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In 1947, the Heathkit company – a formerly-bankrupt aircraft manufacturer – introduced its first electronic kit. The $39.50 oscilloscope became a best seller, a dozen years after the company’s new owners bought Heath for a whopping $300. Back then, hobbyists built ham radios, black-and-white TVs and hi-fi sets from vacuum tubes, soldering fiberglass circuit boards together with glowing guns from Radio Shack, hunched over basement workbenches, surrounded by a haze of blue-gray flux smoke. It was long before the days of microscopic surface-mount components, squirted from machines at tens of thousands of parts per hour.

Not long ago, I wrote here about the atrophy of amateur radio, and inquired (unsurprisingly, unsuccessfully) if there was any hope for that pastime. Most things ham trigger a lot of nostalgia in me – recollections of dad-chauffeured car trips to the city for radio classes with Jason; of my “Elmer”, Ed, N2EH (now a silent key); of good times spent with the other hams at the RIT Radio Club, who were among the best of my college friends; and of countless growing-up hours spent tinkering, building things, and un-building things. For a long time, I thought this spirit of geek tinkering was similarly waning, but recently I’ve had a few reasons to change my tune…

First off, the pieces and parts. In the golden age, resistors, capacitors, coils, tubes and transistors were the parts du jour – and you could do some pretty cool things with them. The 70s and 80s brought integrated circuits – and my generation of tinkerers dove head-first into logic gates, op-amps, newly-commodified microprocessors and LED displays. But as the demands of the tech-buying public called for more miniaturization and richer feature sets, things got more difficult. Ball grid array packages – unsolderable by all but the most-dedicated and well-funded (or craziest?) hobbyists – ushered in an age of inaccessible parts. But now, thanks to projects like Arduino, and companies like Bug Labs and Gumstix, pluggable modules and microcontrollers are becoming basic building blocks in themselves.

But more than just the evolution of what’s available to build with, there has been a renaissance in the builders, too. People like Diana Eng and Jeri Ellsworth, and groups like the recently-formed Interlok Rochester – or, hell, the entire readership of Make Magazine – remind me that the spirit of tinkering is alive and well. Maybe hobbyists aren’t exactly making the next iPhone – though they’re certainly trying and in some cases, succeeding! When you’re faced with the immense complexity that’s possible via today’s gadgets, it’s easy to get discouraged about the potential for electronics as a hobby. But it’s also easy to be hopeful and inspired when you look at what these folks are doing. To the tinkerers: keep up the good work! And to those who’ll bring us the next generation of electronic building blocks, I can’t wait to see what you’ve got in store…