WIRED:FOR A PLACE built on the silicon chip and printed circuit boards, the public side of Silicon Valley has spent a long time away from tiny black and green mazeworks. Chip factories, which used to squat across the valley, have long ago moved to China.
As a concept and as a company, Facebook is about as far away from the smell of solder and printed circuit boards as you can get.
But among the technologists who toy with new ideas in their evenings and dream of some new start-up to take them away from their dull “coder-monkey” careers, microelectronics has made something of a comeback. Programmers are as likely to find themselves sitting with a breadboard and wiring diagram as spending another hour in front of a PC, building a prototype of a robot or bleeping musical instrument.
Just as hardware engineers ended up fiddling with computer software in their spare time in the 1970s, now software engineers are messing with physical objects.
There’s a number of influences in this shift. One, as described by a colleague who quit his job building websites to create a business card printing company, is the simple frustration of “never having anything real to show anyone”.
No matter how much of a toy one might wire together, it’s still something you can show your peers in six months’ time.
The other is that home electronics has come a long way from crystal sets and blinking LEDs. Hobbyists can now purchase, relatively cheaply, sophisticated equipment – from a fully functioning robot chassis to thermal imagers. The armoury of tools and simple components needed to work on projects is available through fast and inexpensive mail orderers. Even custom parts can be constructed by sending the designs to the manufacturer and having them returned in a matter of days.
And home electronics these days is far more like programming – easy to get started, flexible, and largely correctable if you make mistakes.
Microcontroller sets such as the Arduino and Parallax Propeller are available for under €50, plug into the USB sockets of a laptop or desktop computer and can be coded with complex instructions. They can then be removed, independently decked with sensors such as motion detectors or switches, and actuators such as wheels and relays, and set to work.
If it doesn’t work, most times, you can simply rewrite your program until it does work, rather than having to write off your entire experiment.
And if it does work? Then you may be able to turn it into a business. The gaps between creating a prototype project and going into commercial manufacture are also diminishing.
For the past few years, there’s been a growing community of creators who have slipped seamlessly from hacking on hardware projects in their spare time to running a part-time or full-time business based on their designs.
Limor Fried’s work designing small circuit boards as an MIT student led to a full-time career as chief executive of Adafruit, and ended up on the front cover of Wired. Wireds editor, Chris Anderson, runs his own robot airplane company on the side.
It’s reminiscent less of the last few Silicon Valley booms (the dotcom, Web 2.0 and social networking bubbles) than of those that preceeded and enabled them. When Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs started Apple in the 1970s they took the physical prototypes they had built for their fellow enthusiasts and turned them into a business.
Most watching that business grow would assume that it would only serve other Wozniaks and Jobs, technologists who liked computers for their own sake. But, given tools such as the early home computers, those computer hobbyists (who all had day jobs too), were able to expand the utility and appeal of the computer and apply it to other industries.
The first spreadsheet, the first general-purpose word processors, all came from these dabblings.
So far, the new generation of hardware tinkerers have mostly worked within their own field, too. But the simple devices they have built have begun sneaking out into the wider world. The hobbyists who have bought the first, primitive 3D printers to help them manufacture their one-off hardware designs have collared the company MakerBot, $11 million in venture capital, and let it grow to 125 employees.
Dozens of home-hardware projects have raised hundreds of thousands from their fans via Kickstarter, the crowd-sourced funding website, including heart-rate sensors, radiation detectors, and iPod accessories.
And the community that enjoys such experiments is getting larger every day. Last week, the hobbyists and entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley gathered at Maker Faire, an annual celebration of hardware hacking. More than 120,000 visitors attended in just one day of the weekend event, clogging highways and trains in the region.
The year Steve Jobs announced the Apple II at the west coast Computer Faire, it had 12,000 visitors.
In one of these evening projects, the new Apple may already be forming.
