Cylons, Pumpkins, and LEDs
I got this idea Friday. I would do a Cylon pumpkin with the red LED eye-scanner moving back and forth. A quick google search and I found that others had done the same thing. I even found code for the Arduino board to do this. (Ok, I’ll tweak the time constants, I thought his was scanning too fast. It looked like an anxious cylon to me.)
My wife had bought some great pumpkins so all I needed was ten bright red LEDs. I have ten LEDs already, but of miscellaneous colors and brightnesses. Off to Radio Shack, or “Shack” as they oddly call themselves now after a basket-ball player.
Of course, Radio Shack doesn’t have them. And what they do have is poorly organized, the bin labels don’t match the contents. The sales guy took pity on me and called their other stores. No one had them. Some don’t even carry parts anymore. There are no other stores that might carry stuff like this either.
Radio Shack is moving to selling just cell phones, cameras, and other consumer electronics. There are a number of other stores that do that better, Best Buy for example. And there are numerous online sources as well. Yet, the burgoning “maker” movement of hacking, tinkering, customizing, and creating your own electronics has only online sources for parts and materials in most areas. Radio Shack is missing a potential market by their rush to what everyone else is doing.
In Silicon Valley, Austin, and other reasonably techy areas, there is Fry’s Electronics. But here in the Wash, DC area, there’s nothing. It’s a desert wasteland of unavailability. This is the way things are in most of the U.S.
Industry and government figures wring their hands sometimes over the lack of engineers and scientists that the US creates. We import both from India, China, Europe, and Africa. Fortunately enough want to stay to keep us all in GPS toys and more important things, although that seems to be changing.
The thing is that taking things apart, experimenting, playing with parts, and maybe building something new and tinkering in general is important. Tinkering leads to design, design leads to engineering, and engineering can lead to scientific inquiry. But tinkering begins with parts. No parts, nothing to tinker with.
A lack of easily available parts is directly affecting the next generation’s engineering and scientific abilities.