TKWRITE
I was infected with PartsJunkie and never recovered. And "the Old Man" ( A.C. Gilbert himself) gave me and Mark PARTS out of the bins in the New Haven factory that made Erector Sets and American Flyer trains! We never wanted 'finished stuff' again.. we wanted PARTS.
50's - scrounged parts from my Dad and his Ham Radio friends
60's - scrounged parts from IBM's disposal depot behind the Poughkeepsie plant
70's-90's - worked for IBM and scrounged used XT's, AT's for schools, did "Computer Demolition" with school kids, made cranes and cars out of IBM Floppy drives and Graphics Printer.
late 90's - "Retired" and followed my wife to Africa and China where we lived in Shenzhen. Prayed/Preyed at the SEG market (800 electronics shops in one building!) , scrounged through the small side shops in B'oan and Nanshan with my great Chinese friend Jun Peng.
2010 - Inadvertently started YourDuino.com with Peng when his employer wanted to cut him to 1/2 time. Bought parts and paid Peng out of my Social Security check for 3 months and we started selling Arduino Stuff.
2013-2017 sold kits with an Arduino Derivative and LOTS of PARTS that have gone to over 5000 students who open the box and start Making Stuff. I can never pay A.C. Gilbert back but I can pay stuff forward. If you know a kid who really wants to do stuff with Arduino and PARTS and doesn't have much money, email me. I'll help. PARTS will FLY!
Regards, Terry King
...In The Woods in Vermont, USA
terry@yourduino.com
"Anything we can do to get Real Stuff in the hands of kids and adults is what matters. If you have
any ideas on how I can help with that, let me know."
I feel that this paradigm is upon us. The massive upsurge of the Arduino ecosystem, the Raspberry Pi universe (Kano ready for the masses), LittleBits and Lego Mindstorms is creating of new generation of adults/kids who are touching electronics for the very first time. A percentage of those individuals will wish to then design/craft real products for sale on kickstarter, design custom embedded solutions for enterprise customers or simply bring clean drinking water to remote villages.
I think it is time to start describing the path from "maker" to production-ready "engineer" - perhaps describing "engineer" as - product designer/engineer - some one who wishes to sell 50,000 units of some new widget- systems integrator/embedded "design house" - building custom solutions for large organizations (.gov, .edu, .com)- engineers for a better world - helping to fix fundamental challenges that impact our world (read Hieroglyph)
QUOTE:
For one thing, university bookstores need to start carrying maker products to reduce the engineering learning curve.
/QUOTE
I am VERY happy to say that every incoming Electrical Engineering and Computer Science student at the University of Connecticut goes to the campus bookstore and buys this kit:
https://arduinoinfo.mywikis.net/wiki/YourDuinoEngStarter
I sold them 800 of those kits last year and they just told me another 800 this year. Some other Universities use it also.
This is my happy revenge for 1960 when I dropped OUT of Uconn because I realized they weren't going to let me TOUCH anything electrical until Senior year. So 55 years later, it's the way I wanted it to be back then :-)
100 years ago, A. C. Gilbert patented the erector set: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erector_Set
My friend Mark and I called him ..'the Old Man'. Mark's father Dick was Sales Manager of AC Gilbert and on weekends we'd go down to the idle factory. The Old Man would be puttering around in the back, Making Things. There were bins and bins of PARTS to make American Flyer Trains and Erector Sets. Sometimes the Old Man would pull some part out of a bin, hand it to us and say "Hey Kid, What's That?". "Uh, we'd say. that's an armature for something.. maybe a train engine". "OK, so what's THIS?" Another part. The Old Man gave us PARTS, He never said "I'm going to teach you something." He and Dick would look at us and laugh. We would make stuff out of parts. Mark put together the 'truck' of an American Flyer Diesel Locomotive that we ran by itself on the tracks in Marks bedroom. It went like hell, especially after we put two transformers in series.
I was years later before I realized how much people like the Old Man and my Dad's Ham Radio buddies went out of their way and put stuff in the hands of us kids. I am SO happy to be building Erector Sets in the Science Fiction Future of 2015.
Anything we can do to get Real Stuff in the hands of kids and adults is what matters. If you have any ideas on how I can help with that, let me know.
Regards, Terry King
...In the Woods in Vermont USA
terry@terryking.us
-The One who Dies with the most Parts LOSES. What do you need??