I should have loved electrical engineering

When I studied electrical engineering, I'd say that a good half of our class were your typical "DIY" tinkering guys, which had been a hobby for quite some time. For some, like me, it was audio equipment. Guitar amplifiers, effects pedals, and all that. For others it was robotics. Other again enjoyed building their own DIY home automation systems. Or fitting mechanical systems with sensors and such, ham radio, whatever.

But, yes, probably half of my classes were a real drag to get through. It all depended on who the lecturer was, and how enthusiastic they were.

Funny. I studied EE in 2012, and by that time, according to professors, there weren't many hardware tinkerers in the group compared to the 1990's. Many more people saw it was a good field that's comparable to CS. At this time, EE was on the way down and CS was on the rise in popularity. The classes were absolutely brutal for most people because they came in with less of an understanding of it.

I think the drop in tinkering is due to the high skill/cost barrier to entry particularly SMT, and lab equipment. If you want to do anything interesting beyond a breadboard and arduino/rpi you are going to need to invest in a custom pcb and lab equipment. With SMT, I got into EE/HW by taking things apart and studying them, back then (late 90's) most consumer stuff still had a good mix of thru-hole and SMT so tinkering was easy. Now almost nothing is thru-hole so if you want to fix or modify anything you are going to need more than a cheap harbor freight soldering iron.

I duuno, a custom pcb costs a dollar and you solder it with a cheap hot plate instead of an iron

repair is definitely not the gateway it used to be, though

I disagree. It has never been cheaper to get decent equipment.

Custom PCBs have been $5/square inch for a set of 3 from OSHPark for many years.

You can buy a usable hot air station on Amazon for the price of a DoorDash meal.

Do you have a recommended hot air station for tinkerer use? I am trying to move up from breadboarding into something more field-deployable proof of concept.

Look up '959D' as a model. They're serviceable hot air stations made by a bunch of different white label vendors that are usually $40-60 on the likes of Amazon, cheaper elsewhere.

I love this perspective. I wanted to be Tom Scholz from Boston (though he was an ME, and that was my dad’s music).

My junior project in EE was a guitar fx pedal with a shielded breadboard on top. I won’t be bashful, that was the most popular project in the room.

Then… I got divorced and never finished my EE degree. I already had a degree in CS, and had pursued a second degree because I thought software was too limiting. Now, here I am, all limited.

The reason I never subsequently finished my degree was that I didn’t really want to work on CMOS nor transmission lines or microwave, and graduating with an ECE degree from U of Utah offered those as your career paths.

You can work with SMT at home no problem. A decent hot air station like Quick 861dw will cost you just about $300 and you don’t need much more to tinker.