Edit: so it turns out that every hobby can be expensive if you do it long enough.

Also I love how you talk about your hobby as some addicts.

  • 👍Maximum Derek👍English
    192•2 years ago

    Electronics / microcontrollers.

    Took just a few months to go from, “I can make a wifi connected weather station for like $20 in components!?” to “oscilloscopes cost how much?”

    • AggressivelyPassive
      10•2 years ago

      I’m really happy I don’t have enough space for that stuff. Otherwise I would be poor. It’s hard enough to keep myself from buying another old computer.

      • 👍Maximum Derek👍English
        11•2 years ago

        Mine is pretty basic but is built on the shoulders of giants. Also that $20 was from pre-pandemic / pre-chip shortage prices. I’m guessing it’s more like $35 now, or maybe high $20s from ali express.

        I use Home Assistant for home automation. It has a now official addon called ESPHome for easily configuring esp devices and adding them to Home Assistant.

        I bought some cheap dev boards off amazon and thankfully they worked
    an esp8266 microcontroller with IC2 headers and a microusb port already onboard
    a bmp280 that measures temp, humidity, and barometric pressure
    a lux sensor with a plastic dome over the top
I soldered them together on a prototyping board

        All the components were supported by esphome, so I just needed to write the device config and then flash the devboard via esphome (in a web browser) over the built in usb.

        I 3d printed a housing for it, but you can also buy boxes. It needs airflow but also needs to stay dry. You can use a spray sealant to help avoid corrosion from ambient humidity. I skipped that step because I want to see how quickly it becomes problematic… and I should probably check on that.

    • @anonono@lemmy.world
      5•2 years ago

      yeah I got a fancy lab power supply but stopped at oscilloscopes, those things are expensive.

      it’s still cheap and fun to do a lot of stuff, but now I wanna build a sound-card based oscilloscope.

    • @colonial@lemmy.world
      5•2 years ago

      Good soldering gear already makes me wince. I couldn’t imagine paying $500+ for an oscilloscope.

      Fortunately I’m more interested in the software side of things… thank God nobody charges for programming toolchains anymore.

      • @CoderKat@lemm.eeEnglish
        1•2 years ago

        Same. I’m lucky for software to be my hobby/career. It’s practically free. Contrary to popular misconception, it doesn’t require any kind of special or more powerful hardware (for most dev, at least). Maybe $150 for a second monitor, for sanity, but that’s not actually necessary.

        …I mean, I do have good hardware too, but that’s for my gaming hobby, not my software hobby.

        • @colonial@lemmy.world
          2•2 years ago

          To be fair, if C++ or Rust is your thing… let’s just say I’d have a Threadripper if they weren’t five grand.

          I once had to (repeatedly) compile a C++ codebase on some Lenovo shitbook. It ended up being so infuriating (thirty seconds, minimum) that I wrote a few load-bearing shell scripts to rsync everything to my desktop, build it, and copy the binary back… which was ultimately about five times faster.

          Man, I wish I could have just used MicroPython for that project.