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Comment by certyfreak | Hacker News Reader

A thing preventing people from going into hardware(prototyping) is the cost. Software is cheaper than hardware. i.e. i

Not exactly true. Many electronics manufacturers give out free samples. All kinds of free samples. When I was a kid (and even into adulthood) I would contact all the electronics manufacturers I could to get free samples. I had dozens of free Microchip PIC embedded CPUs and support chips. Back in the day Maxim semiconductor (now Analog Devices), and many others. I even got free stuff from Digikey, but that took some convincing of the right people at Digikey. Some of the products I begged and pleaded for - I got a full touchpad controller for free, including shipping, because I was a "student" and I was making a "prototype". It really wasn't that difficult to get free electronics to learn with. And for the passive components - resistors, capacitors, coils, and other parts there's always free broken electronics floating around, and I would harvest everything I could that I didn't already have plenty of.

https://www.microchip.com/samples/

https://www.analog.com/en/support/customer-service-resources...

https://reddit.com/r/electronics/comments/1qvcr2/how_to_prop...

https://www.ladyada.net/library/procure/samples.html

Sampling is a lot rarer these days. There is a reason your last two links are from 10+ years ago. Too many hobbyists tried to use sampling as a means of getting free parts for their personal projects.

Sampling is intended to get a sample so the company's expectation is that it will eventually result in an actual order. This will obviously happen when sampling to companies, and sampling to EE students means those students are more likely to choose your products when they enter the field.

Sampling to hobbyists doesn't really have any return on investment, so once they started getting thousands of requests they just shut it down. These days you are just expected to order low-quantity items from their distributors.

Getting free samples was always part generosity and part social engineering, even 30 years ago, before everyone in tech got an arduino. I'm fully aware of a company's expectations in giving away samples - even as a kid 30 years ago, but that doesn't mean a determined person can't still get free samples. The game hasn't really changed much. I'm just saying that the previous commenter's idea that it's expensive to get into electronics as a hobby is not exactly true.

Monetary cost is only small part of it (as it got significantly cheaper too, at least for small electronics).

The feedback loop is just very long. Few weeks to get PCB unless you pay a lot extra to get it in few days.

And even if you own a 3d printer for mechanical parts that's still day of printing

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