Is the rebirth now?

Since my post the  media now seems to be echo'ing my prediction that manufacturing will return to the UK. Here's a article in the telegraph  and there have been various comments on the BBC.

It's encouraging news however my fear is that there may be a skills gap. Although the UK still runs many high quality electronics courses, the students on them are predominantly foreign. We have over the past 20 years been busily educating China and other countries in how to design electronics, but not our own population.

If I look at the many skilled electronic designers I know, many are no longer in electronic design in fact many are know teachers.  There is also a demographic challenge too. I am now in my 40's and I was one of the last generation of classically trained electronic engineers but many of the skilled designers I worked alongside are now in their late 50's so if electronics does return then we need to have young engineers coming through now to have the knowledge imparted from the veterans.

Or am I worrying too much?  The last few weeks I've been back on the tools and playing with hardware. I've decided to modify the parking sensor system on my car. It currently has a reversing camera but no ultrasonic sensors so I fancied adding these to the on-screen system which is built into the car. I purchased a cheap Chinese made parking sensor system and promptly set about hacking it to get the data out of it. At first I struggled to reverse engineer the protocol used but I bought a logic analyser for £20 and quickly figured out how it works. I'm now well on the way to reading the data from it into a microcontroller (Arduino) which will overlay the information on the car's built in display.

So if I look at this hobby project, there is actually remarkably little hardware design needed on my part. Because of the design of the parking system I need some buffer chips but very little else. My 15 year old son could probably design the circuit with a little guidance. 

So returning to education, the skills needed for digital electronics are more programming and a basic understanding of high level circuits rather than circuit design. Analog still needs a high level of competence. The real skill is one of innovation and seeing the potential to exploit currently available building blocks.  The Arduino is a classic example. This cheap chip is remarkably powerful and flexible.  The trick is knowing how to exploit it's capabilities.

So are we ready for the rebirth?