Australia has a new Electronics Magazine

[Uncle Fester]

with quite a cool name: This is targeted more towards beginners and intermediate electronic enthusiasts and that is exactly what we need to stop Electronics in Australia from dying out completely.
I some times criticize that our only other publication, Silicon Chip, has projects that are overly complicated designed for what they achieve and can get quite expensive.
I personally never built any of them, but I might have nicked a few ideas for my own designs.

What I like to see is a magazine that inspires DIY and DIYode excels in exactly that.
Most projects are just breadboard only (+n'Arduino) and this can quickly lead to experimentation, where even newcomers can get creative.
It also shows what others have achieved, even more inspiration.

So this little mag gets a big thumbs up from me, hence my wish to mention it here in case nobody has noticed it.
I would normally had never noticed it because I can't even get the Silicon Chip at local newsagents any more.

There may be a for those who are in a similar boat, this one time only.

[Tactile]

I have the first 3 issues just to see where its heading. It's an interesting idea and its good to see a fresh approach with no hangers-on from SC or the old EA mag. Its great for beginners in the narrow area of Embedded programming with a few basic electronic tutorials thrown in but I will be interested to see if survives.

I cant help wonder if this field is covered though...there are a lot of tutorials on Youtube - Dave Jones has a lot of the hardware bases covered and John Boxall's online tutorials and book is there if you want to go deeper with Australian content.

I hope they do well and crush that SC rag, but I cant help but wonder if the format (paper) is irrelevant these days...time will tell.

[TVguy]

I hope they do well and crush that SC rag, ...

Why hate on SC? Love it, and have every edition from the very first. EA lost the plot and went belly up due to loss of focus.
I subscribe to both the print and online SC and it is a great read. Many other magazines globally, publish SC articles.
It is more focused towards journeymen, rather than engineers (Elektor is for EEs).
Curious tirade for a newbie. Ulterior motive perhaps?

Dave Jones posted about this back in June on the

[TZB]

That Dave reminds me of Dave Hughes
Great to see this new mag out.

[shred]

I bought the first edition to see what it was about. It's a bit too "buy module A and buy module B, plug them together and you're done" for me. It seems reminiscent of "The Mag Pi" - the free magazine published by the Raspberry Pi people.

I really hope they succeed, but it's a hard road to tread when you can get so much quality information for free off the 'net.

I really miss the good old "ETI", before it was degraded into a general science magazine. It had some articles with good technical "meat" in them and a refreshingly irreverent editorial tone.

There were occasionally some pranks in the April edition - some of which didn't go so well. I remember a Microbee column by the late Tom Moffat that contained some code to "simulate colour on a black and white MicroBee". It was a BASIC program that poked machine code instructions into RAM, then executed the code, so it wasn't immediately obvious what was going on. The effect was to turn all the characters on the display upside down. This was ok, except:

* The code checked to see if it had already been run - running it again did not put things right side up
* The Microbee had battery backed static RAM. Turning it off and back on didn't fix it either!

You would think that readers of an electronics magazine would have enough nous to disconnect the battery and try again, but apparently not. There were a lot of complaints from MicroBee users who had to pay to have their machine repaired...

[lsemmens]

I agree, the old ETI was good, as was the early EA and they both got lost. I wish it well. Speaking of defunct magazines, I used to enjoy BYTE for many years and that even died an untimely death. I always turned to "Chaos Manner" first, whenever I purchased Byte. I wanted to build the 8 channel mixing desk that ETI published over numerous issues in the 70s, never did, although I did come across one some years later that, sadly, had seen better days. Newer, cheaper, desks had made them redundant by then.

[Tactile]

Curious tirade for a newbie. Ulterior motive perhaps?

Tirade? What ulterior motive would that be?

[Skepticist]

Ah yes - brings back memories of my adventures with the Microbee which is still in the shed somewhere. Spent excessive amounts of enjoyable hours creating assembly language programs to drive my own hardware creations because basic was, well, a bit too basic not to mention too slow and memory hungry which is important when you're limited to 32k of ram. Even made my own disassembler/ single stepping debugger which I squeezed into a 2532 EProm - fun times.

Silicon Chip lost me when they decided to charge for downloads related to projects they published (even though I'd already paid for the magazine). The only way out of paying per download was an annual subscription and I'd only purchase an issue if there was something of particular interest to me that particular month.