Trading is one of the oldest and most traditional human occupations. Ancient civilizations in China, Mesopotamia, Egypt and India were involved in trade. The silk route established an era of regional dominance on certain resources. Because the world is as it is, some regions do not have the access to the same resources as others. Thus started the era of specialization. China gave the rest of the world silk while India gave us spices. However, as always, humans have had a tendency to try to be completely self-reliant. They invented artificial textiles to replace silk and grew different strains of spices in their own backyard.
In the present days, this has gone out to a whole new level. The 2000s have become the era of do-it-yourself (DIY). With the open source hardware movement, it has become really easy for anybody to make pretty much anything they want. With the advent of Arduino, the cheap microcontroller, there has been a spawn of innovative crafty designs. Their use of art installations is of noteworthy mention. Arduino has in a way enabled cheaper robots and scientific equipment. OpenPCR is a completely open source hardware instrument that is used in polymerase chain reactions (a reaction used by forensics and biotechnologists to amplify DNA). Xoscillo is an open source oscilloscope thus enabling things on a much cheaper platform (oscilloscopes are often really expensive equipment and costs can reach $0.5 million). Arduino in quadcopters has heralded a whole new generation of drones.
Most important of all, Arduino has enabled the making of home-made consumer end 3D printers. This has ushered in a whole new kind of DIY. People have made things in such machines without very much experience in heavy equipment usage like mills or CNC. It has become easy for a hobbyist to make all sorts of custom cases and other plastic parts for all sorts of different applications. This has enabled the spawn of a new generation of DIY. This has also found a lot of use in scientific applications for rapid prototyping of components. However, 3D printing has its inherent disadvantages of lack of mechanical strength, etc.
Thus, the new engineer should ideally learn how to use such tools. Although these technologies cannot compete with purpose built equipment, there is not a better option than open source hardware to expedite the progress of project fast and easy.
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