EE Majors

In the old days, many EEs were Hams, and built stuff from scrounged analog junk, which could be taken apart and understood. Many took hardware things apart, same story, though many were distracted into ME. I floated between both fields, but somehow ended up in EE (but never was a Ham).

Now days, if you want to play with hardware, ya gotta program.

Joe

Being a ham I can see why. Not too long ago radios were made of tuned circuits and a few other components. You mechanically adjusted the tuned circuits. Today they are mainly just computer chips and the software does all the work. Just look at the dongle that plugs into a USB port and you get the TV stations on the compuer screen.

I have a receiver box that is about 4 inches square and an inch or two thick. It will tune in from just above the audio range to two gigaHZ. While I can not follow it , it will let me set up 4 or 5 screens on the computer and have that many different stations all going at the same time. Most everything is done in the sofware.

The two places I know about that turn out actual circuit designers are the University of Colorado in Boulder and Montana State in Bozeman.

Anybody who has been an EE or physics student at either place is worth a look.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Why? There are lots of resistors and fets and lasers and things around.

Unless you do cool analog stuff.

Code doesn't connect directly to motors or servo valves or jet engines. The world is still analog. I think it's fun to see and work with machines and buildings and gigantic lasers and blow things up.

There seems to be a Real Men movement lately, namely guys who want to do physical stuff, like build things and fix things and get away from sitting in front of keyboards and screens. They skip the sociology degrees and go to community colleges or trade schools or just apprentice.

Of course nowadays women can fly planes or finish drywall or design electronics too. But some boys want to be boys.

You are still talking digital. Sure, if you need a compute module, buy a Raspberry Pi for $9. But it won't modulate a megajoule laser or drive a 5000 PSI servo valve.

Yes, and even better if you want to start a business selling modules. I am going down that path right now.

First will be board mounted power supplies, offline and POL converters

There are a few good ones at UC Santa Cruz too.

Not UC Berkeley, apparently.

I've heard good things about Rice too.

Post a link when they are available.

We're considering a line of little RF modules, switches and attenuators and such. We're doing a little market research to see if anyone is interested.

I don't know if you have ever been to a Maker Faire, but most of what you will see there in the electronics area will be standard stuff with software controls.

Bill

Why not use Rust under Linux to blink an LED?

Large modern radars contain basically everything. Starting with the sky and moving down the chain, we first encounter a bunch of analog RF components with transmission lines (stripline or the like, hardly ever a coax or twisted pair unless bypassing an error) and very small SMD components, all enclosed in a metal box or compartment feeding (through a wall) a bunch of ADCs feeding (through another wall in an electrical semi-serial format like JESD204) some ASICs or FPGAs (where the initial firmware lives and works) and does things like FIR Comb Filters at hardware speed. The result is packaged up into many parallel packet streams converging on the Signal Processor (a very large massively parallel computer platform which computes all the radar beams and resulting candidate target detections, and so on.

No interpreted language is remotely fast enough, or reliable under pounding. But they are widely used in the integration lab.

The exact boundaries between these domains vary with technology and radar operational band. Higher operating frequency requires more analog RF hardware, and lower frequencies can be done mostly in the FPGA, and so on.

Joe

Forth?

They're probably all in China nowadays. If you're doing things like SMPSU design the Chinese are shifting vastly more volume of product than any western country. They're also a lot cheaper to employ than the west. The silicon is increasingly all Chinese designed too. Probably second is Taiwan, which is where a lot of the high end ODMs are.

(Not to say that some of this isn't western-designed, Chinese-manufactured, but there's a lot of it that's Chinese ODM, Chinese OEM, Chinese consumer and never touches the west at all)

Theo

Exactly. While Forth is in fact interpreted, running on a list of RPN commands to the hardware controller. Forth was created by an astronomer as a better way to control pointing and tracking of very large optical telescopes.

War story: I was very interested when Forth came out in the 1970s, and dug into it very deeply for possible use in realtime systems. Forth Inc was very secretive, and would not say anything useful about how it worked. Eventually, I asked for the contact details of ten happy customers, and called them. Turned out that half were happy and half were not. The half that were happy had all cracked the kernel, and knew how it worked.

One sent me a paper copy of an octal dump of the kernel, which I hand disassembled. If I recall, the listing was something like 20 pages. It sounds impossible, but it's no harder to read machine code than the assembly code that generated it. After a short while, you just know that 37 octal is ADD, and so on.

I pulled it all together by writing my own version, which I called Fifth. It took about a month, but I was in the field working on a customers simulator, and had lots of dead time to fill. It was so quiet I could visualize vastly complex things and hold them for hours. Never again. Don't recall just how big Fifth was, but it was about the same size as Forth, a few thousand lines.

Anyway, once I knew how it worked, I could see that it would be impossibly awkward to use to implement a full-up simulator (100,000 lines of 32-bit assembly code).

Joe