yes!

Back when I was 21 and trying to come up to speed in RF, I learned a lot from RF Design and Wireless World.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

WW was good on content but circuit diagrams in it were somewhat badly typeset at times - just enough to make it tricky to get working.

Elektor was the other European mag back then and it is still going. They had a summer special with loads of circuit ideas much like IU. Quirky resistors as rectangular boxes was one of their trademarks.

Do kids these days have similar guides to designing real electronics?

When I interview an engineer, recent grad or not, I give them my

Yes I agree.

I don't think there's necessarily anything wrong with stumbling across a solution. But I agree that in electronics it should then be possible to explain how it works. Other forms of art have similarities and differences. Elgar likely couldn't explain where he got this from

When I started work I was very concerned with finding the best circuit to meet the requirements. But sometimes I wasn't allowed to use the circuit I came up with because although I could explain how it worked, I couldn't explain where I got it from and I didn't immediately have any mathematical model for it. My mind had likely pieced it together from ideas gathered from many sources including magazines a decade before. Also I wasn't always allowed to try things out to see if they worked well for a specific requirement because as a qualified electronics engineer you should be able to produce the required design straight from the relevant circuit theory and mathematics, shouldn't you?

So I wonder what will happen when an AI with similar or better capability than AlphaGo is trained using AoE and the contents of a site like this one:

Such a system would theoretically be reducible to an algorithm but that doesn't mean it's necessary to understand the specific algorithm any more than it's necessary to understand where images are stored in our brains.

Yes I had to have WW every month too. I think WW was a bit more globally distributed.

That's one of the first things I learned from this

Well, I do much the same - I wake up with a new idea. And cannot say how it happened - I slept through it.

To patent something, it is _not_ required that one know how it works, or even that one's theory be correct. Many are not. Only the ability to make it work on request is required.

Fifty years ago, Jacques Hadamard queried his colleagues (like Einstein, etc) on where their insights came from - they woke up with the idea, or it just came to them after intense thinking.

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Joe Gwinn

Yes. Invention is a complex and mysterious process.

I had a friend who worked for an aerospace company. The engineering building had no lab space, because management assumed that engineers just did paperwork.

I think a lab (with a Dremel!) is a fundamental requirement. Parts aren't always characterized well enough that one can design just with math, or with simulation. Abs max ratings are for wusses.

Some people, like us, invent in our sleep. Some famous people invented while walking.

I used to think that overnight ideas were delivered in my morning shower, and they are, but now I believe that ideas happen in a nice hot shower too, any time of day.

Right. Ultimately, we really don't know how anything works.

It is an insultingly simple circuit, and many of them may decide at that point that they don't fancy working for a guy who would be that rude when interviewing potential hires.

There are two aspects to job interviews - the people doing the hiring learn about the people being interviewed, and the people applying for job learn about the people doing the hiring.

I had a campus interview - as a graduate student - with the personnel guy from the organisation that I actually joined after I graduated. He started reading out the leaflet that I'd been given (and had read) and ended the interview when I asked him to stop doing that and answer some questions about the work being offered.

The actual job interview with the engineers that I ended up working with went rather better, though they did start off by asking me to explain how a Xerox machine worked, which is an odd question to ask a physical chemist, though it made a lot of sense when I found out what the job actually involved (and I did know quite a lot of the details about how Xerox machines worked).

Ideas come from the sub-conscious (if you use Freudian terminology) or our back-ground processing. It pops up into our conscious mind when we aren't distracted by more immediate concerns. For my father that was when he was shaving. You have to devote a lot of conscious though to solving the problem before it can percolate down into your sub-conscious.

Too true.

But mostly we have pretty good idea, quite good enough for all practical purposes. Most people can explain that idea in terms that other people can understand, if they want to. John Lark may not want to or may not be able to.

I suspect that the intense thinking is essential, but it probably doesn't have to happen just before you get the idea. If you've left a question unresolved for years, your sub-conscious can pick up the extra information it needs when it does become available, and serve up the solution when you aren't distracted by more immediate problems.

On 8/21/24 01:08, john larkin wrote: [...]

Amazing. I wouldn't have believed that there could be such a disconnect between a management and the things they pretend to manage.

I think managers don't need offices, because they spend their days in meeting rooms. ;-)

Jeroen Belleman

Then you haven't worked in industry in the UK.

There were engineering managers who had been engineers - or at least knew enough about the underlying science to have some clue what was going on - but most of them had been through engineering management courses where they were taught that engineers were hopeless perfectionists who had to be chivied into releasing stuff to production as soon as it looked like something that production could put together.

They can't shout loudly enough to bully their subordinates effectively in open plan offices.

The really advanced question is to state the voltages in an emitter follower.

I recently hired a kid who flubed the voltage divider question. 10 volt supply, 9K and 1K divider, what's the voltage across the 1K? He mumbled and said 9.

He seems bright and enthusiastic and already knows a lot about Raspberry Pi Pico (ie the RP2040 chip). So he can do software while I teach him some electronics.

I don't use flyback diodes much any more. Most mosfets are controlled avalanche, whether the data sheet says so or not. I tested an FDV301 for a billion shots just to be sure.

We do a lot of aerospace instrumentation, but nothing that's life-safety critical. Our only stuff that flies is used on engine test flights and wouldn't kill anyone if it failed.

I have done flight stuff, planes and rockets, and the testing and paperwork hassles dominate the design. That's boring.

Boeing is a mess. So is Intel. When the bean counters and stock-market manipulators take over from the engineers, things go bad.

Of course, the craze for fuel savings make everything as light and flimsy as possible. People sweat every ounce. I wonder if they weigh the flight attendants' underwear.

Highly paid old-timers are force-retired to save money. They should spend their later years training the next generation.

The best managers for those who design electronics are generally those have been electronic circuit designers themselves. Like most things it does also depend on human psychology. I can think of one exception to the above but he thought he was god's gift to management.

Why should he have? No-one does that any more. If your time is taken up by other things such as your latest text message and if everything electronic that you need (such as your Mobile Phone, TV, Microwave Oven, Toaster etc) is readily available by magic then why would you want to learn how to design anything yourself?

In any case no-one wants you to know anything about their latest designs because you might become a competitor and eat into their profits. I wonder whether anyone patented the two-resistor voltage divider when it was first invented.

Most companies don't care what you do or did at home. If they want electronic design they'll tell HR to find an individual with suitable qualifications. If that process doesn't go well (perhaps because the interviewer couldn't tell whether a candidate was suitable or not) then a lot of time and money will be needed to fix whatever was designed. This is seen as normal in many places. I had one manager tell me "It's not a requirement for it to work" In an assertive non-joking tone. I didn't reply but my mind said "well in that case I think you should find someone else to do it".

It's also true that home electronics is now so much more reliable than it was 60 years ago that no-one at home needs to care how anything works. My father could repair a toaster no trouble. But these days when toasters die they go to the dump not the repair shop. The repair shop no-longer exists for that reason. Repair shops were often associated with the home of the owner and the same test equipment used for repair could be used for design.

There are also many reasons why you can't sell anything you design at home because you don't have the money to make sure it complies with safety and other standards. And you don't have money for the lawsuit when someone claims your product injured them.

The tinkerers are to be found in maker spaces.

They are exposed to a lot of hardware/software/mechanical things, classes and other peoples' projects, and some will trend to electronics.

Yes, but if the newcomer is on a short-term contract and doesn't get a indefinite appointment after, the effort is largely wasted. I've seen that happen often.

Jeroen Belleman

Am 21.08.24 um 07:27 schrieb Jan Panteltje:

In .de, we had Funkschau for the radio-oriented and ELEKTRONIK at the industrial engineering level, above mine when I was in school. On a visit in .cz, I found Amatérské Radio, interesting but unobtainium on this side of the iron curtain.

Elektor was not taken too serious, could not be cited, but occasional fun. I remember, under the heading "Elektortur":

Man: 100K, 1/4 W

No more sure about the exact numbers.

cheers, Gerhard