Design electronics like it is 70s at CERN
photos.google.com
photos.google.com
However, there is a lab at Berkeley working on the topic, with really interesting work being done: http://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~tianshi/research.html
"logic is encoded using the phase of oscillatory signals, rather than voltage levels. Such phase encoding has long been used in radio communication for its superior noise immunity; we show that it can also be used for computation, using self-sustaining nonlinear oscillators as underlying logic elements."
Harmonic injection computing, anyone?
I think there's room for "low compute" architectures that are simpler to build given infrastructure was at risk. Perhaps localized manufacturing.
How, and why?
There has been progress in other regards (lower supply voltages, lower power consumption, rail-to-rail operation, smaller packages), but clearly progress in the analog realm over the last forty years has been much more modest than in the digital.
But note that class D amplifiers are mainly applicable to relatively low frequencies. Perfect for audio, but not adequate above this range, see e.g. [2].
[1] https://epc-co.com/epc/cn/GaN%E6%8A%80%E6%9C%AF%E6%9D%82%E8%...
[2] https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/223803/class...
The TL07x series op-amps along with quite a few others have been in continuous production for over 40 years. They are still manufactured by the million. When is the obsolescence you refer to planned for?
It makes me a bit sad that it's getting harder to find places to get hands-on with these old manual processes, because it's a great way to wrap your head around the fundamental concepts of the thing you're learning. I'm younger than the author, but well into the internet age we were still taught manual pasteup and letterpress on old Heidelberg platen presses in our high school graphic design courses and I draw on some of that process knowledge even today.
It also feels like those experiences were really helpful for learning to think systematically and predicting how the consequence of the design decision I make now will affect me down the line. Today if I screwed up a plate it would take me a few minutes to fix; back then it would've taken literally hours and, if we were running business, cost a ton of money in lost production time.
Note that I am not saying those solutions were better, but there was a lot of hardwork, talent and intense discipline in making stuff back in the day. Drawings were hand drawn! Some guy was bending down for 3 days straight to make that schematic!
It's all too viscerally physical and mechanical. I want a time machine to go to the 70's for a bit, and furiously document and interview people. Lot of this knowledge and expertise is lost because we don't need this stuff anymore.
Remember things when they had toggle switches and knobs? What happened? We have touch screens that ask us to scan the QR code of the water filter before dispensing water from the Fridge. Oh, but it shows today's weather on the door. So great.
On Hackernews, we are such an intense bit of people - we should bring some of the old tech back and simplify our world. If you're in software, build flat, simple and fast apps that are maintainable. Make them composable and modular. If you're in hardware, build high quality stuff for twice the price but then convince the user through honest & truthful marketing that this product is better for you in the long run. Instead, the rush these days is to market products with abhorrent psychological tricks and backstab users with all kinds of dark patterns. Shame on you guys. When you're on your death bed, none of this will matter. Do good things and build great stuff. Atleast I will reflect back that I made the users, you know the ones that provided me with a living wage, happy.
The mechanical things are still there, and it is even easier to make them. Unfortunately, it turns out that they are expensive, so they have been relegated to either very expensive devices or to beginner's devices. Take a look at high-end scope or ultrasound machine control panel -- they are full of beautifully designed knobs and switches. And on the opposite end of spectrum, if you look at instructables/hackaday, there are tons of project to interface anything mechanical.
Same goes for the discrete circuity. Get one of those cheap plastic solar lights -- you may find there is no controller in sight, just a bunch of old-style transistors. And on the other side, no SOC will have a 1GHz AFE or 20 amp output.
Users are welcome to pay the real price of the product if they don't want it to be spyware.
At any rate, if you're thinking about work on your deathbed you have more things to worry about than how happy users are with the junk you made while living.
Once upon a time there were many profitable business models for selling software.
Then software got big. You weren't selling a thousand copies anymore, now it's a billion.
The economics of software is that the price you "need" to charge goes down when the number of users goes up. If it costs ten million to develop and you have a thousand users, they each have to pay at least $10,000. If you have a million users they only have to pay $10.
If you have a billion users they each only have to pay $0.01.
You can get more than the $0.01 from each user through advertising. What you can't do is get an amount on that scale through payment processing, because the transaction overhead is larger than that.
So now you have a user that the advertiser is willing to pay $0.03 to advertise to. The users themselves are willing to pay $0.05 to not be spied on, but you haven't got any efficient way to get $0.05 from them. It'd have to be much more than that to justify the payment processing overhead, and the user isn't willing to pay that much.
So it's not a matter of the users being unwilling to pay, it's that we don't have an efficient way for them to pay that small of an amount.
A common Google problem is that for all that they are a global company, they can't launch shit globally. I was really interested in using Google Contributor, both sides, but limited launch meant that I could only look from far away and never ever encounter a site using it. Hell, I think some of the engineers who worked on it weren't in the very small group allowed to use it.
Users would rather not pay that, so we are stuck with craptastic spyware that is selling their data to google, facebook, the NSA, the Chinese communist party and that organ harvester from Moldova.
The real price of delivery of software over the Internet is zero.
(Well, it's slightly above zero, because all the networking equipment uses electricity, but you pay for your part of that in your power and Internet bills.)
Let me know the name of the apt mirror you're running. I'll be sure to point the couple hundred machines I admin for their hourly updates.
(But yes because it isn't.)
Eventually installed at Television Centre, together with our PDP-11 driven motorised rostrum camera.
Also, I didn't understand why Google Photos was in the title at first, but I actually really like this presentation format. It's kind of like a super clean blog post.
https://wiki.analog.com/university/courses/electronics/text/...
Look for the instructor „Bonnie Ferri“ on Coursera.
Of course, it will feel crappy in solving that problem.
It's funny because there's so many more meaningful problems you can solve as a programmer. However, most of those jobs pay a little bit less.
I mean it is insane to me on a rational level that an embedded engineer/programmer working for a company designing avionics software/train control software in the UK/France or Germany earns less (by half) what someone in SV does working for some start-ups.
I get the whole "they are paid what the market determines they are worth thing" but intuitively I find it weird.
If I could do my life over again I'd have gone to Uni and done electronics and then moved into that kind of field, not for the money - it's about the same but because it is interesting and you get to point at a train or plane and say "it's safer because I did my job".
I sat on the beach yesterday watching a 4 and half billion year fire that is burning 8 light minutes away, overhearing two ladies in their mid 50s talk about how much money they were making flipping houses and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wf4cea5oObY
The universe doesn't care if you contemplate it or not, it doesn't care if a couple of 50 year olds make their money selling pieces of dirt with some bricks on for more than they paid.
Enjoy your life, do the things that make you content (and I say content not happy carefully here, happiness is fleeting, contentedness lasts).
In the end it's all the same anyway.
> Chibitronics is an evolution of Jie Qi’s passion for combining technology and art through making electronics using paper craft. The circuit stickers were developed as part of her PhD research at the MIT Media Lab. Together with Andrew “bunnie” Huang and Patricia Ng, Jie’s research has evolved into the Chibitronics toolkits.
OMG. I remember doing it.
Later at my first job, we made our own prototypes in the basement. We had a giant Agfa stat camera that would take the 2x artwork and reduce it 50% onto clear film that we would use to expose photosensitive resist coated PCB and then etch.
I really, really don't miss those days :-)
The couple of times I delt with homemade PCB's... janky.
If I had to prototype something I'd buy vector board with plated through holes and then solder wire wrap wire to sockets. Quicker and almost as reliable as a professional PCB.
Edit: The transparent sheets with pcb traces transfered on them are called "acetate sheets", made of the same material used in transparency projectors slides. They're used to transfer the drawing onto copper boards previously treated with photosensitive material via exposition to UV light, then the boards can be etched by the usual FeCl solution.
I have a very strong interest about how folks used to make develop and build technology back on the time. Sometimes I think we are losing A LOT by not keep certain design principles in our minds, and that applies to maths, software development, electronics, engineering in general and many other fields.
I believe that we could get so much more out of our available, modern tools if we started to pay more attention to the history of our fields.
Huge respect to the engineering culture of these people.
I'd never want to design a printed circuit board using a ruler and a few sheets of paper. It's suddenly wildly apparent to me why CERN funded the creation of KiCAD.
Without CAD software, I could see it being an exceptionally difficult chore.