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I should have loved electrical engineering

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Re: I should have loved electrical engineering

#101

Post by zhemao »

buildbot wrote: post #84
Eggpants wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went into EE wanting to learn how to design CPU’s and thought the analog side would be boring. However, control theory turned out to be my favorite class. Learning how negative feedback loops are everywhere was an eye opener. Also learning Laplace transforms was one of my first “holy shit this is freaking clever and cool” moments. Just like how parity bits in data streams can be used to detect AND correct errors.

Same on the laplace transforms. I was kinda mad we had learned any other way. It was a lot easier than whatever we were doing before mathematically! I wonder, how much control theory is there in CPU?

In computer architecture / digital ASIC design there's zero control theory. There's not much mathematics in general.

Re: I should have loved electrical engineering

#102

Post by b33j0r »

TrackerFF wrote: post #2

When I studied electrical engineering, I'd say that a good half of our class were your typical "DIY" tinkering guys, which had been a hobby for quite some time. For some, like me, it was audio equipment. Guitar amplifiers, effects pedals, and all that. For others it was robotics. Other again enjoyed building their own DIY home automation systems. Or fitting mechanical systems with sensors and such, ham radio, whateve…

I love this perspective. I wanted to be Tom Scholz from Boston (though he was an ME, and that was my dad’s music).

My junior project in EE was a guitar fx pedal with a shielded breadboard on top. I won’t be bashful, that was the most popular project in the room.

Then… I got divorced and never finished my EE degree. I already had a degree in CS, and had pursued a second degree because I thought software was too limiting. Now, here I am, all limited.

The reason I never subsequently finished my degree was that I didn’t really want to work on CMOS nor transmission lines or microwave, and graduating with an ECE degree from U of Utah offered those as your career paths.

Re: I should have loved electrical engineering

#103

Post by underlipton »

dfawcus wrote: post #55
pclmulqdq wrote: post #11

EE encompasses a lot of "engineering that takes hard math" at a professional and research level (similar to "hard CS," just different fields of math), so it is very hard to do as an undergrad, when your background in complex analysis and E&M is weak. Early classes on circuits in EE will usually take shortcuts using known circuit structures and simplified models. The abstraction underneath the field of analog circuits…

Yeah - there was a massive filtering of the students between the 1st year entry, and the second year at my Uni. Largely down to people unable to handle the (not terribly) complex maths at that stage. I knew a number of folks in the first year who were very good at practical electronics, having come in from a technician side, but simply gave up due to the heavy maths load. It got more complex when doing Control Theory…

I sometimes wonder if math suffers from a bit of basketball syndrome. That is, I'm sure there are dozens of potential Muggsy Bogues-esque players out there, but the game's meta continues to drift ever towards who coaches and trainers know how to coach and train, which is tall dudes.

There might be a structural issue if you have a bunch of guys coming in from the technician side, as you say, who almost all get filtered out. You might need remedial classes, a different curriculum progression, something. Or else recruitment standards/expectation-setting are wacked-out.

Re: I should have loved electrical engineering

#104

Post by renox »

sevensor wrote: post #44
carlmr wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Early classes on circuits in EE will usually take shortcuts using known circuit structures and simplified models. Might just be me, but I found it all clicked when we started learning the fundamentals underneath these abstractions. For me it was harder in the first classes because it's about memorizing poorly understood concepts, my brain prefers logically deriving complex concepts as a learning method.

My biggest criticism of EE pedagogy is that it tends to proceed from abstractions and then derive the whole world. This makes it a bit of a slog for a lot of students. I’d like to see an application-first approach that builds up principles from observed behavior. Like, measure the slip in an induction motor and then work out what’s going on there, instead of deriving motors from Maxwell’s equations.

I remember having two class about networking, the first one was top down, it was awful, the second one was bottom up, everything clicked.

Re: I should have loved electrical engineering

#106

Post by fraserharris »

I majored in Engineering Physics with an EE focus. Our classes were scheduled so we took the dependent math courses a semester before the relevant EE topics (ie: learned Laplace & Fourier transformations before circuit analysis). The EE majors all took the related math & EE courses simultaneously and visibly struggled, with every class we took together having a bimodal grade distribution.

Re: I should have loved electrical engineering

#107

Post by Karrot_Kream »

choilive wrote: post #91
Eggpants wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went into EE wanting to learn how to design CPU’s and thought the analog side would be boring. However, control theory turned out to be my favorite class. Learning how negative feedback loops are everywhere was an eye opener. Also learning Laplace transforms was one of my first “holy shit this is freaking clever and cool” moments. Just like how parity bits in data streams can be used to detect AND correct errors.

Control theory was also one of my favorite classes that a low of software people should learn (at least the very basics). So many hand rolled heuristically driven if/else type systems that can simply be replaced more reliably with a PID.

I've played around with this over the years in my career but have found that tuning PID loops is very tricky, much trickier than creating a soup of if/else clauses and much less auditable to those who don't understand the math.

Re: I should have loved electrical engineering

#109

Post by pkolaczk »

markus_zhang wrote: post #39
pclmulqdq wrote: post #11

EE encompasses a lot of "engineering that takes hard math" at a professional and research level (similar to "hard CS," just different fields of math), so it is very hard to do as an undergrad, when your background in complex analysis and E&M is weak. Early classes on circuits in EE will usually take shortcuts using known circuit structures and simplified models. The abstraction underneath the field of analog circuits…

Interesting. My approach to hobbyist EE (actually embedded) is: 1. Learn soldering 2. Treat circuits like black boxes. If I need X amount of Y, e.g. I need a circuit to smooth the voltage, I pick one black box with adequate attributes. However this is pretty introductory and I have no idea how to learn to fix old consoles. Sometimes it’s just a broken capacitor but I first need to figure out which part is broken.

Circuits as black boxes is usually a very leaky abstraction, because how circuits work depends a lot on what’s connected to them. And they have plenty of attributes that can interact in very weird ways.

Re: I should have loved electrical engineering

#110

Post by ahartmetz »

sevensor wrote: post #44
carlmr wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Early classes on circuits in EE will usually take shortcuts using known circuit structures and simplified models. Might just be me, but I found it all clicked when we started learning the fundamentals underneath these abstractions. For me it was harder in the first classes because it's about memorizing poorly understood concepts, my brain prefers logically deriving complex concepts as a learning method.

My biggest criticism of EE pedagogy is that it tends to proceed from abstractions and then derive the whole world. This makes it a bit of a slog for a lot of students. I’d like to see an application-first approach that builds up principles from observed behavior. Like, measure the slip in an induction motor and then work out what’s going on there, instead of deriving motors from Maxwell’s equations.

Teaching solutions without even mentioning the problems, basically. I hate it.
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