I should have loved electrical engineering • Hacker News Board

Re: I should have loved electrical engineering

#121

Post by antod » Fri, Sep 05, 2025, 12:28 AM UTC

bee_rider wrote: post #88

stephen_g wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, this kind of idea is why I’m dead against using things like the hydraulic analogy in early EE for anyone who is ever going to want to do more than the ‘hook some things up to an Arduino’ (or probably ESP32 these days) kind of level electronics. The gaps between the analogy and the real world actually make it harder to understand the fundamentals and just confuse people when you get to a deeper level understandi…

The hydraulic analogy always sort of confused me because, like, fluid mechanics are real complicated. So, I always had this gut feeling question of like, can we actually end up with a hydraulic analogy that is exactly as complicated and electricity and magnetism? If we push the analogy beyond what is intended? Is it an analogy or are both models expressions of some underlying model of potentials and flows, and we hap…

Yeah. As I mentioned in another comment, as someone who studied Civil Engineering (ages ago) maybe most EEs never learn enough hydraulics to know the analogy probably goes further than they realize - ie much further than just kids level stuff.

Voltage drops across components or look a like head drops across pipe fittings. Losses along a pipe are similar to wires. Head and flow rate are very similar to voltage and current across multiple paths. Kirchoff can apply to both etc.

Many of the quantities have direct parallels and derive from each other in similar ways.

Obviously there are limits. But my middling DC circuit knowledge helped a lot when learning hydraulics from a mathematical engineering perspective.

Re: I should have loved electrical engineering

#122

Post by ewujoku » Fri, Sep 05, 2025, 12:38 AM UTC

A properly rigorous EE/ECE program needs the first 3 years to provide a foundation. Yes, some people get weeded out that way.

For me, a senior-level circuits class using Horowitz and Hill "Art of Electronics" was the game-changer (in 1981!). 3rd edition (2015) still looks great to me (although yes it is large and expensive).

Re: I should have loved electrical engineering

#123

Post by bcrl » Fri, Sep 05, 2025, 1:55 AM UTC

ninetyninenine wrote: post #58

It's hard to put this plainly without being insulting but I have to be blunt. EE is just 100000000000x harder to learn. The distance from theory to application for EE is especially gigantic. Software development for the most part is extremely easy. It's one of the few "engineering" fields where you can go to a bootcamp and learn it in 6 months. You won't see this kind of thing for quantum mechanics or electrical engi…

When MIT ran the first massive online course, 6002x, I found out that MIT 6002x was the electronics course I had wished for back when I was in high school. The high school electronics courses I took only touched upon analysis of the simplest of circuits, and there wasn't a lot of explanation of how the different kinds of transistors (NPN, PNP, MOSFETs..) are modeled.

But oh how much workload the 6002x course was... I needed 10-15 hours per week for all the reading, problems and labs, and doing that while working full time and commuting 2 hours a day was a grueling pace to survive!

Re: I should have loved electrical engineering

#124

Post by harrall » Fri, Sep 05, 2025, 2:04 AM UTC

dreamcompiler wrote: post #116

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.

Agreed on the Laplace transforms. They instantly turn linear differential equations into basic high school algebra problems. But they don't work for nonlinear problems.

I remember when I first learned calculus and holy shit that was cool already. Then it kept getting better and better as I learned differential equations, linear algebra, etc.

To me EE = heavy math and that’s what makes it so fun.

I actually do software now but it’s completely different. There’s like no math in most applications of it. Putting something together with a Rasp Pi or Arduino feels like 98% software and 2% EE.

Re: I should have loved electrical engineering

#125

Post by pkolaczk » Fri, Sep 05, 2025, 2:27 AM UTC

Eextra953 wrote: post #70

pclmulqdq wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny. I studied EE in 2012, and by that time, according to professors, there weren't many hardware tinkerers in the group compared to the 1990's. Many more people saw it was a good field that's comparable to CS. At this time, EE was on the way down and CS was on the rise in popularity. The classes were absolutely brutal for most people because they came in with less of an understanding of it.

I think the drop in tinkering is due to the high skill/cost barrier to entry particularly SMT, and lab equipment. If you want to do anything interesting beyond a breadboard and arduino/rpi you are going to need to invest in a custom pcb and lab equipment. With SMT, I got into EE/HW by taking things apart and studying them, back then (late 90's) most consumer stuff still had a good mix of thru-hole and SMT so tinkerin…

You can work with SMT at home no problem. A decent hot air station like Quick 861dw will cost you just about $300 and you don’t need much more to tinker.

Re: I should have loved electrical engineering

#126

Post by rramadass » Fri, Sep 05, 2025, 4:25 AM UTC

pclmulqdq wrote: post #32

amelius wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true, although for wireless applications you can follow the recommendations of the IC vendor and the remainder of the work is RF-engineering, not research. That's why I said fab, not lab. But yes, you are right to a great extent. The main point is that the hard EE work can be prohibitively expensive for individuals and smaller companies.

I think you're oversimplifying this. Lots of RF research is done with a DAC, an ADC, an FPGA, and a frontend made of discretes (sometimes also with off-the-shelf boxes connected with SMA connectors). A lot of power electronics research is done with microcontrollers and discrete parts. Digital circuits research often stops on an FPGA or in a simulator. You can do a lot of actual original work without a fab.

Can you recommend some good resources (books/videos/etc.) for studying RF Engineering and doing RF Research by oneself?

Assume beginner knowledge of relevant mathematics/electronics and good software skills.

Am interested in both the practical side (eg. build a SDR from components) and the theoretical side i.e. the Physics/Mathematics to explain it.

Re: I should have loved electrical engineering

#127

Post by ehnto » Fri, Sep 05, 2025, 5:57 AM UTC

I feel this way about a lot of topics. Concepts are extremely fun to explore and easy to get enamoured with. But actually doing real work in some topics can feel totally disconnected.

You might love mechanical engineering and machines so you get into machining parts. By hand it is exactly what you thought, but once you hit CNC you're back to a desk job, spending most of your time in CAD software not even touching the machine.

Re: I should have loved electrical engineering

#128

Post by imtringued » Fri, Sep 05, 2025, 11:06 AM UTC

lll-o-lll wrote: post #111

choilive wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Absolutely the worst control systems of all time have been written by software engineers that don’t understand control theory. The second worst control systems are designed by those who only know the PID heuristic, and can’t be bothered to model a little non-linearity from motor drives saturating.

The biggest problem with PID control is that the integral term performs double duty as both a signal that accumulates small errors to minimize the steady state error, but also as a signal that shows deviation from the target due to unmodeled constraints.

It should be pretty obvious that you cannot overcome constraints by moving even harder in the direction of the constraint, which is what the integral term does.

Re: I should have loved electrical engineering

#129

Post by imtringued » Fri, Sep 05, 2025, 11:10 AM UTC

renox wrote: post #104

sevensor wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why is bottom up or top down needed? Why can't you just explain everything at a high level first and then get into the details?

Re: I should have loved electrical engineering

#130

Post by carlmr » Fri, Sep 05, 2025, 11:36 AM UTC

wetwater wrote: post #118

carlmr wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a good point, too, I had a bunch of abstractions without applications in my head.

Its interestine, when you say abstractions. Could you explain what you mean by abstractions in this context and what do you mean by the underlying fundamentals.

One example would be resonant circuits. Ok great you can build resonant circuits, but what for? The fundamentals to understand frequency responses came later in signals and systems. The application came much later when I learned about electric motors, which basically behave like low pass filters (resonant circuits) which enables us to use PWM to generate sine shaped current curves by switching the input voltage on and off. The voltage signal is smoothed by the LPF circuit that is the motors windings.

I think it would have helped me if we talked about the motor or other examples first, and then did some math to show how the resonant behavior can be useful.