8 ms·

10x indeed. This is an example of that even rarer creature, the "unstoppable" engineer. Need an FPGA? I'll just learn verilog. Never made a pcb but need one? No

10x indeed. This is an example of that even rarer creature, the "unstoppable" engineer. Need an FPGA? I'll just learn verilog. Never made a pcb but need one? No prob, just learn kicad and figure out how to solder SMD. No docs? Just reverse engineer. No tools? Make my own. This approaches Woz level engineering, if not 100% technically, at least philosophically.

SwellJoe 11y ago
I believe we're seeing the lever that the Internet provides produce results, in cases like this. Smart kids before the Internet had to dig up information in widely disparate sources; some of these skills and knowledge were the exclusive purview of universities and research institutions. You simply couldn't do some of this stuff if you didn't have access to a lab and someone to show you how to do it. The Internet has caused an increase in access to knowledge comparable to, and maybe even surpassing, the leap from the pre-Gutenberg printing press world. In other words, the Internet is a multiplier that applies to the incredible curiosity and enthusiasm and intelligence of bright kids. So, multiply your 10x (or whatever #x) nerd by the 10x (or probably much greater multiplier) of the Internet, and you get the world we're living in now. Amazingly, the multiplier will likely continue to increase over time. I don't know if it will accelerate in a way comparable to the Internet coming along (I mean, we had centuries between early really big knowledge multiplier leaps), but it might. We live in amazing times is what I'm trying to say, and I'm genuinely jealous of kids coming up today, despite some minor caveats. I was bright and curious, and lucky enough to have access to a computer (C64 first, later C128 and Amiga 2000), but the access to knowledge was still quite limited. Internet didn't come for me until I was an adult. Internet and a boundless curiosity and practically unlimited free time is heady stuff.
- barrkel 11y ago
  The internet is also full of distractions. There's a risk that the stimulation-rich environment will reduce the level of boredom that can instigate creativity, as I know it did for me - I had an out of date Commodore 64 (until I fried one of its chips) followed by an out of date Amstrad CPC464, with no software so I had to write my own.
  - MichaelGG 11y ago
    Bingo. I'd summer at a farm where the only fun electronic item was a TRS-80. Apart from running outside or feeding the animals, that was my main entertainment. I spent hours writing adventure games for my cousins to play. Same, later on, in school, with TI calculators. But my kids? Despite being "digital natives" don't even really know how to use computers. (Yes my failure as a parent, but also indicative of the environment.)
    - ajmurmann 11y ago
      I'm really worried about this. Not only as far as it impacts computer skills but everything. I watched a stand-up piece/talk by Stephen Fry and he described how he read the complete works by Oscar Wilde when he was 14. Some books multiple times. I'm afraid that the odds of a 14 year old child will do that have gone down dramatically because of the informational and stimulation overload we are under today. "Smart devices" in particular I believe to be more of a curse than a blessing. I've been trying to limit my use of it and it's been great. Of course it doesn't always work, like right now.
    - e12e 11y ago
      I think there's another thing "different" now vs the 80s/90s: The decline of good computer magazines, and despite places like hn, the relative scarcity of good technical resources to replace them. No Byte, No Dr. Dobbs, and while there are still a couple of magazines dedicated to Linux, I find their quality versus the magazines for the Amiga is a bit uneven. Personally I grew up reading Dr. Dobbs, Byte Magazine, a slew of Amiga journals and Scientific American. I probably started reading the latter at a point where I understood maybe 40% - but it was a great way to learn English. On the plus side, you can now go and play with and read the code from the likes of Bernstein, Percival, Torvalds and things like the entire Solaris system. And there are great resources, like the Arch Linux wiki, the FreeBSD documentation and dev/user lists. But the good stuff is increasingly hard to discover in an ocean of mediocre stuff. And I have yet to find any good canonical resource for "the good stuff". One of my biggest disappointments with college was that academics appear to be doing a terrible job of keeping up to date, or helping students seek out good extracurricular resources, despite the fact that these resources keep growing and growing. I hope that the trend toward open publishing of research will continue, and maybe see some sister-resources in the form of free popular science resources pop up -- I could easy imagine universities and research institution pooling resources in order to help researcher edit and publish popular science articles in addition to their standard papers -- as a combination of general science education, and to rise awareness/advertise research.
- eggy 11y ago
  How true! I couldn't afford a computer in 1977, so I bought a book in 1978 on how to program DEC PDP-11 in assembly language. I understood something for every 10 I couldn't grasp without a real computer. In 1978 I bought a Commodore PET with a cassette tape drive built into it. Learning was slow going. Even in 1995, I was still calling companies for information, unless they had a website (< 25,000 then). I've had the chance to do some cool stuff, because I tried hard to make those connections, whether it was writing a letter to a company for a sample-kit of their electronics products or something other. Now, my son, has made rockets with sugar fuel, build a robot controllable via the web, made magnet ski boots for walking upside-down on steel, etc.. all from YouTube and other sources. I think he is smarter than I ever was, but I also think the information availability (1 min. vs. 2 weeks for an answer by letter or phone), the amount of people publishing videos, how-tos and such, have greatly amplified the process. It is only a matter of time before we walk up the exponential curve of progress we are standing before today on a slight incline.
- Udik 11y ago
  It's the acceleration that leads up to the singularity. Our current technological level allows anything that requires knowledge and materials just to happen at faster and faster rates.
- irascible 11y ago
  This is soo true. When I was starting out, I had to save money to buy giant manuals, and then do drive bys of different bookstores to find one that happened to have the thing.. it was a nightmare.. like.. have an idea.. do a month of sourcing, and then maybe have the knowledge to pursue it.. now I research 10 topics in a day.. and have the luxury of choice! It's stunning.
AnthonBerg 11y ago
FWIW soldering SMD is much easier and more pleasant than through-hole :) The difference is that it takes some small amount of learned technique and just slightly more equipment - namely liquid flux. http://store.curiousinventor.com/guides/Surface_Mount_Soldering http://store.curiousinventor.com/guides/Surface_Mount_Solder...
- e12e 11y ago
  Depends on the size of the components though. I got to take a short SMD soldering course while I was in the military. And down to a certain size, it is indeed easy. But as miniaturization continues, and some point manually placing components becomes really hard - much like working with clocks.
  - AnthonBerg 11y ago
    True! But two things save us and make DIY SMD reasonable: - With practice we can go down to surprisingly small components. It's less about precision work and more about having an intuition about heat flow and surface tension which let the components align themselves. - When components are too small or simply impossible (or it is beyond my knowledge) to solder with an iron, we can always just use an oven :) Which is entirely reasonable to do either at home / in the garage as they can be build very cheaply, or locally at a friend's or a fab-lab type deal.
- janekm 11y ago
  Try tacky flux, much nicer still...
nickpsecurity 11y ago
I agree. I just got a great book, Electronics Principles by Malvino, on electronic engineering with especially analog focus. I was told to get another one to learn proper PCB design. There's others for Verilog. Unlike programming, most stuff in these has to be learned by trial-and-error with hardly any instant solutions a la StackOverflow. Graphics cards themselves are their own beasts with complex issues even for simple ones, esp integration w/ regular software. So, as I'm reading this, I'm surprised how nonchalantly he describes what looks like a ton of headaches that's in front of me personally. Doing some basic stuff in Verilog on an FPGA is straight-forward. What he's done was not unless he found some excellent resources that basically let him cheat a lot in the learning. I'd be interested in them as I'm collecting resources with HW knowledge and wisdom.
- Cyph0n 11y ago
  I'm also looking for good books on PCB design and Verilog. Could you please share the titles that were recommended to you?
  - nickpsecurity 11y ago
    I actually lost them. However, after an hour of digging through Schneier's blog, I found some of them. For analog and PCB, there's this: Electronic Principles 8th Ed Malvino http://www.amazon.com/Electronic-Principles-Albert-Malvino/dp/0073373885/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1460908656&sr=8-1&keywords=electronic+principles+malvino http://www.amazon.com/Electronic-Principles-Albert-Malvino/d... Note: Look up the 2nd edition or something as I got it for $2. Principles of analog don't really change. Super-easy to read with more heuristics & diagrams than theories. I didn't know until today it was being updated. Circuit Designer's Companion... for free! http://diagramas.diagramasde.com/otros/The%20Circuit%20Designers%20Companion.pdf http://diagramas.diagramasde.com/otros/The%20Circuit%20Desig... Note: High-assurance engineer told me this guy was a master and this book is all-in-one most of what you need to know. A reviewer said it's mostly for digital, not analog, stuff but that's probably your goal. Digital stuff is highly opinionated on whether it's "good" or not. So, read the reviews to determine if it's good for you personally. http://www.amazon.com/Digital-Design-RTL-VHDL-Verilog/dp/0470531088/ref=zg_bs_3726_4 http://www.amazon.com/Digital-Design-RTL-VHDL-Verilog/dp/047... http://www.amazon.com/dp/0131678442/?tag=stackoverfl08-20 http://www.amazon.com/dp/0131678442/?tag=stackoverfl08-20 Note: These were said to be nice for beginners on Verilog, etc. Good tutorials online, too, with practice code and help on StackOverflow. I suggest getting a simulator and/or cheap FPGA then just experimenting. http://www.amazon.com/dp/1461186293/?tag=stackoverfl08-20 http://www.amazon.com/dp/1461186293/?tag=stackoverfl08-20 http://www.amazon.com/dp/0470054379/?tag=stackoverfl08-20 http://www.amazon.com/dp/0470054379/?tag=stackoverfl08-20 Note: First is a cookbook for FPGA designs. Second covers things like floorplanning and resets. http://www.amazon.com/Digital-Systems-Engineering-William-Dally/dp/0521592925/ref=zg_bs_3726_70 http://www.amazon.com/Digital-Systems-Engineering-William-Da... http://www.amazon.com/VLSI-Test-Principles-Architectures-Testability/dp/0123705975/ref=zg_bs_3726_43 http://www.amazon.com/VLSI-Test-Principles-Architectures-Tes... http://www.amazon.com/Comprehensive-Functional-Verification-Complete-Industry/dp/0127518037/ref=zg_bs_3726_45 http://www.amazon.com/Comprehensive-Functional-Verification-... Note: Books on Digital System Engineering, VLSI testing, and functional verification to top it off. Endnote: I don't guarantee quality of any of these except Electronic Principles and Circuit Designer's Companion. The rest just had positive reviews plus what I assessed to be decent information for their target topics.
tzs 11y ago
Soldering surface mount devices doesn't seem to be too bad, actually. Here are a couple of short videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NN7UGWYmBY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NN7UGWYmBY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uiroWBkdFY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uiroWBkdFY
- lb1lf 11y ago
  Soldering SMD is, in my experience, a lot simpler than soldering their through-hole counterparts - provided you've got a proper soldering iron, that is. Board preparation, obviously, also is a breeze - once you've drilled holes for your vias, just place the board in a vice and off you go. Also, added bonus when it comes to passive components - rather than having those pesky color bands (annoying for the chromatographically challenged among us), values are typically stamped on the components using numerals - so less chance of making a mistake.

SwellJoe 11y ago

I believe we're seeing the lever that the Internet provides produce results, in cases like this. Smart kids before the Internet had to dig up information in widely disparate sources; some of these skills and knowledge were the exclusive purview of universities and research institutions. You simply couldn't do some of this stuff if you didn't have access to a lab and someone to show you how to do it. The Internet has caused an increase in access to knowledge comparable to, and maybe even surpassing, the leap from the pre-Gutenberg printing press world. In other words, the Internet is a multiplier that applies to the incredible curiosity and enthusiasm and intelligence of bright kids. So, multiply your 10x (or whatever #x) nerd by the 10x (or probably much greater multiplier) of the Internet, and you get the world we're living in now. Amazingly, the multiplier will likely continue to increase over time. I don't know if it will accelerate in a way comparable to the Internet coming along (I mean, we had centuries between early really big knowledge multiplier leaps), but it might. We live in amazing times is what I'm trying to say, and I'm genuinely jealous of kids coming up today, despite some minor caveats. I was bright and curious, and lucky enough to have access to a computer (C64 first, later C128 and Amiga 2000), but the access to knowledge was still quite limited. Internet didn't come for me until I was an adult. Internet and a boundless curiosity and practically unlimited free time is heady stuff.

barrkel 11y ago
The internet is also full of distractions. There's a risk that the stimulation-rich environment will reduce the level of boredom that can instigate creativity, as I know it did for me - I had an out of date Commodore 64 (until I fried one of its chips) followed by an out of date Amstrad CPC464, with no software so I had to write my own.
- MichaelGG 11y ago
  Bingo. I'd summer at a farm where the only fun electronic item was a TRS-80. Apart from running outside or feeding the animals, that was my main entertainment. I spent hours writing adventure games for my cousins to play. Same, later on, in school, with TI calculators. But my kids? Despite being "digital natives" don't even really know how to use computers. (Yes my failure as a parent, but also indicative of the environment.)
  - ajmurmann 11y ago
    I'm really worried about this. Not only as far as it impacts computer skills but everything. I watched a stand-up piece/talk by Stephen Fry and he described how he read the complete works by Oscar Wilde when he was 14. Some books multiple times. I'm afraid that the odds of a 14 year old child will do that have gone down dramatically because of the informational and stimulation overload we are under today. "Smart devices" in particular I believe to be more of a curse than a blessing. I've been trying to limit my use of it and it's been great. Of course it doesn't always work, like right now.
  - e12e 11y ago
    I think there's another thing "different" now vs the 80s/90s: The decline of good computer magazines, and despite places like hn, the relative scarcity of good technical resources to replace them. No Byte, No Dr. Dobbs, and while there are still a couple of magazines dedicated to Linux, I find their quality versus the magazines for the Amiga is a bit uneven. Personally I grew up reading Dr. Dobbs, Byte Magazine, a slew of Amiga journals and Scientific American. I probably started reading the latter at a point where I understood maybe 40% - but it was a great way to learn English. On the plus side, you can now go and play with and read the code from the likes of Bernstein, Percival, Torvalds and things like the entire Solaris system. And there are great resources, like the Arch Linux wiki, the FreeBSD documentation and dev/user lists. But the good stuff is increasingly hard to discover in an ocean of mediocre stuff. And I have yet to find any good canonical resource for "the good stuff". One of my biggest disappointments with college was that academics appear to be doing a terrible job of keeping up to date, or helping students seek out good extracurricular resources, despite the fact that these resources keep growing and growing. I hope that the trend toward open publishing of research will continue, and maybe see some sister-resources in the form of free popular science resources pop up -- I could easy imagine universities and research institution pooling resources in order to help researcher edit and publish popular science articles in addition to their standard papers -- as a combination of general science education, and to rise awareness/advertise research.
eggy 11y ago
How true! I couldn't afford a computer in 1977, so I bought a book in 1978 on how to program DEC PDP-11 in assembly language. I understood something for every 10 I couldn't grasp without a real computer. In 1978 I bought a Commodore PET with a cassette tape drive built into it. Learning was slow going. Even in 1995, I was still calling companies for information, unless they had a website (< 25,000 then). I've had the chance to do some cool stuff, because I tried hard to make those connections, whether it was writing a letter to a company for a sample-kit of their electronics products or something other. Now, my son, has made rockets with sugar fuel, build a robot controllable via the web, made magnet ski boots for walking upside-down on steel, etc.. all from YouTube and other sources. I think he is smarter than I ever was, but I also think the information availability (1 min. vs. 2 weeks for an answer by letter or phone), the amount of people publishing videos, how-tos and such, have greatly amplified the process. It is only a matter of time before we walk up the exponential curve of progress we are standing before today on a slight incline.
Udik 11y ago
It's the acceleration that leads up to the singularity. Our current technological level allows anything that requires knowledge and materials just to happen at faster and faster rates.
irascible 11y ago
This is soo true. When I was starting out, I had to save money to buy giant manuals, and then do drive bys of different bookstores to find one that happened to have the thing.. it was a nightmare.. like.. have an idea.. do a month of sourcing, and then maybe have the knowledge to pursue it.. now I research 10 topics in a day.. and have the luxury of choice! It's stunning.

AnthonBerg 11y ago

FWIW soldering SMD is much easier and more pleasant than through-hole :) The difference is that it takes some small amount of learned technique and just slightly more equipment - namely liquid flux. http://store.curiousinventor.com/guides/Surface_Mount_Soldering http://store.curiousinventor.com/guides/Surface_Mount_Solder...

e12e 11y ago
Depends on the size of the components though. I got to take a short SMD soldering course while I was in the military. And down to a certain size, it is indeed easy. But as miniaturization continues, and some point manually placing components becomes really hard - much like working with clocks.
- AnthonBerg 11y ago
  True! But two things save us and make DIY SMD reasonable: - With practice we can go down to surprisingly small components. It's less about precision work and more about having an intuition about heat flow and surface tension which let the components align themselves. - When components are too small or simply impossible (or it is beyond my knowledge) to solder with an iron, we can always just use an oven :) Which is entirely reasonable to do either at home / in the garage as they can be build very cheaply, or locally at a friend's or a fab-lab type deal.
janekm 11y ago
Try tacky flux, much nicer still...

nickpsecurity 11y ago

I agree. I just got a great book, Electronics Principles by Malvino, on electronic engineering with especially analog focus. I was told to get another one to learn proper PCB design. There's others for Verilog. Unlike programming, most stuff in these has to be learned by trial-and-error with hardly any instant solutions a la StackOverflow. Graphics cards themselves are their own beasts with complex issues even for simple ones, esp integration w/ regular software. So, as I'm reading this, I'm surprised how nonchalantly he describes what looks like a ton of headaches that's in front of me personally. Doing some basic stuff in Verilog on an FPGA is straight-forward. What he's done was not unless he found some excellent resources that basically let him cheat a lot in the learning. I'd be interested in them as I'm collecting resources with HW knowledge and wisdom.

Cyph0n 11y ago
I'm also looking for good books on PCB design and Verilog. Could you please share the titles that were recommended to you?
- nickpsecurity 11y ago
  I actually lost them. However, after an hour of digging through Schneier's blog, I found some of them. For analog and PCB, there's this: Electronic Principles 8th Ed Malvino http://www.amazon.com/Electronic-Principles-Albert-Malvino/dp/0073373885/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1460908656&sr=8-1&keywords=electronic+principles+malvino http://www.amazon.com/Electronic-Principles-Albert-Malvino/d... Note: Look up the 2nd edition or something as I got it for $2. Principles of analog don't really change. Super-easy to read with more heuristics & diagrams than theories. I didn't know until today it was being updated. Circuit Designer's Companion... for free! http://diagramas.diagramasde.com/otros/The%20Circuit%20Designers%20Companion.pdf http://diagramas.diagramasde.com/otros/The%20Circuit%20Desig... Note: High-assurance engineer told me this guy was a master and this book is all-in-one most of what you need to know. A reviewer said it's mostly for digital, not analog, stuff but that's probably your goal. Digital stuff is highly opinionated on whether it's "good" or not. So, read the reviews to determine if it's good for you personally. http://www.amazon.com/Digital-Design-RTL-VHDL-Verilog/dp/0470531088/ref=zg_bs_3726_4 http://www.amazon.com/Digital-Design-RTL-VHDL-Verilog/dp/047... http://www.amazon.com/dp/0131678442/?tag=stackoverfl08-20 http://www.amazon.com/dp/0131678442/?tag=stackoverfl08-20 Note: These were said to be nice for beginners on Verilog, etc. Good tutorials online, too, with practice code and help on StackOverflow. I suggest getting a simulator and/or cheap FPGA then just experimenting. http://www.amazon.com/dp/1461186293/?tag=stackoverfl08-20 http://www.amazon.com/dp/1461186293/?tag=stackoverfl08-20 http://www.amazon.com/dp/0470054379/?tag=stackoverfl08-20 http://www.amazon.com/dp/0470054379/?tag=stackoverfl08-20 Note: First is a cookbook for FPGA designs. Second covers things like floorplanning and resets. http://www.amazon.com/Digital-Systems-Engineering-William-Dally/dp/0521592925/ref=zg_bs_3726_70 http://www.amazon.com/Digital-Systems-Engineering-William-Da... http://www.amazon.com/VLSI-Test-Principles-Architectures-Testability/dp/0123705975/ref=zg_bs_3726_43 http://www.amazon.com/VLSI-Test-Principles-Architectures-Tes... http://www.amazon.com/Comprehensive-Functional-Verification-Complete-Industry/dp/0127518037/ref=zg_bs_3726_45 http://www.amazon.com/Comprehensive-Functional-Verification-... Note: Books on Digital System Engineering, VLSI testing, and functional verification to top it off. Endnote: I don't guarantee quality of any of these except Electronic Principles and Circuit Designer's Companion. The rest just had positive reviews plus what I assessed to be decent information for their target topics.

tzs 11y ago

Soldering surface mount devices doesn't seem to be too bad, actually. Here are a couple of short videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NN7UGWYmBY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NN7UGWYmBY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uiroWBkdFY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uiroWBkdFY

lb1lf 11y ago
Soldering SMD is, in my experience, a lot simpler than soldering their through-hole counterparts - provided you've got a proper soldering iron, that is. Board preparation, obviously, also is a breeze - once you've drilled holes for your vias, just place the board in a vice and off you go. Also, added bonus when it comes to passive components - rather than having those pesky color bands (annoying for the chromatographically challenged among us), values are typically stamped on the components using numerals - so less chance of making a mistake.