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For last 16 years I have designed and manufactured "real hardware" for living (FPGAs, up to 18 layer PCBs, fast interfaces, RF, analog -- running an engineering

For last 16 years I have designed and manufactured "real hardware" for living (FPGAs, up to 18 layer PCBs, fast interfaces, RF, analog -- running an engineering house now). Yet I still tinker with electronics outside of the "real hardware work". It just is fun. Especially if you can teach it to others; or give them the everlasting tinkering bug!

jacquesm 9y ago
Interesting. I quit electronics once I figured out that software gives me 'infinite parts' at a zero budget. My ability to play around with electronics was always constrained by my parts budget. What kept me going was the ability to scrounge old stuff from the garbage and take it apart for parts, but then it was the luck of the draw and once things got really integrated that route was closed off. So now anything that I do that has to have an effect in the real world is put together with the absolute minimum in interface hardware and the remainder is software.
- felipemnoa 9y ago
  >>I quit electronics once I figured out that software gives me 'infinite parts' at a zero budget. Same here. You can build virtually anything in software.
  - jjoonathan 9y ago
    Anything, so long as it interacts with the outside world exclusively through a screen, speakers, or API :)
    - vvanders 9y ago
      Right? Why didn't someone tell me that these newfangled SDRs worked purely through the magic of softrware.
      - jacquesm 9y ago
        Missing a /s ? If not, what did you think the 'S' stood for?
        TeMPOraL 9y ago
        There's plenty of hardware tinkering around SDRs though.
        vvanders 9y ago
        Well Software, duh ;). The point I was sarcastically making was that even in SDRs you still have a downconversion via either Direct Converting or SuperHet to baseband so your signals are in the right frequency reference that you don't completely saturate your DSP/FPGA/CPU. I love software as much as anyone else but just saying that you can do everything in SW is a bit disingenuous.
        jacquesm 9y ago
        But nobody said that. I wrote "So now anything that I do that has to have an effect in the real world is put together with the absolute minimum in interface hardware and the remainder is software." and the other person wrote "virtually".
        vvanders 9y ago
        I was replying to the second, just adding a "virtually" doesn't absolve you of real-world hardware concerns. If your SDR is getting overloaded because of bad pass-band filtering then no amount of software is going to save you.
    - jacobolus 9y ago
      A way of rephrasing the previous comments would be: “I only use hardware devices when I need special-purpose I/O (including direct physical measurements and physical effects). All signal processing and logic can be more cheaply, quickly, and effectively done in software.”
      - vvanders 9y ago
        > cheaply, quickly, and effectively done in software Hardly. Power usage in SW(or FPGA) vs ASIC is easily an order of magnitude difference. For most battery based solutions software based signal processing is right out. Latency is another, your CPU is going to introduce both jitter and long latency compared to a discrete software solution. Software also can't handle raw speeds involved in a lot of things. There's not a single CPU out there that can natively handle 5GHz wifi off of the wire. That's why even direction conversion SDRs use a frequency mixer to lower the data rate down to something a DSP can handle.
        jacobolus 9y ago
        By cheap, quick, and effective, I’m talking about human labor, not cost of silicon doodads for a commercial-scale product. If you imagine we’re talking about someone’s hobby prototype projects, designing all of those things you mentioned takes skill, experimentation, time, parts, assembly, likely a team collaboration, etc. The combinations of parts get conceptually complicated and the feedback loops during the development process get slower and slower. Obviously there are reasons to use custom-designed hardware if you are a corporation and you are building a million identical devices, or if you have extreme bandwidth or latency needs that a modern CPU literally can’t keep up with, etc. But that’s a very different context than what the people several posts up are talking about. P.S. if you pile your posts with abbreviations your readers have a harder time figuring out what you are talking about.
        twtw 9y ago
        Loads of people do FPGA development for hobby projects, which isn't "software." FPGAs can dramatically improve problems with latency, jitter, power over software implementations, yet are still quite accessible.
  - squarefoot 9y ago
    Compiled hamburgers aren't that tasty:)
  - meuk 9y ago
    Virtually anything of couse just means 'not everything'. As a sideproject, I'm building a keyboard, try that in software. Besides, software is sometimes just too slow. There's a reason you have a GPU (yes, it can be programmed, but my point is that it's separate hardware). Certain algorithms are just much better suited for hardware implementations since everything runs in parallel at a very fine-grained scale(cryptocurrency mining for example - the main reason that people are mining with GPU's is that the ASICs are so popular that it's hard to get them).
- icebraining 9y ago
  Yeah; nowadays parts can be cheaper, but to take advantage of that you often have to order from another continent, waiting weeks to get them. The alternative is to build a local stash, but that requires a large upfront investment, and you'll still be missing that crucial part for the current project. I still like electronics, but software has spoiled me.

jacquesm 9y ago

Interesting. I quit electronics once I figured out that software gives me 'infinite parts' at a zero budget. My ability to play around with electronics was always constrained by my parts budget. What kept me going was the ability to scrounge old stuff from the garbage and take it apart for parts, but then it was the luck of the draw and once things got really integrated that route was closed off. So now anything that I do that has to have an effect in the real world is put together with the absolute minimum in interface hardware and the remainder is software.

felipemnoa 9y ago
>>I quit electronics once I figured out that software gives me 'infinite parts' at a zero budget. Same here. You can build virtually anything in software.
- jjoonathan 9y ago
  Anything, so long as it interacts with the outside world exclusively through a screen, speakers, or API :)
  - vvanders 9y ago
    Right? Why didn't someone tell me that these newfangled SDRs worked purely through the magic of softrware.
    - jacquesm 9y ago
      Missing a /s ? If not, what did you think the 'S' stood for?
      - TeMPOraL 9y ago
        There's plenty of hardware tinkering around SDRs though.
      - vvanders 9y ago
        Well Software, duh ;). The point I was sarcastically making was that even in SDRs you still have a downconversion via either Direct Converting or SuperHet to baseband so your signals are in the right frequency reference that you don't completely saturate your DSP/FPGA/CPU. I love software as much as anyone else but just saying that you can do everything in SW is a bit disingenuous.
        jacquesm 9y ago
        But nobody said that. I wrote "So now anything that I do that has to have an effect in the real world is put together with the absolute minimum in interface hardware and the remainder is software." and the other person wrote "virtually".
        vvanders 9y ago
        I was replying to the second, just adding a "virtually" doesn't absolve you of real-world hardware concerns. If your SDR is getting overloaded because of bad pass-band filtering then no amount of software is going to save you.
  - jacobolus 9y ago
    A way of rephrasing the previous comments would be: “I only use hardware devices when I need special-purpose I/O (including direct physical measurements and physical effects). All signal processing and logic can be more cheaply, quickly, and effectively done in software.”
    - vvanders 9y ago
      > cheaply, quickly, and effectively done in software Hardly. Power usage in SW(or FPGA) vs ASIC is easily an order of magnitude difference. For most battery based solutions software based signal processing is right out. Latency is another, your CPU is going to introduce both jitter and long latency compared to a discrete software solution. Software also can't handle raw speeds involved in a lot of things. There's not a single CPU out there that can natively handle 5GHz wifi off of the wire. That's why even direction conversion SDRs use a frequency mixer to lower the data rate down to something a DSP can handle.
      - jacobolus 9y ago
        By cheap, quick, and effective, I’m talking about human labor, not cost of silicon doodads for a commercial-scale product. If you imagine we’re talking about someone’s hobby prototype projects, designing all of those things you mentioned takes skill, experimentation, time, parts, assembly, likely a team collaboration, etc. The combinations of parts get conceptually complicated and the feedback loops during the development process get slower and slower. Obviously there are reasons to use custom-designed hardware if you are a corporation and you are building a million identical devices, or if you have extreme bandwidth or latency needs that a modern CPU literally can’t keep up with, etc. But that’s a very different context than what the people several posts up are talking about. P.S. if you pile your posts with abbreviations your readers have a harder time figuring out what you are talking about.
        twtw 9y ago
        Loads of people do FPGA development for hobby projects, which isn't "software." FPGAs can dramatically improve problems with latency, jitter, power over software implementations, yet are still quite accessible.
- squarefoot 9y ago
  Compiled hamburgers aren't that tasty:)
- meuk 9y ago
  Virtually anything of couse just means 'not everything'. As a sideproject, I'm building a keyboard, try that in software. Besides, software is sometimes just too slow. There's a reason you have a GPU (yes, it can be programmed, but my point is that it's separate hardware). Certain algorithms are just much better suited for hardware implementations since everything runs in parallel at a very fine-grained scale(cryptocurrency mining for example - the main reason that people are mining with GPU's is that the ASICs are so popular that it's hard to get them).
icebraining 9y ago
Yeah; nowadays parts can be cheaper, but to take advantage of that you often have to order from another continent, waiting weeks to get them. The alternative is to build a local stash, but that requires a large upfront investment, and you'll still be missing that crucial part for the current project. I still like electronics, but software has spoiled me.