3 ms·

Do you not find problems in simulation? I used to do modeling in Ansys and CST Microwave Studio, and found them to be fairly accurate.

• kaybe 7y ago
  Mhm.. I think you overestimate the level of this operation. Imagine a hackspace trying to get things aircraft-certified. (It's a university, which just means we have more expensive things. There is no dedicated person for this, most of the work is done by students with limited time and no domain knowledge in anything hardware at the beginning. And we're still chronically underfunded, of course.) (So yes, we do model, but usually the science side of it. Most of the instruments stay in the lab, go in cars or just outside worldwide (also ships, stratospheric balloons etc, nobody cares about EM radiation too much as long as you don't overdo it), so the hacky homegrown versions are totally fine. Building scientific instruments in a research group has some advantages because they can be highly custumized, but that means you need to have a person with it who knows which parts to kick for which problems, or where to add or remove some parts. The first iterations are eg expensive optic components, some basic micro-controller or embedded computer system, cardboard and tape.) (For the more sophisticated things like satellite instrument design you do get dedicated more specialized staff on your team (probably working at ESA or NASA etc), so they will do all the electronics design and probably modelling, so you're free to do what is actually your job, optimizing the thing for science.)