5 ms·

As part of my undergraduate course we had to build an embedded system that did this, at a high baud rate, with a transmitter and receiver. It was the most ridic

As part of my undergraduate course we had to build an embedded system that did this, at a high baud rate, with a transmitter and receiver. It was the most ridiculously difficult project I have ever undertaken. Finished the transmitter but there was something wrong with part of our analogue circuit and it gave the signal an artefact. I wrote the assembly in a day (oh yeah we used assembler and burned an EPROM I think) but the hardware assignment was Walt Disney level fantasy. I believe zero people on the course got it fully working. I spent almost every spare hour I had in that lab for ten weeks. And despite it being insanely difficult, I learnt something that semester. I learnt that I would never, ever, work in hardware.

osrec 5y ago
Lol, I had a similar experience as a teenager, however it only increased my desire to work in hardware!
londons_explore 5y ago
This isn't too difficult if you can write the algorithm in software (ie. matlab). Do a basic OFDM with bins say 5Hz wide, with QAM data. Align timing, phase shift and amplitude by brute force looking for known marker bins. Choose such narrow bins and such long symbols to try to hide the effects of echo, reverb etc. Deal with noise and channel deficiencies with lots of erasure coding.
- wyldfire 5y ago
  > This isn't too difficult if you can write the algorithm in software (ie. matlab). Back in the day, I don't think matlab had any 'export' logic like I think modern copies do. IIRC matlab can emit C code + matlab library calls maybe?
- randomsearch 5y ago
  IIRC we had to put together a significant analogue circuit, without any real guidance as to how we'd achieve the high baudrate. The software was running on a minimal CPU that we wired up by hand, the address bus, the databus, the memory chips and everything else... hundreds of cables on breadboards, just for the digital part, and the analog electronics took up more boards. A loose connection caused by moving the boards could cost you hours when restarting. It was definitely too difficult _for me_.
hesdeadjim 5y ago
I can relate, my Computer Architecture course at UT Austin was taught by a adjunct professor who was a technical fellow at Intel. He gave exactly zero fucks, and assigned us a level of work and expectation that at a minimum consumed 20-30 hours of my week. I failed chemistry to get an A in this class, and despite coming to the same realization that I wanted nothing to do with hardware, I left understanding what it meant to actually work hard.
robomartin 5y ago
Most people in software have no concept of just how difficult hardware can be. Add to that the fact that most physical products today are really hybrid hardware + software, with the added feature that this sometimes means FPGA + one or more MCU's + analog + high speed controlled impedance + matched propagation delay + signal and power integrity. Yeah, hardware is, well, hard. This is particularly true at scale. Anyone can make one or a few of something. Scale it up and things get interesting very quickly. I am currently working on one such projects. One of the modules will be manufactured at an initial rate of about 5K units per month and is predicted to eventually reach as high as 50K per month. With software --and particularly with web-based products-- you can literally have millions of customers, make mistakes and fix things overnight. Imagine shipping hundreds of thousands of physical products and discovering a problem with the design. Not the same world at all. Heck, in most cases you can't even update the software after shipping. Which means you have to get all of it right before it goes to manufacturing. Among other things, I think this is one of the reasons for which VC's aren't all that interested in hardware. It's difficult, capital intensive and the risk vs. reward simply isn't on the same scale. That said, I enjoy hardware development. Yes, I do software just as much and, believe me, its a walk in the park compared to hardware, but I would not trade one for the other. No pun intended, either you are wired to like hardware or you are not. That's the way I see it.
- amelius 5y ago
  > Among other things, I think this is one of the reasons for which VC's aren't all that interested in hardware. It's difficult, capital intensive and the risk vs. reward simply isn't on the same scale. Hardware, it seems, is about to become a winner takes all market. And at that point you can't be a successful software producer unless you control the hardware as well.
  - paxys 5y ago
    The problem with hardware is that is becomes more and more difficult for a startup to compete in a market segment as time goes on due to general technological progress. But this same progress makes writing software easier. Back in the 70s you probably had a shot at starting a computer company or silicon manufacturer with a small team and good amount of funding. Today that is wildly impossible. Software, on the other hand, is the opposite. A billion+ dollar research project from 20 years ago is an npm import away today. Two people with a laptop are more and more equipped to take on the goliaths of the industry (or get acquired by them) than they were in the past.

osrec 5y ago

Lol, I had a similar experience as a teenager, however it only increased my desire to work in hardware!

londons_explore 5y ago

This isn't too difficult if you can write the algorithm in software (ie. matlab). Do a basic OFDM with bins say 5Hz wide, with QAM data. Align timing, phase shift and amplitude by brute force looking for known marker bins. Choose such narrow bins and such long symbols to try to hide the effects of echo, reverb etc. Deal with noise and channel deficiencies with lots of erasure coding.

wyldfire 5y ago
> This isn't too difficult if you can write the algorithm in software (ie. matlab). Back in the day, I don't think matlab had any 'export' logic like I think modern copies do. IIRC matlab can emit C code + matlab library calls maybe?
randomsearch 5y ago
IIRC we had to put together a significant analogue circuit, without any real guidance as to how we'd achieve the high baudrate. The software was running on a minimal CPU that we wired up by hand, the address bus, the databus, the memory chips and everything else... hundreds of cables on breadboards, just for the digital part, and the analog electronics took up more boards. A loose connection caused by moving the boards could cost you hours when restarting. It was definitely too difficult _for me_.

hesdeadjim 5y ago

I can relate, my Computer Architecture course at UT Austin was taught by a adjunct professor who was a technical fellow at Intel. He gave exactly zero fucks, and assigned us a level of work and expectation that at a minimum consumed 20-30 hours of my week. I failed chemistry to get an A in this class, and despite coming to the same realization that I wanted nothing to do with hardware, I left understanding what it meant to actually work hard.

robomartin 5y ago

Most people in software have no concept of just how difficult hardware can be. Add to that the fact that most physical products today are really hybrid hardware + software, with the added feature that this sometimes means FPGA + one or more MCU's + analog + high speed controlled impedance + matched propagation delay + signal and power integrity. Yeah, hardware is, well, hard. This is particularly true at scale. Anyone can make one or a few of something. Scale it up and things get interesting very quickly. I am currently working on one such projects. One of the modules will be manufactured at an initial rate of about 5K units per month and is predicted to eventually reach as high as 50K per month. With software --and particularly with web-based products-- you can literally have millions of customers, make mistakes and fix things overnight. Imagine shipping hundreds of thousands of physical products and discovering a problem with the design. Not the same world at all. Heck, in most cases you can't even update the software after shipping. Which means you have to get all of it right before it goes to manufacturing. Among other things, I think this is one of the reasons for which VC's aren't all that interested in hardware. It's difficult, capital intensive and the risk vs. reward simply isn't on the same scale. That said, I enjoy hardware development. Yes, I do software just as much and, believe me, its a walk in the park compared to hardware, but I would not trade one for the other. No pun intended, either you are wired to like hardware or you are not. That's the way I see it.

amelius 5y ago
> Among other things, I think this is one of the reasons for which VC's aren't all that interested in hardware. It's difficult, capital intensive and the risk vs. reward simply isn't on the same scale. Hardware, it seems, is about to become a winner takes all market. And at that point you can't be a successful software producer unless you control the hardware as well.
- paxys 5y ago
  The problem with hardware is that is becomes more and more difficult for a startup to compete in a market segment as time goes on due to general technological progress. But this same progress makes writing software easier. Back in the 70s you probably had a shot at starting a computer company or silicon manufacturer with a small team and good amount of funding. Today that is wildly impossible. Software, on the other hand, is the opposite. A billion+ dollar research project from 20 years ago is an npm import away today. Two people with a laptop are more and more equipped to take on the goliaths of the industry (or get acquired by them) than they were in the past.