2 ms·

That’s right, the analog circuit has clear topology which I can easily imagine what’s going on just by looking at it and sometimes by manipulating it. It’s sim

by mrtksn 2y ago

That’s right, the analog circuit has clear topology which I can easily imagine what’s going on just by looking at it and sometimes by manipulating it. It’s simply more enjoyable to look at, like looking at mechanical watches or industrial machinery. Chips are kind of dull. Not to take anything away from their enormous utility and impact of course.

bgnn 2y ago
Well, this us true for only the simple analog circuits. A modern analog front-end of a 5G modem or so is absolutely impossible to understand visually. Even the sub-blocks like the phase-locked-loop (PLL) or the analog-to-digital converter (ADC) are often vay too complex to grasp alone. But with a good hierarchy of the schematic one can divide each of these into sub-blocks and understand each of the sub-blocks. The whole is still too complex to understand fully, even for its designer. This causes a lot of simpe mistakes to happen like forgetting to connrct two nodes and not realizing till the silicon failing after the production...
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  Yes, but there is a certain magic feeling of power in knowing that you could, with a steady hand and a soldering iron with thin enough tip, meaningfully alter or repurpose the analog parts of the circuit. It's like the difference between a game whose logic is 90% Lua or Python scripts, included plaintext in the game directory, vs. one that's 100% compiled C++. One is susceptible to modding by a 12 year old kid armed with a notepad, or a 22 year old kid trying to make a flashy visualization of finite state machines to get a good grade on CS labs for little work[0]. The other is... still mutable, if you get into reverse engineering, and probably pay for (or pirate) SoftICE[1]. More importantly, one lets you learn how to make similar things, through looking and experimenting; the other doesn't[2]. -- [0] - Well, that involved Processing to show an animated diagram of a simple FSM, and Colobot with a flying Moon robot programmed with that FSM for the flashy vis, plus some half-assed IPC using text files... [1] - Ghirda wasn't a thing back then. [2] - See also "Show source" in browsers - used to be a great on-ramp to webdev and programming, back when JS was just a toy language.

by mrtksn 2y ago

bgnn 2y ago

Well, this us true for only the simple analog circuits. A modern analog front-end of a 5G modem or so is absolutely impossible to understand visually. Even the sub-blocks like the phase-locked-loop (PLL) or the analog-to-digital converter (ADC) are often vay too complex to grasp alone. But with a good hierarchy of the schematic one can divide each of these into sub-blocks and understand each of the sub-blocks. The whole is still too complex to understand fully, even for its designer. This causes a lot of simpe mistakes to happen like forgetting to connrct two nodes and not realizing till the silicon failing after the production...

TeMPOraL 2y ago
Yes, but there is a certain magic feeling of power in knowing that you could, with a steady hand and a soldering iron with thin enough tip, meaningfully alter or repurpose the analog parts of the circuit. It's like the difference between a game whose logic is 90% Lua or Python scripts, included plaintext in the game directory, vs. one that's 100% compiled C++. One is susceptible to modding by a 12 year old kid armed with a notepad, or a 22 year old kid trying to make a flashy visualization of finite state machines to get a good grade on CS labs for little work[0]. The other is... still mutable, if you get into reverse engineering, and probably pay for (or pirate) SoftICE[1]. More importantly, one lets you learn how to make similar things, through looking and experimenting; the other doesn't[2]. -- [0] - Well, that involved Processing to show an animated diagram of a simple FSM, and Colobot with a flying Moon robot programmed with that FSM for the flashy vis, plus some half-assed IPC using text files... [1] - Ghirda wasn't a thing back then. [2] - See also "Show source" in browsers - used to be a great on-ramp to webdev and programming, back when JS was just a toy language.