What to start with in electronics - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / beginners

author: Mihai123
author_rank: Newbie
timestamp: December 27, 2021, 04:13:01 pm
content: Hello, I am a college student in the field of electronics and I find that doing only school work is not satisfying for me. I want to start doing projects and build circuits on my own. I enjoy the digital part of electronics. My question is, do you have any suggestions with what I could start with? I'm sorry for the newbie question haha.

author: tooki
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 27, 2021, 04:52:51 pm
content: There's a lot to be said for playing with an Arduino (or any other MCU that can be programmed with the Arduino IDE, like ESP32, STM32, etc) and sensors/peripherals. You'll quickly figure out what else you need to complete a project.As someone who's not especially creative in terms of coming up with ideas for projects, I try to find problems I want to solve.For example, right now for a school project, I'm building what is basically just a smart power strip (in a rack-style enclosure). Here's the train of thought that led to the current design. The original problem I wanted to solve is that once or twice, I've forgotten to turn off my soldering station at home, which is easy because it doesn't have a backlit display. So the first thought was to have a simple countdown timer that turns off the outlet when it reaches 0. Then to that I got the idea to add inputs from other sensors as shutdown triggers, the idea being that if it can detect I'm away from the bench for more than a few minutes, it's better to turn it off. Once I decided on using a large desktop enclosure that can simply go below my two stacks of bench meters, I decided "hey, since I've got a microcontroller in there anyway, I could solve another problem on the bench: the lack of a nice clock", so I'm going to add an extra display just for that.That's not a suggestion for an idea, but rather an example of how I come up with ideas when I need one. But start small for now!!

author: Mihai123
author_rank: Newbie
timestamp: December 27, 2021, 04:56:35 pm
content: I see, thank you very much for the answer! I will put some interest into Arduino.

author: Shock
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 27, 2021, 05:15:54 pm
content: If you intend to do further study it doesn't hurt to check out what they are covering over the next few years as well.

author: rstofer
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 27, 2021, 05:19:31 pm
content: I highly recommend the Arduino Starter Kit because it comes with a lot of toys to hang off the Arduino itself. It also comes with tutorials and code for all the gadgets. There won't be much math involved and the projects could have some practical value. There are also Arduino robotics toyshttps://www.amazon.com/ELEGOO-Project-Tutorial-Controller-Projects/dp/B01D8KOZF4Search Amazon for 'Arduino robot' and you will get a lot of hits.Arguably, this isn't electronics in the engineering sense. These kits have a lot of technical information but maybe not so much electronics theory.So, I recommend you consider the Digilent Analog Discovery 2 and the associated parts kit. There is a substantial educational discount - you'll have to chase it down but it basically comes down to being enrolled in a course and having a .edu email account (I didn't chase this, I'm not eligible for anything).https://digilent.com/shop/test-and-measurement-equipment/usb-oscilloscopes-analyzers-and-signal-generators/https://digilent.com/shop/analog-parts-kit-by-analog-devices-companion-parts-kit-for-the-analog-discovery/I really think the best learning comes out of lab work verifying the classroom theory. Take the usual RC low pass filter: Everybody knows where the -3dB breakpoint is located and everybody knows the slope after the breakpoint but that's not the same as breadboarding it and seeing the response on a real-time graph. And there are hundreds of other experiments you can do to solidify your learning.Have fun with your studies!

author: rstofer
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 27, 2021, 06:23:58 pm
content: As a long retired hobbyist, I can certainly see where folks would think the AD2 was expensive. I'm not sure I would buy it at the new and improved price although they had a discount sale going on where the price was substantially reduced if you also bought an FPGA board. Still, it's kinda pricey.OTOH, if I were a student, paying exorbitant tuition, I might think the AD2 was the ultimate value in education. Tuition, particularly at private universities, is expensive. We're talking $60k/year, give or take, for a school like USC, $82k with living expenses. That's per year so multiply by 5 for a degree. The cost of educational equipment is insignificant. Books, reference materials, lab supplies (home lab) and tools are totally irrelevant compared to the cost of tuition (and possibly living expenses).Yes, some students can get financial aid and that's great. Student loans are not so great. Graduating with an EE might take 5 years and cost $300k plus living expenses ($410k all in). No wonder everybody is excited about cancelling student debt. Individually, it could be a LOT of money.https://admission.usc.edu/learn/cost-financial-aid/State colleges and universities are considerably cheaper but still not free. Except in Texas for qualified veterans, spouses and dependent children where there is free tuition. They still have to pay for living expenses (if any) and books.https://www.texvet.org/postings/hazlewood-actWay to go Texas!No, I'm not eligible...

author: BILLPOD
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: December 27, 2021, 07:12:31 pm
content: Good Morning Mihai123, When I was taking university courses there was lab time to go along with the classroom time. In lab we had to group up into groups of 4 or 5 because there wereonly a limited number of bench 'spots' with all of the equipment to do the lab exercises. With 4 or 5 bodies involved in setting up the exercises, each of us didn't get enough hands on experience using the equipment, (scopes, power supplies, etc.).So what I did was set up a work bench at home, with all thethings necessary to do the lab exercises at home. It REALLY helped me grasp what principles the course was designed to teach.And, as a bonus, you wind up with a well equipped bench for a hobby in electronics.

author: AaronD
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: December 27, 2021, 08:34:31 pm
content: Of course, everyone's experience is going to be different, so it's hard to figure out anything that resembles a "best" approach. But the way that *I* got into it was originally with Lego Technic as a very young kid.It was entirely mechanical of course, being Lego in the 1990's, and entirely kid-powered, but cool stuff nonetheless. The standard Christmas and Birthday present in my family was a suitably complex set of Legos that would always have at least one new part in it. (we didn't pay much attention to the suggested age, and it was sometimes a stretch, but that was good too) Often, the new part was a different-shaped piece of plastic, but sometimes it was a motor or maybe pneumatics, etc. Instead of keeping the sets together, we would sort all the parts into similar-shaped bins (shoe boxes, take-out food trays, etc.) and put the instructions into their own "library bucket". Sometimes I would pull some instructions out and build that, either for nostalgia or to see how they did something, but most of what I did was from my own ideas.When we stayed with some relatives while getting our transmission fixed on vacation (nice of them to just happen live in that town), they had an elevator set that we didn't, and it included a one-motor programmable controller. I think it was just a timer, but it was enough to get me hooked on automation. So Dad started to think about building an interface board for the Commodore 64 to control Lego motors. He was then going to teach me how to program the C64. Just when he was about to build that board, Lego and MIT came out with the first Lego Mindstorms set, so he got that instead.After maybe a year with the official drag-and-drop "connecting blocks" sort of programming language, I "graduated" to a drag-and-drop "expandable outline" sort of programming language called "Gordon's Brick Programmer". I didn't spend very long at all with GBP before moving on again to "Not Quite C", which is a C-ish compiler that produces Lego-compatible bytecode for the original RCX running the official firmware, and a pretty decent IDE calledBricxCC.(Since Lego abandoned the original Mindstorms hardware before WinXP, the BricxCC ecosystem has become the greatly preferred way to use it on a semi-modern or even completely modern laptop. It also runs just fine in Wine, which is what I do now.)I did a LOT with NQC, things that would never have been possible with the original IDE that Lego shipped with the kit. As I was getting close to exhausting what I could make it do with my knowledge at the time, I got my first exposure to a "real" microcontroller and a "real C" compiler, in the form of a PIC18 and MPLAB as part of a high school FIRST robotics kit. (FIRST has moved on to bigger and better things now, several times) I was THE programmer for my team that year, and I think I did a pretty decent job for what I was at the time. Nevertheless, I happened to run across that code later, and it was absolutely awful compared to what I had gotten to by then. It worked, but it was ugly and inefficient...In my senior year of high school, I offered to fix a 6 x 2000W AC theatrical lighting controller that was losing channels one by one, which quickly turned into a complete redesign and rebuild using a bunch of PIC16F877's with all of my own circuit design and construction around them and all of my own code in them. THAT WAS AWESOME!!!!! Not just having a 1kW dimmable test load / space heater / desk light in my dorm room in college, but the fact that my self-directed research to make this thing and simulate it in my head to avoid blowing things up (or myself), kept me well ahead of my freshman "Intro to Electronic Engineering" classes. By the time we got to things in class, I already knew exactly what we were doing, so I only needed to reformat it to what the professor wanted. Easy "A", in terms of the effort that I spent *explicitly* on the class. One of them even gave me a class period to demonstrate it when we ran out of material a week early in the semester, and then connected me to an architecture professor who paid me to do the electronics for one of his side projects that was very similar.I'm glad now, to have also helped the venue that used the original 6 x 2kW system to transition again from my 8 x 2kW system (convenient power of 2), to LED. My system worked just fine, and I had upgraded it at one point to accept DMX instead of my original hack-job of I2C, but I also didn't understand creepage, clearance, or the details of thermal design when I originally made it...... So I'm glad now to have it out of there and in my closet, unpowered.By that time, I had the skills and the comfortability to make just about anything that could be done on a breadboard...in an 8-bit MCU instead. I believe that that's the point that you're asking about how to reach?I guess what I'm saying, very roundaboutly, is to find a worthwhile project, or better: a series of worthwhile projects, that require the skills that you want to learn, and then learn those skills for the express purpose of finishing the project(s), so that you can accomplish the worthwhile goal, whatever you've chosen it to be.

author: Capernicus
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: December 27, 2021, 08:41:08 pm
content: Aaron D, thats pretty cool.You can get one of those little arduino robots to go pretty easy (I've got one in my house), but robots are more of a software problem than a hardware problem getting them to do something decent.

author: AaronD
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: December 27, 2021, 09:44:58 pm
content: Quote from: Capernicus on December 27, 2021, 08:41:08 pmNot the way I did it!I made my own hardware too. First with Lego, then with plywood and PVC pipe, then with steel scrap and aluminum extrusions, etc. My self-directed research project in college used an NTSC camera and capture card, and old WinXP box, a windshield wiper motor from the local junkyard as a steering servo, some custom electronics that were hand-soldered with clipped-off resistor leads and bits of unzipped ribbon cable...and the go-kart that my brother and I made from scrap at Grandpa's house over many spring breaks as kids, to automatically follow a pair of tape lines on the shop floor. (automatic lane-keeping)Of course, this was well before Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and similar things. As you might understand, I have mixed feelings about them. They offer an easy way for lots of people to make something cool, I guess like the original Lego Mindstorms did for me, but they also abstract away what's actually needed to make something different from what is pre-engineered for you. I guess the trick is to go ahead and use the pre-engineered stuff, take that boost, *and then go beyond it* so that you can engineer your own stuff as well.I've never used an Arduino for anything, greatly preferring to roll my own PCB because I can. (I might have "just happened" to use the AVR chip that's on one of the Arduino variants, but the 'duino had nothing to do with that choice, and it's the closest I've ever come to using one) But I do use Raspberry Pi's for things that require more computing power than is reasonable for an 8-bit MCU, and for a low-power desktop PC. Depending on where you draw the line, you might argue that, "It's not real engineering unless you can design and manufacture your own RPi 5," or, "It's perfectly valid to cobble together a bunch of off-the-shelf hardware modules for everything and never touch one line of code."Quote from: Capernicus on December 27, 2021, 08:41:08 pmAh! Yes, you're absolutely right on that! But you still need to know what the software is controlling, and *that* is hardware.Case in point:A PID controller that has some ADC inputs for the Setpoint and Actual signals, and a discrete H-bridge output for the Command to a brushed DC motor. (this H-bridge also has the standard bootstrapped high-side drivers, with the standard "gotcha" that that arrangement comes with) Everything in between, including the ADC filtering, H-bridge management, whatever auto-tuning there might be, etc., is in software. Oh! And this particular H-bridge also has an over-current shutdown that gives you a 1-bit digital signal that it just happened, and takes a 1-bit digital signal to reset. Just because the hardware designer doesn't *completely* trust software that is still in development.Now, your job as the software engineer on that project, is to not only write and then tune the PID logic, but also to manage this particular circuitry.(In case you're wondering, yes, that *was* one of my projects at work.)Essentially, my view of software is just a way to cram a TON of hardware functionality into a tiny space. That's pretty much all it is. Room-sized computers shrink to fit in your pocket. Audio processing gear shrinks from having several standing-height racks next to a mile-wide board at a concert, to what is essentially a physical phone-app controlling a smart patch box on stage. Etc. In most applications, the physical size is now determined entirely by the external interface, not the electronics behind it.My thought process to make something starts with a block diagram, as if I were to actually do it all in hardware. And then I write software to cover most of that description instead. The parts of the diagram that are left, that can't be done in software, like signal conditioning between the chip's capabilities and the real world, become the PCB design. So my physical design is essentially a custom breakout board for the chip that I've chosen to use, but it's still important!

author: Capernicus
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: December 28, 2021, 12:09:33 am
content: I agree with that whole thing, I love how freely you speak about this stuff, other people are a little too cautious to be like that. I liked reading the whole post! no fear!Do you have any videos of this bot you were putting together? It sounds interesting.I think simulating the momentum could actually be better than a PID controller, its what im going to try.I have a bot coming out too, The market is just being born now, IMO, there really can be some nifty bots come out that beat the current "roomba" technology that is very unfortunately (or fortunately for a possible bot company) top of the rung still today!I know Boston Dynamics, have some really amazing stuff, but its all out of the price range of most people, and even Spot (their robot dog), I dont think they have fully utilized this little machine AT ALL! The self driving cars don't look that exciting to me either, I think I can beat them, personally, not that I would trust my AI for that job either, because its so precarious a thing to do, get a computer to commute around safely, anything could go wrong.So, there's some real room there for some ppl to move in for a quick buck, if they can beat the top rung now, (which is actually quite a low bar!) you can make as much money as you want.I was an artist and musician, and it was unfortunately not possible AT ALL, to ever think of it as a monetary avenue, its just fully saturated, and you have to be Ammadeus or nothing, to get ANYTHING, in the art area!!! (or possibly even better, today maybe he was still playing for peanuts, the same as the rest of us. hehe)I guess once they have fully automated civilization, then making robots will be exactly the same as that, in the end.

author: AaronD
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: December 28, 2021, 03:29:48 am
content: Quote from: Capernicus on December 28, 2021, 12:09:33 amNo I don't, unfortunately. It was a contract from a mechanical company to make what I call a "drive-by-wire lawnmower". Essentially, take a zero-turn riding mower, take out the mechanical link between the lap bars and the transmissions, put a sensor on each, and a motor/gearbox on the transmission. The entire (superficial) purpose of this project was to make it behave as if the mechanical link was still there, even though it wasn't. They didn't say a whole lot about applications, but I overheard the possibilities of adding side-slope correction, and the ability to radio-control it (unmanned) on a busy highway. (if a truck creams it, you only lose the machine, not a person) Of course, the actual possibilities are endless.By the time I was done (and made the mechanical company fix the egregious amount of slop in their first-version gearbox - software can't fix everything!), it was several times *better* than the pure-mechanical version! I could twiddle my fingers at the end of the control bar, and it would respond to that! The all-mechanical version had an entire hand worth of play there. I learned their "pop can test", which is to run the caster wheels around a pop can on the ground, as tightly as you can, without knocking the can over; and I pretty much blew their testers away with how good my final result was.Quote from: Capernicus on December 28, 2021, 12:09:33 amYeah, there are TONS of possibilities yet to be discovered! I've wondered myself how well it would work to use a BD quadruped (which is already being used to navigate facilities that were designed exclusively for humans) as a mobility prosthetic for amputees. Effectively creating a real-life 'taur......sorta......which would of course, open a whole 'nother can of worms!Quote from: Capernicus on December 28, 2021, 12:09:33 amWell, *someone's* gotta provide the next generation's hits! But yeah, good luck for any individual to get *themselves* in that position. There's just too much chance involved: being in the right place at the right time entirely by accident, the right people just happen to stumble onto your YouTube channel or TikTok...uhh...thingy, or whatever. And then there's the burnout of *having* to do it for a living once you do "make it"...Quote from: Capernicus on December 28, 2021, 12:09:33 amOh, I'm sure that'll happen. I'm just waiting for fast food and other low-skilled jobs to become automated. I think that anything that can be automated, should be automated, leaving the humans to be creative instead. A lot of infrastructure and legal understandings will have to change to make that work, which is not going to happen overnight, but I think that that's the ideal.About the hazardous stuff: a lot can be gained by restricting the environment that it works in. Strict automatic-only highways, for one example, like in a sci-fi story that I read a while ago that physically blocked any vehicle from entering that did not confirm in that moment that it could force control *away* from the occupants. I think that that author has the right idea. Only then can we realize the massive benefits of large-scale automation. If even one person insists on doing it manually, the whole thing breaks spectacularly. Otherwise, it's almost bulletproof.I would also LOVE to see a free physics simulator that I can throw a general engineering design at and see how badly I screwed it up without spending money on a prototype that I know will fail *somehow*. Not just mechanical engineering, but electrical, chemical, and everything else all put together in one simulation. (a chemical reaction might change the circuit, for example, and that's part of the design (more than just a battery); or I can see that my 2.4GHz clock trace that takes a lap around the board is going to wreck my Bluetooth speakers; etc.)I'm sure the Union of Antiquated College Professors, or whatever they call themselves, will be staunchly against it because, "the kids will spend so much time being fascinated by the pretty pictures that they won't learn anything" (that was their argument against my use ofMathCADin my undergrad engineering classes), but I see it as an excellent way to prototype the ideas *that I really care about* and will therefore *willingly* put effort into, without making an expensive mess.Contrary to the professors' arguments, or at least how they made it sound at the time, most simulators *CAN* be trusted. You just need to be skeptical about what you actually told it to simulate! GIGO and all that.Having been out for a while, I suspect that, in addition to just being isolated from the real world for so long (a one-year swap with a career engineer is not enough), they also fell victim tothe "Sunk Cost Fallacy", having spent so much time and effort to learn to do things by hand that they couldn't bear to throw it all away in favor of what practically every industry was already doing instead. Yes, show what's going on, USING THE SIMULATOR TO DEMONSTRATE IT, and encourage the students to play with the simulator - what happens if you do XYZ, like playing with a real-world design - but you really don't need to build an airplane with a slide-rule anymore. Let the computer do that.Interestingly, I would usually do my homework manually so I could "show my work" as they wanted, using MathCAD mostly as a typesetter (my handwriting was awful), then once I'd gotten my answer, I would often add something like a graph ('@' symbol, Ctrl-V, done!) or the same math with a different set of inputs, using the automatic solver to work my version of the problem, etc. On one occasion, a (correctly done) homework problem extrapolated to claim that wood was a superconductor at DC! I pointed this out to the prof., who said that the given properties and equations were actually an approximation, that was only valid for a small operating area that we happened to be studying at the moment.Okay, so now that you've invalidated *your own* teaching style in terms of general understanding, what were you saying about my proposal!?! (I didn't actually say that, but...)

author: Capernicus
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: December 28, 2021, 05:04:15 am
content: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmLBCPSSCNQ&t=21s.<-amazing physics engine.That lawnmower modification sounds really excellent, It wasnt long ago I didnt know anything and I thought diodes were backwards at first, because of this lecture->Then I had a funny feeling getting information out of these "lecturers" wasnt going to be so easy. So I went to just work it out all myself, and I'm sitting here now fairly successful.Heres a cool thing I did. (Please excuse my lack of communication skills, being in my house alone doing this crazy shit has devolved me into an animal at times.)And It's going quite hunky dory, as far as I judge myself, but most people at this forum don't like what I do, it offends them, because maybe its too different and like working from scratch? (I'd imagine u'd be different cause u seem that type of guy.) Or they are jumping on me for giving technology know how away for free, I don't know to this day, I'm just a little careful what I do here from here on.So... do you have any big plans for a success project?I Want to make a bit of money selling off an original robo-kit. the main difference is this thing is packing alot more AI in it, than say... perhaps that little NAO robot (If you know) Because he comes with a programming system, but not the ACTUAL PROGRAM. which is way more important, I'm thinking I'm going to source the parts, put a $1000 CPLD on it, and then jack it up $2500 - try to sell 1000 of them and make a million.I recommend everyone do it, Then we can have a big robot war and see who made the evillest model! =)I can say dangerous things tho, that turn people away from me, like saying "A voltage divider can be used an amplifier" And then all the hate posts start spewing at me, and I have no idea why.

author: tooki
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 28, 2021, 01:53:28 pm
content: Quote from: Capernicus on December 28, 2021, 05:04:15 amI mean, he's notwrong, but he's an "I'm smarter than everyone else and will use the One True Direction, electron flow, unlike the dumb peasants using their backwards conventional flow!" crank who doesn't make clear enough throughout that his notation is opposite that of almost everything out there.Quote from: Capernicus on December 28, 2021, 05:04:15 amJust learn how to identify good and bad sources. That's an essential skill these days, where the challenge isn't finding enough information, but rather being able to filter out the good stuff and ignore the bad.

author: Terry Bites
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 28, 2021, 05:56:01 pm
content: Coding is the easy part. Or easier. But when you want to connect to the real world a decent grounding in analog is vital.

author: AaronD
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: December 28, 2021, 11:49:59 pm
content: Quote from: Capernicus on December 28, 2021, 05:04:15 amYou might be interested to know that a lot of analog audio processors use two of the second circuit in that "lecture" to derive both the +15V and -15V rails from a single 9VAC "wall-wart" transformer. Use the circuit as he shows it for the positive rail, which actually gives around 24VDC from a 9VAC input (peak = rms * sqrt(2), then double that and subtract the two diode drops at 0.7V each), and then feed that into a 7815 linear regulator. Then copy the circuit and turn the diodes around for the negative rail, and use a 7915 regulator there. You'd want to do something different to power a 40-channel analog mixing console, but it does a good job for a single-rack-unit effects processor or something like that. (and when you have a bunch of them, then the floor of your rack looks like a teenager's face with a bowl of spaghetti dumped on it)Anyway, the attached image is that part of one of my projects, to show you what I'm talking about.C1-C4 are inconsequential at the power line frequency. Their job is to reduce noise when the diodes switch.I've split the filtering before the regulators into 2 parts to make a 2nd order filter (rolls off faster, less out-of-band noise for the same cutoff freq.), and to move some of the power dissipation (heat) from the regulators into the filter resistors R1-R2.D5-D6 protect the regulators from reverse voltage if I were to power the circuit directly from the 15-0-15V rails without disconnecting this supply from it.The PWR_FLAGs are to keep KiCAD's error-checker from yelling at me. No other purpose. It knows what each pin is supposed to be used for, and tells you if you've misused one, but you have to tell it specifically that "this is power".The Wire Link is to make this whole thing work on a single-sided (1-layer of copper) board with real-world pinouts. It's just what it says; a wire jumper over something else.Quote from: Capernicus on December 28, 2021, 05:04:15 amIt's hard to figure out what you're doing at all there. Can you:Set the camera on something that doesn't move so I can look around the frame as I need to,Say your piece several times until you get it right,Then upload the good one by itself?I've done some stuff on camera myself, and even after writing a script and then rehearsing that script, I *still* need about 3-4 takes before I get it right on camera!Quote from: Capernicus on December 28, 2021, 05:04:15 amGiven only the above video, my guess would be that they can't figure out what you're actually saying, so their interpretation is effectively acting on noise, and then they criticize that. I don't think this community is anything even remotely resembling proprietary.Quote from: Capernicus on December 28, 2021, 05:04:15 amLet's get a decent communications channel to work, then you can say that again and we'll go from there.Quote from: Capernicus on December 28, 2021, 05:04:15 amWell, a classic non-inverting opamp circuit has a voltage divider *in* it, so you're not completely wrong. It also demonstrates one of the less-intuitive parts of electronic design, which is that a negative feedback path needs to be designed for the *opposite* effect of what you want the overall circuit to do. This can also make some things possible that might not be otherwise, if you can only make the "backwards" version of what you really want.Quote from: tooki on December 28, 2021, 01:53:28 pmYeah, pretty much everyone uses "conventional flow", unless they're dealing directly with the electrons themselves, which is rare. To teach otherwise is counterproductive. And absolutely yes on the personal B.S. filter! (free energy...)Quote from: Terry Bites on December 28, 2021, 05:56:01 pmHeh. Yeah. Like one of my professors said, and I think he got from someone else, "In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is!"Most simulators are ideal, meaning that they only use the freshman equations and call it a day. They won't tell you about "ground bounce" from a heavy digital load messing up your sensitive analog reading, for just one "gotcha". That said though, they're still quite useful for non-sensitive stuff, and for finding some of the more egregious problems. If you're willing to iterate the design, then you can stretch a basic simulator's usefulness a bit more, by making a prototype from the best design that you can get using the simulator alone, then measuring the prototype and adjusting the simulation so that it matches the measurement, then changing the design in the opposite direction and making another prototype, etc. Essentially, this accounts for non-idealities "making the prototype behave as if the idealized design were different", which you discover by making the simulation match and then seeing what it took to do that. (for example, a folded-horn subwoofer might behave as if it were a few inches shorter than you intended because of how the folds are shaped, which you discover by trial-and-error'ing the simulation to match the measurement and seeing that that's the difference, and so you make the next version that much longer than you originally expected)What I had in mind in a previous post to this thread, saying it would be nice to have, is an actual real-world simulator, by default, so it would include all the messy stuff and require a complete set of manufacturing files and datasheets to work at all. That's a lot harder to do. The best approximations today cost several engineers' salaries per seat...and they're still not the "8-year-old genius that hasn't had 10 years of math classes and 5 years of jargon" sort of thing that I'm looking for.Re-reading Terry's comment, I suspect he actually meant that you need to understand the physical world first, in order to write code that interacts with it. That's true too! At least to do it *well*, anyway. Most of what I do has the mindset of an analog circuit and interactions. It only happens to be done in digital software, but the thought process and the understanding are very much analog all the way through.You really get to see that when you start looking at DSP functions (Digital Signal Processing). Almost everything that can be done in the digital world, actually has a physically constructable analog equivalent that is computationally indistinguishable. (ignoring real-world noise, non-linearities, parts tolerance and drift, etc.) It might be incredibly inconvenient to do it in analog, but it *can* be done and probably *has* been done at one time or another. (a custom theatrical audio console, for example, with saved settings and layers of controls before digital was even a thing at all; using voltage-controlled processing elements, sample-and-hold circuits to store that control voltage, and switches to connect the same controls to a different set of S&H's...)

author: tooki
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 29, 2021, 12:33:32 am
content: Quote from: Capernicus on December 28, 2021, 05:04:15 amYou’ve been told why, repeatedly: your often arrogant tone, while simultaneously demonstrating extremely poor understanding of electronics basics. Your lack of understanding and training doesn’t make you an insider to secret knowledge, but rather a beginner who needs to mostly shut up and listen instead of telling others they’re wrong. Instead of acknowledging the gaps in your knowledge, you’ve filled those gaps with your own imagined explanations, and you then give those imagined explanations the same weight as actual electronics facts!This is why people have given you so much pushback. Your imagination is not equivalent to our training!

author: AaronD
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: December 29, 2021, 01:11:27 am
content: Quote from: tooki on December 29, 2021, 12:33:32 amI didn't get that at all. I mostly saw someone that has poor access to decent training and so he's using what he can find...and has stumbled onto the less-reputable side of YouTube, as is easy to do with no knowledge to start with.And maybe a bit of personal trauma as well, which shouldn't necessarily impede a personally-formulated education, but it might cause people who don't see that to drive him away. Thus perpetuating the notion from his perspective, of an "elite club" that actively doesn't want him. That is EXCELLENT fodder for conspiracy theorists and free energy nuts.So if the experts won't touch him, whether here or academia or otherwise, and he doesn't know enough to filter for himself yet, what else is he supposed to do?"Sorry, not here," seems polite enough on its own, but a series of them congeals into something else. The new message becomes, "Go die somewhere! Nobody wants you because you started wrong." And sometimes it comes out almost directly like that. Is that really what we want to say?I remember trying to get a senior engineer to explain to me why he did something the way that he did, by explaining to him the way that I would have done it. I wanted him to understand that and then tell me in specific technical (not personal!) detail, where I was wrong and why, and how his solution solved those problems and a few others that I didn't see. In other words, understand where I am, and take me from there to where he is. Instead of that, he responded similarly to the way that you did. Is this another case of that? On both sides?

author: Capernicus
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: December 29, 2021, 10:01:53 am
content: Quote from: AaronD on December 27, 2021, 09:44:58 pmDoing stuff with Arduino, makes everything easier, but there is a discrete circuit solution for all arduino projects without the microcontroller, but its a little more advanced perhaps to be that way? What if it makes you a better engineer by possibly 1 million times.And that lego plastic is pretty tough, I bet using Lego in your fabrication process might be completely professional activity in a make-shift sense, Make-shift is very clever and can get things happening quick with low cost. Like Macguyver style, without a trip to bunnings (thats Australia's main hardware store), can you still get your machine/idea together in a short time period without even leaving your house!!!

author: rpiloverbd
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: December 29, 2021, 10:08:27 am
content: Do you know C programming? you already know digital electronics. If you know C, then I think an AVR microcontroller course likeAtmega85will be really helpful.

author: tooki
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 29, 2021, 10:18:10 am
content: Quote from: AaronD on December 29, 2021, 01:11:27 amThis thread is fine. But in other threads his attitude has been outrageous. This community has been more than patient and generous with him, so to see him whine that he has “no idea” why people write “hate posts”, whilestillclaiming to have secret knowledge that “they” don’t want us to know? Give me a fucking break.This community has proven itself over and over again to be extremely willing to help beginners, but in return it expects the beginners to listen to what’s said, to be appropriately humble (i.e. be aware of your level of knowledge and defer to those who know more), to put in the work (we don’t do your homework for you), to be respectful of others’ time (by not wasting it with reticence, or posting the same question 3 times expecting different answers when they didn’t like the first one, etc). Capernicus violated the first two expectations egregiously.

author: tooki
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 29, 2021, 10:31:50 am
content: Quote from: Capernicus on December 29, 2021, 10:01:53 amMany (certainly not all) Arduino projects could be done with discrete circuits, and for sure there is educational value in doing that. But whether this is a particularly valuable skill is a different question, since in practice, on the job, one generally needs to get things done as quickly and cheaply as possible, and these days, microcontrollers tend to be often significantly cheaper than discrete circuits, while simultaneously being faster to develop, and much more flexible. It simply doesn’t make sense, for example, to use $3 worth of discrete logic ICs to accomplish something that a $0.50 microcontroller can do.And this isn’t a new development, since microcontrollers have been widely used for decades now in lieu of discrete circuits.Something to consider, too, is that much of the development process for discrete digital logic is the same as for code: figuring out what conditions must be met to produce a desired output. Many of the tools used to figure these things out apply just as well to both code and logic gates, and indeed, nowadays, there’s a middle ground of sorts: FPGAs (and CPLDs and GALs), which are programmable gate logic where you write code that arranges hardware gates.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 29, 2021, 10:39:58 am
content: Quote from: Mihai123 on December 27, 2021, 04:13:01 pmBuild some traffic lights.Implement with and without a microcomputer.Extend its functions.Compare and contrast the two implementations.Define what surprised you, and what you would do differently next time.All that will help you in job interviews.

author: Capernicus
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: December 29, 2021, 10:50:06 am
content: Quote from: tooki on December 29, 2021, 10:31:50 amBut the art of electronics is lost, IMO.PPl should learn to make oscillators, registers, delays, bucket brigades, and timing relays/switches without the microcontroller. You don't benefit moneywise, perhaps, but u benefit intellectually.When you put a microcontroller in a circuit ur utilizing 1% of what youve put in your machine and its really superfluous, compared to putting in exactly only what u needed.I know it wont happen, but what if suddenly there was no microcontrollers, or equipment to configure them, (like a whole computer on the side.) then your a dead dodo without the proper from scratch knowledge.

author: tooki
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 29, 2021, 11:21:59 am
content: Quote from: Capernicus on December 29, 2021, 10:50:06 amYou learn all of those things in an EE education. What makes you think you wouldn’t?What hobbyists do isn’t necessarily representative of what’s learned in formal education, nor of what’s learned in years of deep experience in lieu of formal education.But a good engineer also knows not to reinvent the wheel. Often, the knowledge of how things work under the hood proves valuable not because you’d rebuild it from scratch, but because that knowledge lets you understand why a circuit isn’t working as expected.Quote from: Capernicus on December 29, 2021, 10:50:06 am…and? So what? If it’s cheaper and works the same or better, who cares if there’s untapped potential in the device? It doesn’t hurt anything, and it might come in handy in the future if requirements change. (Also, don’t forget that discrete circuits often need far more passive components, whose cost can add up and often exceed that of the logic chips! A simple MCU that needs no external components is often far cheaper than a “simple” logic solution.)Discrete control systems are still routinely used in things like safety interlocks where unflappable reliability is paramount, so you want a pure hardware solution. (For a great example of why we often require hardware-level safety interlocks by law, look at the Therac-25 disaster.)

author: Capernicus
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: December 29, 2021, 11:30:06 am
content: You can buy a $300 fdm printer on ebay, and it works well.But an original 3d printer with a full discrete circuit and no microcontroller is a work of art.Just u'd have a bit of trouble inserting in the G-Code, but there would be a cool way to do I bet if you brainstormed about it.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 29, 2021, 12:15:06 pm
content: Quote from: tooki on December 29, 2021, 11:21:59 amToday's WTFhttps://thedailywtf.com/articles/best-of-2021-the-therac-25-incidentAmateurs think about how things work. Professionals (also) think about how things fail.

author: Capernicus
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: December 29, 2021, 12:44:29 pm
content: The best way to encourage a beginner in electronics, is to nourish his dreams with skepticism.Kid, I'm sorry to say, everything is just too hard... the only way you can get electronics to work is to let the big companies do everything for you, because its just too hard to do it by yourself, its almost impossible. Maybe you have some big industry ego's you have to protect by saying things arent just DIYable given the required thought. I dont know why ppl would be so negative.The truth is the opposite. You can make an lcd game from scratch, you dont need to buy anything, you can even make the screen yourself if you want.

author: AaronD
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: December 31, 2021, 04:14:55 pm
content: Quote from: Capernicus on December 29, 2021, 12:44:29 pmAt some point, you have to decide how much to DIY and how much to buy already working.Do you really want to do EVERYTHING yourself, like the guy in that TED talk? That'd be an awesome learning experience, but you really wouldn't have anything good to show for it except for the experience itself and the understanding that comes with it.Or do you want to let others make the building blocks that you then put together in a way that no one else has yet? That's usually the way that people go, and it looks vastly different from one person to the next.

author: rstofer
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 31, 2021, 04:31:46 pm
content: Quote from: Capernicus on December 29, 2021, 11:30:06 amA discrete logic 3D printer should be a piece of cake. Early Numerical Control machines, like those using the Bendix Dynapath controls, did it very well up through 5 axis. Of course, there were only 2 flops per PCB and the machines had well north of 100 boards on swing-out racks about 6' high and 3' wide but it worked very well. If we allowed the use of ICs the logic could fit on a board less than 2' square. The early Cincinnati Milacron machines did this. We could also do it with an ARM <whatever> and some external circuitry to deal with the hydraulic servo system.Nixie tubes ruled!Those were heady days for a young fellow - circa 1969. The Bendix controls literally drove me to start college and focus on digital.I think there is a reason we don't use discrete transistor logic any more...

author: AaronD
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: December 31, 2021, 04:36:08 pm
content: Quote from: tooki on December 29, 2021, 11:21:59 amI know that digital is far superior in terms of functions per dollar (or whatever your currency is), signal integrity through all of that processing, etc. But I still enjoy mixing a concert on a large-format pure-analog rig!(well...except for the hard-drive recorder in lieu of tape, the digital effects unit with ADC's and DAC's built-in, PC and phone inputs, and Class-D amps)(Allen & Heath GL3300 40-channel console, Presonus ACP88 8-channel compressor, Lexicon MX200 2-channel effects unit, Alesis HD24 multitrack recorder, etc.)There's a visceral connection between myself and the processing on that rig, that I just don't get with a digital board. But that's not enough to justify the cost in a commercial or other budget-conscious application where everything needs to be bought by the organization. That analog rig was donated piece-wise to a non-profit youth center where I put it together and donated my own "glue work", like hand-soldering a 284-point TRS patchbay with 3 joints per point. (~850 solder joints, plus reworking the occasional mistake or pulled wire)I also built a portable rig for them, using a rackmount, remote-controlled digital mixer in place of the analog console, compressor, and FX unit, and put a Pi on the USB jack to record multitrack via some startup scripts. Including the amps, WiFi router for control, and rackmount power strip for the band, that 60-pound box with suitcase wheels and a handle is more capable than the installed rig in pretty much every way except for the raw channel count, and would have been much cheaper per channel if we were to actually buy both rigs. (take the 12-pound amp out and put it in someone's clothes bag, and it's under the 50-pound limit for commercial airlines in the US) My favorite part of that rig is the ability to set up quickly and mix from anywhere, without running a heavy "snake" between the makeshift stage and my chosen position in the expected audience. (which isn't always accurate) If the audience moves, I can just get up and follow!I even mixed a parade float band that way, walking along behind the audience with the controls on a laptop. And in another case, I mixed a different band on a truck going a bit faster while I and a driver followed on a motorcycle, with the same laptop. (that's me in green, in the attached picture)I think that everyone that has a sound system, should at least make a serious attempt at a regularly-used analog rig. Not for economics because it's insanely expensive now per feature, and it needs to have some good features to make this work, but for the reminder of where we came from and what the digital version is programmed to emulate. Each engineer should have some regular time on that rig, and be expected to use it well, in addition to the digital one(s).But again, it's hard to justify the cost of that to a bunch of bean-counters, and so we get people (I've seen them personally) that don't have a clue what the digital board is doing or how to configure it to solve a problem that would be plumb easy in analog. They just push faders, and that's about it. When they change pages and the faders jump, so do they. But if you can run an analog system, with everything in front of you at once, and you understand that the digital version is emulating that, then you know what to look for and it's not hard to find at all. (I taught myself on a ratty old analog rig, and then took off and ran with my first digital like it was nothing...much to the consternation of the luddites in charge of it.)Even more kudos if you can work on the rig yourself. That's not hard at all either, at least for analog. The aforementioned A&H GL3300 has the bottom covers permanently removed and stacked in a corner, and the back edge supported by a custom bracket that allows me to flip it up in-place, which gives me access to everything while it's still plugged in. (40 channels * 3 plugs per channel (raw in to the preamp, line-level outboard processing, finished individual out) = 120 of those connectors, plus the master section) And I've made some of my own analog processing from scratch...In today's world though, I really need to learn how to process digital signals like I2S and HDMI, so I can make the same kind of "incidental glue logic" for those as I do for the older analog stuff like +4dBu line level and VGA. That'll probably involve FPGA's and 32-bit MCU's, compared to the opamps and 8-bit chips that I'm presently used to.

author: Capernicus
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: January 03, 2022, 09:59:38 am
content: talking about digital sound/signal processing.... doing your filtering, there is analogue filters, digital filters developed off the filters, (and one more which id like to test out.) running a "digital filter" with analogue arithmetic. (so it goes full circle back to analogue again!)For 3 different kinds of filters, all design just converting from looking at the last one!

author: AaronD
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: January 03, 2022, 04:44:08 pm
content: Quote from: Capernicus on January 03, 2022, 09:59:38 amYou mean like a real-time circuit simulation with live physical I/O? That's certainly been done too. I believe there's even an open-source circuit simulator that allows you to do that with your PC sound card, though I've forgotten what it was now.Generally though, it's far more efficient to figure out what math the analog circuit is doing, and just do that math directly in the digital code without *also* simulating the flow of charge around the original circuit. As a "black box" processing module, you really don't care how energy falls through the marble maze inside, just as long as the inputs and outputs line up with the desired effect.For example, there are analog multiplier chips that use a clever arrangement of transistors, each operating by their specific physics. You could simulate all of that, or you could just use the multiply instruction (which works completely differently for the same result) and move on. Similar deal for summing junctions, fixed or adjustable gain, etc.Oscillators are slightly different in that there's no obvious best way to do it in digital. Like the analog world, there are several different ways that work, but there's no correlation across that boundary. You could:Do the trig function(s) directly, which (usually) takes a lot of processing effort but is directly readable in the source code, orUse a full-wave, pre-calculated lookup table and just read it off, orUse a 1/4-wave lookup table (for things that have that symmetry) and some clever tricks to recreate the full-wave with minimal processing effort and 4 times the resolution for the same storage space. (or 1/4 the storage space for the same resolution)One quadrant is stored directly, with values from 0.0 to positive 1.0. Running the index backwards (bitwise NOT if the number of indices is an exact power of 2) gives a different quadrant. Flipping the sign of the output gives yet another quadrant. Doing both gives the remaining quadrant.If you take the lower N-2 bits as the unprocessed index, and the upper 2 bits as a code for which quadrant you're in, then the whole thing becomes almost as trivial to run as the full-wave version.To make an unsigned-integer oscillator that is centered on 1/2-scale, you could store the values as 1/2-scale to full-scale, and use the bitwise NOT on the output too, instead of a sign-flip.You might also need to offset the index by 1 in some quadrants and not others, to avoid repeating values. This may also affect the optimal size of the stored lookup table, by 1 element.Etc.And of course there are different ways to generate that index too:Use the top N bits of a larger variable, and repeatedly add a certain full-width value to that variable, letting it overflow or "roll over" as it will. The top 8 bits of a 16-bit variable, for example, and repeatedly add a small-ish 16-bit number to it. (more bits and correspondingly more storage gives you better quality, so how much quality do you need?) Adding a smaller number each time gives a lower frequency, and adding a larger number gives a higher frequency. This makes it easy to create a signal-controlled oscillator, by taking the adder from some other part of the system and not a constant.Use all N bits of the index, and increment it by 1 based on a timer, also letting it overflow or "roll over" as it will. That timer is usually set by its period, so a smaller period gives a higher frequency, and a larger period gives a lower frequency. Like the previous method, this can also be controlled by a different part of the system and not a constant, but the relationship is less intuitive. (Though if you actually *want* that behavior, then there you go. No explicit "1/x" required, which is usually about as expensive as a trig function.)Etc.Digital tends to work best when you re-design the desired function in the digital world and don't try to copy the details of an analog version, despite ultimately being subject to the same fundamental rules of signal processing:Certain amplitude responses come with unavoidable phase shifts.Phase = delay; it's just measured and expressed differently.There's a difference between steady-state phase-alignment and transient time-alignment. (steady-state is allowed to settle before measurement...)There's a fundamental trade-off between tight control in the frequency-domain or in the time-domain. If you're only interested in frequencies, like for human hearing, then go ahead and use "brick-wall" filters, deep and narrow notches, etc. But if you also care about the waveform, then you need to ease up a bit.Where this starts to become unintuitive is when you want to start and stop a given frequency, and not have it continue forever. This inherently adds other frequencies to the signal, that must be understood as such. If your filter *only* allows the obvious frequency, then it will "ring" on its own and not stop easily...Etc.But if you're trying to emulate a classic analog effect and have the digital version sound like the original, then you do need to know the physics behind the original. The LA2A compressor, for example, used an electroluminescent panel (not an LED or incandescent bulb) shining on two CdS photocells: one to process the audio, and the other to drive the front-panel meter. That EL panel "just kinda worked" for the original application, so no one really dug into it to see what it was actually doing...until people wanted it as a digital effect. Turns out that there's some complicated non-linear behavior going on there, that all had to be understood for the first time and then modeled.And it's now a popular inclusion in digital effects packs, possibly by a different name. Behringer calls it their "Leisure Compressor". They also have the classic 1176 compressor under the new name "Ultimo", and a bunch of other classic emulations with different names too. They're not "HiFi" by any means, nor do they have anywhere near the functionality of the direct-digital functions that exist for every signal (Gate, EQ, Compressor), but the reason to use these emulations often includes their "deficiencies" on purpose, which is why it's important to have an accurate *model* for those, and not just copy the original intended function.

author: Capernicus
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: January 03, 2022, 05:36:13 pm
content: You may eventually notice something about me, that I'm into ideal machines only, its kinda like only caring about written music, and not worrying about the magic of unwritable part of the song.So circuit parasitics I will handle them, but only to get rid of the problem, not really obsess over it. Its funny, but in music im the opposite!Because digital filters have fixed taps, you dont actually need a full analogue multiplier to implement them in analogue. if you get the right amount of amplification, you can get it out of one transistor, if you can get the scale right. (possibly with a tuning resistor, is all you need.)But its only for one still setting, it doesnt make a variating filter, only a still one. but they are damn useful anyway! still good for transmission and recieving.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 03, 2022, 05:38:09 pm
content: Quote from: tooki on December 28, 2021, 01:53:28 pmPrecisely.That's acompletereversal from when I was a kid!

author: AaronD
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: January 03, 2022, 07:10:54 pm
content: Quote from: Capernicus on January 03, 2022, 05:36:13 pmWell, okay. It's easy to get a general overview that way, but you can't really *make* anything non-trivial without also accounting for the real-world non-idealities.Quote from: Capernicus on January 03, 2022, 05:36:13 pmAre you talking about making a FIR filter in analog? That might actually work, with a continuous loop of tape, one recording head (the input), and MANY playback heads (the taps). Each tap feeds an adjustable gain, not a filter, and the output of all those gains is summed to the output of the device. Essentially, physical convolution.And if you're okay with a weak output, you can do this entirely passively, with 0 transistors, provided of course that the playback heads give you a ground-referenced (not floating) differential signal: each head connects across a potentiometer to set the gain (actually attenuation, which is fractional gain) and polarity (center is off), and then a resistor connects the wiper of that pot to the common output, just to make sure that the tape head isn't shorted out at high "gain". Of course the problem with *that*, is that passive things like to interact with each other, so you can't put an independent scale on each of the controls. Much more user-friendly, and probably designer-friendly too, to feed each pot into a buffer, and then all the buffers into a virtual-earth mixer...but then you'd have "evil active stuff messing up your signal".The bigger problem though, is that you need the taps to be close enough together in time to represent a frequency that is significantly higher than audible, which would need them to be spaced close together physically and the tape to run very fast. That's a challenge in itself. Then you need enough of them, with that spacing, that the total time represents a frequency that is lower than what you want to control.In a purely theoretical world, that can work, and you can play with it and get some interesting effects. (For example, what happens when the impulse response starts in the middle of the delay line and is mirrored back towards the beginning, instead of starting at the beginning and just tapering off from there? Obviously, you'll have an overall delay equal to half the line length, but something else interesting happens as well...) But it's completely impractical to do it in the real world, outside of a DSP.There are also IIR filters, which pretty much always share their ideal properties with some sort of (practical) analog filter, but with a different set of quirks.IIR stands for Infinite Impulse Response, and it achieves that by using its own output to feed back into the algorithm. Of course, it doesn't have to be the literal output; it could also be an intermediate stage that feeds back, etc. So any given sample theoretically has an influence forever, like the charge on a capacitor, but in the real world it hardly matters because that old influence quickly gets buried in the quantization noise, which is itself kept low enough to be inconsequential (lots of bits), or in the thermal and other noise of an analog circuit.FIR stands for Finite Impulse Response, which is because a sample no longer has any influence whatsoever, once it "falls off the end" of the delay line.FIR's are unconditionally stable, whereas IIR's *could* be unstable. You could make a digital IIR into an oscillator, in which case the pitfalls of analog oscillators come back to bite you again (actually, that's more-or-less what an analog oscillator *is*: just a filter that is kept right on the edge of stability), or you could make it run straight to an extreme value and stay there. Or you could make it a useful filter. The stability is not random, like a rogue sample setting it off, but entirely determined by the topology and the coefficients.

author: AaronD
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: January 03, 2022, 07:26:32 pm
content: Quote from: tggzzz on January 03, 2022, 05:38:09 pmRight! And we're not set up very well to handle that reversal.Every once in a while, the "nutcase" comes up with something good (there's a fine line between genius and insanity), but most of the time it's nuts.If you only filter the source, and then blindly believe what that source says, then you end up being a parrot in an echo chamber. That's not good either, because no source is perfect. Much better than blindly believing *everyone*, but it's better still to think for yourself and filter the information directly. Maybe then you can spot the genius that everyone else calls a "nutcase", while still rejecting the actual nutcases. (and of course that's not perfect either...)

author: Capernicus
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: January 03, 2022, 07:51:19 pm
content: Just to be honest, I am hopeless at filters, I dont know how they work, I just stole filter designers off the internet to get my stuff going with them.If I was going to make a filter myself, I was thinking of somehow getting a blur to have a more exponential fall off, but I havent continued on from that one for ages.I think the guy in the "bad lecture" video was playing the fool. hard to tell that isnt it?The liers paradox is its just impossible to tell if someones lieing or not due to tone of voice and body language alone, and on the internet its even worse if its just text.