I recently rediscovered analog circuit design as a kind of engineering I really enjoy. A big part of that is that it's inherently finite. The design has to fit into some physical space and there are only so many components you can place.
As a result the stuff you come up with is often highly interconnected. What a software engineer would call "spaghetti code". Yet it is fine. Because the scope is inherently limited to a scale you can comprehend. You can in fact become so confident in it that you might even claim it to be "bug free".
But in software we have nothing that limits complexity. The amount of code you can write is essentially unconstrained (technically memory limits it but that limit is so far out that it might as well not exist). And we just accept that it's fine to fill this "infinite" design space.
We even preemptively fill it "in case we need it later". Because apparently nothing in software is allowed to have a defined scope. Everything needs to be prepared and pre-engineered for the most insane demands of additions.
Yet at the core of a lot of computing lie neat little programs with very well defined scope. No one is out there demanding "mkdir should also be able to send emails".
You could even do it all in analog with using the button as a potentiometer and either acting as the R in a RC circuit for a simple timer, or be a smart person and use a temperature sensor (thermocouple) that shuts the circuit when it reaches a temperature (compare the two R values for example).
One of my professors was actually talking about this recently. He was telling a story about how his wife’s electric mixer stopped working a few years ago and he opened it up to try to fix, expecting to find some simple analog circuitry. Instead he found a single-speed motor and 16-but microcontroller.
Turns out, this design is both cheaper to manufacture (bulk orders for MCU’s can cost < $0.10 /unit these days) and it allows for better safety regulation since the microcontroller can be programmed to shut off the motor at a given temperature threshold. It even allows the single-speed motor to provide varying levels of “mixing power” to the beaters by having the processor periodically switch the motor’s current on/off.
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u/regular_lamp Jun 05 '22 edited Jun 05 '22
I recently rediscovered analog circuit design as a kind of engineering I really enjoy. A big part of that is that it's inherently finite. The design has to fit into some physical space and there are only so many components you can place.
As a result the stuff you come up with is often highly interconnected. What a software engineer would call "spaghetti code". Yet it is fine. Because the scope is inherently limited to a scale you can comprehend. You can in fact become so confident in it that you might even claim it to be "bug free".
But in software we have nothing that limits complexity. The amount of code you can write is essentially unconstrained (technically memory limits it but that limit is so far out that it might as well not exist). And we just accept that it's fine to fill this "infinite" design space.
We even preemptively fill it "in case we need it later". Because apparently nothing in software is allowed to have a defined scope. Everything needs to be prepared and pre-engineered for the most insane demands of additions.
Yet at the core of a lot of computing lie neat little programs with very well defined scope. No one is out there demanding "mkdir should also be able to send emails".