Author Topic: When you follow the schematic but it doesn't work  (Read 7236 times)

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Offline james_s

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Re: When you follow the schematic but it doesn't work
« Reply #25 on: July 26, 2018, 04:17:48 am »
A lot of my early projects didn't work. In retrospect it was usually a combination of trying to substitute parts I couldn't get (well before the internet era) and plain old fashioned wiring errors. I'm sure there were some poorly designed/improperly drawn circuits I found too but a lot of the failures were my fault, just a matter of being a kid without much experience building stuff.
 

Offline Jwillis

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Re: When you follow the schematic but it doesn't work
« Reply #26 on: July 26, 2018, 05:22:47 am »
I find the internet is flooded with bogus schematics including a lot of simulations that don't work in reality. If the schematics include demonstrations and good documentation then it becomes a bit better but not always.You just have to sort though the pile of BS and experiment.After a while you can sometimes just look at a circuit and tell if it will work or not.It depends on experience.But you know learning is half the fun.It's a nice feeling in a eureka moment when one can say "OH I get it now!!"
 

Offline tooki

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Re: When you follow the schematic but it doesn't work
« Reply #27 on: July 26, 2018, 01:41:36 pm »
Wow, I think a lot of you have totally unrealistic expectations!!

I once had a professor, teaching communication protocols, who has no idea what's differential signal and how it increases bandwidth. She only knows RS485 is faster than RS232, but has no idea why.
Why would they need to know?

And I also had a professor, despite living in US for 2 decades, has no idea about American slang and English memes. She likes to eat salmon, and every time she pronounces like she likes to eat semen. And she always says she likes to "blow", of course it's something else.
What’s your native language, blueskull?

I mean, I assume you know that in English, the L in salmon is silent.

What did she mean by blowing?  :o

Actually in our department, it's hard to find a computer engineering/network engineering professor who can read schematics, and a few EE professors who can code properly (not just grabbing crap from CodeProject or Arduino forum).
And why should they need to??

Welcome to 2018, where everyone knows nothing at all about fields outside his/her exact field.
It’s a necessity. The amount of total human knowledge is growing at an exponential rate. It’d be literally impossible to try and learn all the stuff outside your niche.



Coming from the IT domain on college level, I'm still wondering about the classic dual system apprenticeship in IT here in CH. Those guys spend 4 years education, normally 3,5 to 4 days per week in an IT company and the rest in business school. You might think, they learn some bloody basics about IT like simple transistor circuits, flipflops,, Ohms law or logics or even the essentials about how a cpu is working:

Just forget it!

There are no essentials, no basics taught anymore nowadays. It just counts, that they know to maintain a windows installation or maybe set up PC from the basic components - but how the components actually work - no way.
they know every detail about the main tasks their companys are in; about webdesign, programming, troubleshooting some particular software or whatsoever - but as soon as they're out of their well known playground, they are lost. It's a shame
(As a fan of the Swiss apprenticeship/dual system...) Why on earth should they waste time learning about flip flops and the inner working of CPUs? None of that is of even the tiniest use in the job they’re training for. A chef doesn’t need to know plumbing, they need to turn on the faucet and get water to cook with. 99% of programmers don’t need to know the inner workings of the hardware, so why on earth would non-programmer IT staff need it?!?!?!?

Would you rather they waste 2 years of their education learning stuff that has ZERO practical application, which would mean skipping even more stuff they DO need to know?

I think it also might be good for you to understand the difference between an academic education and learning a trade. The latter is not about knowing for the sake of it, it’s about preparing you to do a job.

P.S. The school component of an IT apprenticeship in CH isn’t at business school, it’s at a trade school.
« Last Edit: July 26, 2018, 01:43:31 pm by tooki »
 
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Offline bd139

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Re: When you follow the schematic but it doesn't work
« Reply #28 on: July 26, 2018, 02:00:27 pm »
At this point, non programmer IT staff are dying. We actually have none and we have 120 IT staff. Automation is king. If you can't program what the fuck are you doing in IT? Seriously. And to program, you need to know the machine abstraction. It's programming 101.
 

Offline Buriedcode

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Re: When you follow the schematic but it doesn't work
« Reply #29 on: July 26, 2018, 02:42:08 pm »
At this point, non programmer IT staff are dying. We actually have none and we have 120 IT staff. Automation is king. If you can't program what the fuck are you doing in IT? Seriously. And to program, you need to know the machine abstraction. It's programming 101.

What does that have to do with new players building circuits from schematics?
 

Offline bd139

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Re: When you follow the schematic but it doesn't work
« Reply #30 on: July 26, 2018, 03:36:02 pm »
Knowledge is a pyramid whatever you do.
 

Offline Buriedcode

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Re: When you follow the schematic but it doesn't work
« Reply #31 on: July 26, 2018, 04:08:32 pm »
Knowledge is a pyramid whatever you do.

Which means what exactly?  Please stay on topic.  I fail to see how your view of your IT staff lacking in some way relates to newbies trouble-shooting circuits they built from sketchy sources.
 

Offline tooki

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Re: When you follow the schematic but it doesn't work
« Reply #32 on: July 26, 2018, 04:13:02 pm »
At this point, non programmer IT staff are dying. We actually have none and we have 120 IT staff. Automation is king. If you can't program what the fuck are you doing in IT? Seriously. And to program, you need to know the machine abstraction. It's programming 101.
There's all sorts of non-programming IT. Hardware, business analysis, UX design, it goes on and on.

And no, for most programming, you don't need to know the machine abstraction in any great detail. That's literally the reason for having the abstraction.
 

Offline tooki

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Re: When you follow the schematic but it doesn't work
« Reply #33 on: July 26, 2018, 04:14:53 pm »
I'm reminded of 2-3 times I tried to make a C-R oscillator w/ a BJT and maybe an op-amp once, and they never worked. I didn't try changing much, but it never worked. I bet the schematics were fine tho.

Then 1 utuber, an old radio guy, with proper schematics from an old book, I tried 2-3 little circuits and they never worked but his did. With those it was probably the BJT or JFET not being quite right, and not getting the loop gain right.



Don't you hate it tho when you follow a schematic and it doesn't work and you don't know why ? (time to re-try some)

It's just like recipes that don't work, because it turns out they weren't actually tested before publishing…  :wtf:

 

Offline james_s

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Re: When you follow the schematic but it doesn't work
« Reply #34 on: July 26, 2018, 04:44:23 pm »
There's all sorts of non-programming IT. Hardware, business analysis, UX design, it goes on and on.

And no, for most programming, you don't need to know the machine abstraction in any great detail. That's literally the reason for having the abstraction.


Seems the trend in tech lately has been to hire programmers to do everything, product design, UI design, QA, it's probably why software quality has taken such a dive recently pretty much across the board. My first iPhone was rock solid, polished, slick UI, everything worked. The one I have now is very buggy, inconsistencies in the UI, reminders often fail to pop up or get out of sync between the lock screen and the reminder menu, even the built in apps crash. It's very obvious that parts of the UI were designed by people who have no business designing a UI, and there is no longer sufficient QA. This is only one example, I see it everywhere.

Programmers should be spending their time programming. Other positions should be filled by people with expertise in those areas. "IT" is not a one size fits all field, automation is not a replacement for professional QA, engineers tend to be lousy at UI design, and developers who like writing code better than working with people make lousy managers.
 
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Offline tooki

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Re: When you follow the schematic but it doesn't work
« Reply #35 on: July 26, 2018, 05:01:22 pm »
There's all sorts of non-programming IT. Hardware, business analysis, UX design, it goes on and on.

And no, for most programming, you don't need to know the machine abstraction in any great detail. That's literally the reason for having the abstraction.


Seems the trend in tech lately has been to hire programmers to do everything, product design, UI design, QA, it's probably why software quality has taken such a dive recently pretty much across the board. My first iPhone was rock solid, polished, slick UI, everything worked. The one I have now is very buggy, inconsistencies in the UI, reminders often fail to pop up or get out of sync between the lock screen and the reminder menu, even the built in apps crash. It's very obvious that parts of the UI were designed by people who have no business designing a UI, and there is no longer sufficient QA. This is only one example, I see it everywhere.
Hear, hear! In UX (my field), we call those "UX unicorns": people expected to do usability research, interaction design, graphic design, and coding. Sure, you can find people who "can" do all those things. But I'll be damned if I've ever seen one who can do all those things well!

As for quality: thank Agile for that. Agile itself is a reasonably sound methodology (not highly sound, just barely acceptable). But it's still a formal methodology. But tons of places say they're going "Agile", when in fact they're just going "free-for-all", with no formal test cycles, just devs pushing untested code to production… (I've worked in customer/tech support at a software company that did that. What a goddamned nightmare…)

Programmers should be spending their time programming. Other positions should be filled by people with expertise in those areas. "IT" is not a one size fits all field, automation is not a replacement for professional QA, engineers tend to be lousy at UI design, and developers who like writing code better than working with people make lousy managers.
Exactly. I think a lot of folks (even in IT!) assume that IT means programming, and that all areas of IT must include it, and that's just not true.
« Last Edit: July 26, 2018, 05:03:21 pm by tooki »
 

Offline bd139

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Re: When you follow the schematic but it doesn't work
« Reply #36 on: July 26, 2018, 05:18:07 pm »
Thats what everyone said until their job turned into three lines of python.  :-DD

I agree but the focus is on automation. The whole point is that if a task is to be done regularly then automation has a cost benefit. Even our analysts automate with specflow and our project management team automate their workflow with python. Our graphic designers automate their pipelines with various tools (I don’t go there myself). Our management team run automated reporting they built themselves. Our customer support team drive our public API to resolve issues with their own scripts. Our entire front to back end process stack is automated. All our marketing is data and code driven.

Everyone is a programmer if they like it or not. We destroyed all of our competitors because of automation.

We’re “a loose interpretation of agile” but continuous delivery focused. Everything from code to production is automated.
« Last Edit: July 26, 2018, 05:19:41 pm by bd139 »
 

Offline IanMacdonald

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Re: When you follow the schematic but it doesn't work
« Reply #37 on: July 26, 2018, 05:21:29 pm »
They're teaching C# and nodejs at my local college and their staff have absolutely no fucking idea what they are doing. We have had a couple of their "graduates" in on trial and we're basically having to get them to unlearn a lot of stuff. I mean you don't write an OO program entirely in static methods ffs. But that's what they told us. Seriously, no.

Colleges seem to have an obsession with OO programming. While it does have its uses, it's an extremely inefficient way of doing things. I also find it weird that they insist on using C, basically a stripped-down language designed to keep overheads to an absolute minimum on puny hardware, coupled to so heavyweight a paradigm. Kinda seems like two mutually defeating objectives, does it not? 

You have to ask whether it might not be better take the middle ground and use a less stripped-down procedural language.  :-//

That is even before you take into account the serious security issues of C.
« Last Edit: July 26, 2018, 05:24:34 pm by IanMacdonald »
 

Offline bd139

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Re: When you follow the schematic but it doesn't work
« Reply #38 on: July 26, 2018, 05:51:19 pm »
Not really. OO languages scale up to huge projects a lot better than non OO ones. I’ve never seen a large successful procedural or functional project. They all turn to shit way earlier.

I think you need to at least play with assembly, learn C, learn Java properly and learn a functional langauage properly. Then go and use whatever you feel fits the problem.
 

Offline GeorgeOfTheJungle

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Re: When you follow the schematic but it doesn't work
« Reply #39 on: July 26, 2018, 06:01:16 pm »
Ryan Dahl is back, with a new node.js

https://github.com/ry/deno
https://youtu.be/M3BM9TB-8yA?t=1s

We start again from scratch!
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Offline bd139

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Re: When you follow the schematic but it doesn't work
« Reply #40 on: July 26, 2018, 06:53:38 pm »
Can’t be arsed now :)
 

Offline james_s

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Re: When you follow the schematic but it doesn't work
« Reply #41 on: July 27, 2018, 03:09:25 am »
Thats what everyone said until their job turned into three lines of python.  :-DD

I agree but the focus is on automation. The whole point is that if a task is to be done regularly then automation has a cost benefit. Even our analysts automate with specflow and our project management team automate their workflow with python. Our graphic designers automate their pipelines with various tools (I don’t go there myself). Our management team run automated reporting they built themselves. Our customer support team drive our public API to resolve issues with their own scripts. Our entire front to back end process stack is automated. All our marketing is data and code driven.

Everyone is a programmer if they like it or not. We destroyed all of our competitors because of automation.

We’re “a loose interpretation of agile” but continuous delivery focused. Everything from code to production is automated.

Automation is ideal for regression testing, but the automation code is never going to see something interesting and deviate from the testing it has been programmed to do in order to track down some other issue. Automation is almost mandatory as a part of software development, but it is not a replacement for professional testers, it augments existing testing and reduces the need to test the same basic functionality over and over on each new build. Far too many companies try to do ALL of their testing with automation and product quality suffers. Most software is garbage these days, the mentality has become ship it now, fix it "later", except that later never comes and a lot of issues don't get fixed or with each fixed issue comes a bunch of new features and new issues. My iPhone is a shining example of this, the old one I had with iOS6 was fantastic and polished, the one I have now with iOS10 is crap in terms of quality. It's buggy and feels half baked, the UI is full of inconsistencies, the reminders fail to pop up frequently or get out of sync with the lock screen, apps crash, even the native ones. It's blatantly obvious that there was insufficient QA and frankly for a company like Apple that is unacceptable. They built their reputation on products that were slick and polished, to an OCD-like level.
 

Offline tooki

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Re: When you follow the schematic but it doesn't work
« Reply #42 on: July 27, 2018, 09:02:44 am »
And to automate something, you have to define it. And that takes someone. And you just can’t automate requirements engineering, design, or architecture.
 

Offline GeorgeOfTheJungle

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Re: When you follow the schematic but it doesn't work
« Reply #43 on: July 27, 2018, 09:14:51 am »
When all you've touched is the code for A there's no need to test B...  >:D
« Last Edit: July 27, 2018, 09:33:42 am by GeorgeOfTheJungle »
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Offline GeorgeOfTheJungle

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Re: When you follow the schematic but it doesn't work
« Reply #44 on: July 27, 2018, 09:35:47 am »
Can’t be arsed now :)
You're not exactly a node fanboy, right? Don't like callbacks and CPS or what?
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Offline Alex Nikitin

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Re: When you follow the schematic but it doesn't work
« Reply #45 on: July 27, 2018, 09:40:26 am »
When you follow the schematic but it doesn't work ?

Now we all know the answer: you become a programmer "software engineer" :-DD .

Cheers

Alex
 
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Offline bd139

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Re: When you follow the schematic but it doesn't work
« Reply #46 on: July 27, 2018, 09:45:18 am »
Can’t be arsed now :)
You're not exactly a node fanboy, right? Don't like callbacks and CPS or what?

I have no problem with CPS. Hell I wrote my own scheme implementation littered with continuation passing  and tail recursion and all that faff years ago.

It’s just JavaScript. It’s like being in charge of shaving the devil’s nut sack.
 

Offline GeorgeOfTheJungle

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Re: When you follow the schematic but it doesn't work
« Reply #47 on: July 27, 2018, 09:57:11 am »
It's a cute little language.
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Offline bd139

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Re: When you follow the schematic but it doesn't work
« Reply #48 on: July 27, 2018, 10:05:21 am »
Cute like an angry alligator with a crack pipe.
 

Offline GeorgeOfTheJungle

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Re: When you follow the schematic but it doesn't work
« Reply #49 on: July 27, 2018, 10:12:44 am »
ƒ()(); love it!
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