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| Signals and systems class, why? |
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| SiliconWizard:
I agree with what was said above. I'm just sorry that (apparently) your teachers are not able to make you see what those concepts are useful for. That's part of teaching IMHO, especially teaching future engineers! Or maybe they actually are showing students the applications, but *you* are not interested in those applications. For instance, If you're focusing on "computer engineering" and are not particularly interested in the hardware side of things, you may not see the point or even be interested in subjects like signal processing. I think you'd miss out on useful and interesting things in that case, but I can understand that not everyone is interested in those topics, and I also know that many students going for "computer" engineering these days are mostly interested in the pure software side of things. Of course those concepts could be useful even if you're just doing pure software, but I certainly know a lot of "software" people hating those topics and shying away from even signal processing as much as they can. If this is your case, I'd say: try and give it a chance, you might end up getting interested - do not hesitate to ask your teachers for practical examples if you can't see any. Other than that, just see this as part of your formal education, like what you had during high school. |
| ataradov:
--- Quote from: Benta on October 23, 2020, 07:32:18 pm ---Normal for all studies, I guess. --- End quote --- Yes, this is very true. I noticed the exact same thing. Fortunately I learned early on to recognize this pattern. One of the most helpful thing to get a better perspective is to actually watch educational YouTube videos. They will not teach you anything, but they are very useful in putting things into place. Like the video referenced above for the Fourier transform or videos from 3Blue1Brown and other popular creators. Another useful source is the lectures from the universities (MIT, Stanford). What they publish is mostly 101 stuff, so it is not incredibly taxing, but can provide another view on things. |
| ataradov:
--- Quote from: SiliconWizard on October 23, 2020, 08:52:53 pm ---Or maybe they actually are showing students the applications, but *you* are not interested in those applications. --- End quote --- I think part of it, they don't want to reveal the truth that a lot of stuff that is done in real life is not some glorious theory, but a lot of experimentation and trying things out (in an educated way, of course). In the control systems we looked at a lot of practical and would be useful examples of systems. But they all started something like this "CD-ROM head positioning over the track can be modeled as this combination of blocks, find the coefficients for optimal control". The answer why it is modeled this way is nowhere to be found. After working with DSP and CS in practice on actually new systems for which there is no pre-made recipes, I realized that you just try things until the model behaves like the actual system and then add control elements. And hope that your model was good enough that the real system responds the same after adding the control stuff. If not, rinse and repeat until it does. Knowing this from the beginning would have been very helpful. |
| NiHaoMike:
I would say to learn it with SDR experiments. I learned more about it from videos about SDR than I did in school. |
| tggzzz:
--- Quote from: ataradov on October 23, 2020, 09:03:28 pm --- --- Quote from: SiliconWizard on October 23, 2020, 08:52:53 pm ---Or maybe they actually are showing students the applications, but *you* are not interested in those applications. --- End quote --- I think part of it, they don't want to reveal the truth that a lot of stuff that is done in real life is not some glorious theory, but a lot of experimentation and trying things out (in an educated way, of course). In the control systems we looked at a lot of practical and would be useful examples of systems. But they all started something like this "CD-ROM head positioning over the track can be modeled as this combination of blocks, find the coefficients for optimal control". The answer why it is modeled this way is nowhere to be found. After working with DSP and CS in practice on actually new systems for which there is no pre-made recipes, I realized that you just try things until the model behaves like the actual system and then add control elements. And hope that your model was good enough that the real system responds the same after adding the control stuff. If not, rinse and repeat until it does. Knowing this from the beginning would have been very helpful. --- End quote --- There is truth in that, but the "pure" and "simple" theoretical examples are a necessary base that enables guided experimentation and design. Without that, all you have is blind fumbling. |
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