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Projects to find the limits of what is possible right now?
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Nominal Animal:

--- Quote from: coppercone2 on January 24, 2019, 02:09:43 pm ---most process controllers you can do better then what is available
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Any anecdotal stories you could share?  (I have a feeling that perhaps you or your colleagues have ditched some process controller because it really wasn't that good, and replaced it with something homebrew that worked much better.)
coppercone2:
Ypu wont have the same level of shielding, immunity, mechanical robustness stability or precision with mass produced products because saving five cents on some extra decoupling caps makes sense for a designer but if you even think about doing that for a single unit you are wasting your time.

Or a nice sealed welded steel chassis with all the shielding dodads and shielded lcd etc. No one wants to pay for the bythebook solution

Then when you do it right the fun begins with transducer hysterisis and aging and shit being the dominant effects, then your interest shifts to custom sensor design that can challange your electronics.

In general if you dont know what you stand to get rid of your design will age better or be more stable with age or fail more gracefully.

What you wont get from yourself is good software though. At least mine never was.

And obviously i cant give examples on this forum lol

Its obvious if you want to make money you find the minimum working solution to a spec people will buy. Why would a company make a process control with capabilities there is no process for? Usually they take such suggestions as gambling with their money and trying to bait scientists. Everyone finds a market so they can make a sellable spec.

Or the research applications for such a device are absurd and useless. Mad scientist shit.


I am not saying their bad or dont work but their not exactly trying to paint the mona lisa. Its never really gonna be that good.

But good luck trying to beat 8.5 digit meter :( . How to defeat this behemuth? Or microwave stuff. I can see someone with enough machinery getting extreme quality rf plumbing at home though.
CatalinaWOW:

--- Quote from: Nominal Animal on January 24, 2019, 12:02:04 pm ---
 I often spend time creating better tools just because even minor deficiencies in existing tools annoy me when I know how those deficiencies can be fixed/overcome/avoided.  I have had to learn the engineering approach the hard way; making things good enough, but not waste resources overdoing it.  That is still very hard for me, as I'd much rather make things as good as I can.  Not because of bragging rights or anything like that, it is more an innate need of some sort.  Could be a variant of OCD.

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Deficiencies are in the eye of the beholder.  Is something defective because it can't be operated in the middle of a blast furnace?  Is a socket defective because it cannot apply 1000 N/m of torque, or is it defective because the walls are too thick to fit in tight places?  There is a reason why both impact and normal versions are available.  They have been optimized in different directions.

While you may have invented methods to improve the tools you are using, are you sure you didn't make them less perfect for another user who has a different application or a different approach to the problem?

None of this is intended to belittle your efforts, or to stop you, just pointing out that there are many different itches to scratch out there, and not all of them match yours.  And maybe to direct some of your OCD into a "perfect" understanding of all of the users of a given product and their requirements and desires.  Which is necessary to "perfect" a tool for a market broader than one.
coppercone2:
Usually people will agree that its done for the sake of being cheap. If its done to be light or small or something its usually noticable. Market cost.

Usually very obvious to another designer.

You see a product and know the gist of how it works you can imagine rather quickly how it would change if optimized for some peculiar reason. If you cycle through the usualy suspects in your head like repairability, robustness, size, weight etc and your  noct seeing a design phillosophy that usually meane someone got greedy or the market is shit.

I.e. its not hard to tell the rammifications of storage, intraoptability or others. Usually its cheap but there are clever designs related to cleaning ease or weight or storage that can be tricky and lumped as cheap but really result in more cost to design.
CatalinaWOW:

--- Quote from: coppercone2 on January 24, 2019, 05:59:05 pm ---Usually people will agree that its done for the sake of being cheap. If its done to be light or small or something its usually noticable. Market cost.

Usually very obvious to another designer.

You see a product and know the gist of how it works you can imagine rather quickly how it would change if optimized for some peculiar reason. If you cycle through the usualy suspects in your head like repairability, robustness, size, weight etc and your  noct seeing a design phillosophy that usually meane someone got greedy or the market is shit.

I.e. its not hard to tell the rammifications of storage, intraoptability or others. Usually its cheap but there are clever designs related to cleaning ease or weight or storage that can be tricky and lumped as cheap but really result in more cost to design.

--- End quote ---

Sometimes it is that simple. 

But to give a counterexample, integrated circuits.  They are not repairable and are not designed to be.  Yes, low cost comes along with that.  To extend, if you want repairability and maintainability you would eliminate BGA and other high density packaging techniques.

Or another example - is it good design to make something robust and maintainable in a rapidly changing technology area?  Do you really still want to be using your old brick analog cell phone, or is it fine that it is thrown away without repair after a few years?  Yes that does serve the salesmen and such who just care about sales, but it also has allowed the product to develop much more rapidly than it would if new products had to wait until the older generations had finally been repaired too often to make further repairs feasible.
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