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108 points cgeier | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.241s | source
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Ductapemaster ◴[] No.42186703[source]
In my upper-division analog electronics class (the hard one), our lab project throughout the quarter was to build an analog computer that simulated the physics of a bouncing ball. Physical variables of the system were adjustable (gravity constant, coefficient of restitution, etc), and the ball was "released" by pressing a button. The output was viewed on an oscilloscope.

One of the hardest 10 weeks of my life, but also one of the most rewarding. Our team was one of the few that actually got it working in the end. I had to custom-make a gigantic breadboard to hold the entire circuit.

Today I still work in hardware, but mostly with digital circuits. While my analog knowledge has decayed over the last decade, that project and it's success gives me great confidence any time I have to deal with the domain.

If you want to take a look, here's a pretty similar project: https://www.analogmuseum.org/english/examples/bouncing_ball_...

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1. djcooley ◴[] No.42188230[source]
My version of this was a 10-week discrete RF circuits course in graduate school. We had to build a fully functional GHz transceiver out of small FR4 PCBs (< quarter wavelength) and throw-away leaded BJT transistors. Neither were suitable for GHz circuits, so the course was hard by design. I learned so much and developed an intuition for electromagnetics that I still carry 20 years later.