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I should have loved electrical engineering

(blog.tdhttt.com)
157 points tdhttt | 14 comments | 01 Sep 25 09:12 UTC | HN request time: 0.279s | source | bottom
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pclmulqdq ◴[04 Sep 25 10:58 UTC] No.45125831[source]▶
EE encompasses a lot of "engineering that takes hard math" at a professional and research level (similar to "hard CS," just different fields of math), so it is very hard to do as an undergrad, when your background in complex analysis and E&M is weak.

Early classes on circuits in EE will usually take shortcuts using known circuit structures and simplified models. The abstraction underneath the field of analog circuits is extremely leaky, so you often learn to ignore it unless you absolutely need to pay attention.

Hobbyist and undergrad projects thus usually consist of cargo culting combinations of simple circuit building blocks connected to a microcontroller of some kind. A lot of research (not in EE) needs this kind of work, but it's not necessarily glamorous. This is the same as pulling software libraries off the shelf to do software work ("showing my advisor docker"), but the software work gets more credit in modern academia because the skills are rarer and the building blocks are newer.

Plenty of cutting-edge science needs hobbyist-level EE, it's just not work in EE. Actual CS research is largely the same as EE research: very, very heavy on math and very difficult to do without studying a lot. If you compare hard EE research to basic software engineering, it makes sense that you think there's a "wall," but you're ignoring the easy EE and the hard CS.

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carlmr ◴[04 Sep 25 12:12 UTC] No.45126357[source]▶
>Early classes on circuits in EE will usually take shortcuts using known circuit structures and simplified models.

Might just be me, but I found it all clicked when we started learning the fundamentals underneath these abstractions. For me it was harder in the first classes because it's about memorizing poorly understood concepts, my brain prefers logically deriving complex concepts as a learning method.

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1. stephen_g ◴[04 Sep 25 12:22 UTC] No.45126439[source]▶
Yeah, this kind of idea is why I’m dead against using things like the hydraulic analogy in early EE for anyone who is ever going to want to do more than the ‘hook some things up to an Arduino’ (or probably ESP32 these days) kind of level electronics.

The gaps between the analogy and the real world actually make it harder to understand the fundamentals and just confuse people when you get to a deeper level understanding. It requires more unlearning than is worth it for the slight benefit of making the concepts slightly more intuitive to understand at the beginning.

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2. junon ◴[04 Sep 25 12:28 UTC] No.45126493[source]▶
Once I ditched the hydraulic analogy and really tried to internalize charge, current, voltage, etc. is when I finally started to understand why the hydraulic analogy "works" but only for people who already understand electricity.

Electricity behaves in many ways just like water (just at a significantly faster time scale) but I don't think it actually helped me learn how it all worked to start with.

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3. marcosdumay ◴[04 Sep 25 12:30 UTC] No.45126508[source]▶
Hum... The hydraulic analogy is for school kids to learn what electricity is. If you are creating circuits to hook into an arduino, you should have moved from it already.
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4. not_that_d ◴[04 Sep 25 12:35 UTC] No.45126537[source]▶
I feel insulted.
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5. lukan ◴[04 Sep 25 12:37 UTC] No.45126549[source]▶
I believe school kids should be already creating circuits and hooking them up to arduinos.
6. kevin_thibedeau ◴[04 Sep 25 13:12 UTC] No.45126888[source]▶
It is a flawed analogy but it behaves like a fluid more than most realize:

https://youtu.be/2AXv49dDQJw?feature=shared&t=1248

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7. r_lee ◴[04 Sep 25 13:45 UTC] No.45127233[source]▶
This is a common problem in all fields IMO. It's easy for many to fall into the "It's like X" but it only makes sense if you already have the information needed in your head to connect the dots

Which is why I also don't generally like analogies and the kind

8. therealcamino ◴[04 Sep 25 14:07 UTC] No.45127440[source]▶
I had a CS professor as an undergrad who would teach a couple of advanced seminars in his own research area. His approach to those simplifications was to announce, "I'm going to lie to you now, but just go with it and I promise that later we're going to learn the real truth." I liked that as a compromise, to make some practical progress, but not to mistake the simplification for full understanding. (And he wasn't rigid about it -- if somebody would ask a deeper question he'd happily answer it to some level and then get on with his plan.)
9. marcosdumay ◴[04 Sep 25 16:13 UTC] No.45128885{3}[source]▶
Electricity behaves a lot like a fluid. But not much like water or air, so there's little point in using it as an intuitive analogy.
10. marcosdumay ◴[04 Sep 25 16:16 UTC] No.45128915{3}[source]▶
Instead, if you still use it, just drop it because it's probably holding you back.

And if you managed to move ahead in hard mode, you shouldn't feel insulted.

11. bee_rider ◴[04 Sep 25 16:20 UTC] No.45128957[source]▶
The hydraulic analogy always sort of confused me because, like, fluid mechanics are real complicated. So, I always had this gut feeling question of like, can we actually end up with a hydraulic analogy that is exactly as complicated and electricity and magnetism? If we push the analogy beyond what is intended?

Is it an analogy or are both models expressions of some underlying model of potentials and flows, and we happen to have more hands-on experience with water?

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12. foobarchu ◴[04 Sep 25 22:11 UTC] No.45132815[source]▶
This reminds me a lot of the car analogy that gets used to (poorly) teach object oriented programming.
13. antod ◴[05 Sep 25 00:02 UTC] No.45133630[source]▶
Heh, I used electrical circuit analogies when learning hydraulics for pipe networks in Civil Engineering. I struggled much less than the other students who didn't know any basic electrical stuff from physics classes.
14. antod ◴[05 Sep 25 00:28 UTC] No.45133778[source]▶
Yeah. As I mentioned in another comment, as someone who studied Civil Engineering (ages ago) maybe most EEs never learn enough hydraulics to know the analogy probably goes further than they realize - ie much further than just kids level stuff.

Voltage drops across components or look a like head drops across pipe fittings. Losses along a pipe are similar to wires. Head and flow rate are very similar to voltage and current across multiple paths. Kirchoff can apply to both etc.

Many of the quantities have direct parallels and derive from each other in similar ways.

Obviously there are limits. But my middling DC circuit knowledge helped a lot when learning hydraulics from a mathematical engineering perspective.