8
galena
3y

Whose fucking idea was it to still consider assembly (with C being optional) as the most relevant language in electrical engineering school?
Also teaching like 74HC and Op-Amp IC's are still the most common thing in todays electronis is really grinding my gears!!! Is it still an argument that your 8 NAND gates are essentially the same price as a low cost Microcontroller?
But one can be modified within second and the other you potentially need to redesign the entire board.

Comments
  • 6
    It was a good idea... in 1970.

    I mean it's good to learn the basics but then you have work up to the useful stuff.

    EE graduate here, you will get to stuff 1 billion times harder before finishing your degree if you are in a half decent university. For example, high speed design is terribly hard and you need to master everything else before, including electromagnetism and wave physics.
  • 0
    @PepeTheFrog Thats Probably also when the teachers around here started working.
  • 8
    If you don't have the basics under your belt first, your whole house will be built on rubbles. EE is learnt bottom-up, not top-down. EE graduate here.

    Oh, and I had a little side project with a 555 last year because you still just don't need a microprocessor for everything: https://devrant.com/rants/2279398/...
  • 5
    Learn the fundamentals first.

    Assembly is about as fundamental as you can get, short of wiring up the gates yourself — which is great fun in Minecraft. Do recommend.

    Also, don’t knock Assembly!
    Shit’s so cache. 🥁
  • 2
    As for gates vs micro controller, yrs a controller is cheep but also more complex and could be more suceptical la to interference, for example high frequencies or other things.

    So there are still areas where you would not want a micro controller.
  • 1
    Assembly was fun, but your brain needs to process more steps to get something done. It’s a good exercise for mental horsepower imo
  • 1
    Lol I have a BS degree in computer science but I thought hardware was fun
  • 2
    Meh, I'm kinda in the middle here. Fundamentals should absolutely be taught and understood - that's critical. I take issue if that's *all* that's taught however. A course that builds on the fundamentals before getting to micros and C is great, a course that skips micros and C because the lecturers don't know about them is crap.
  • 2
    Someone has to design the microcontroller. Who would it be if not someone who knows the basics (and a shit ton more).

    Of course there should also be courses where you use the latest stuff.
  • 1
    @Fast-Nop Fundamentals are great to know. But if they are thought like they aren't fundamentals but like "that's the thing you're going to use in the industry" when the industry I work in mostly consists of embedded software and PLC's.
  • 1
    @JFK422 That's why I didn't specialise in hardware within EE, but communications engineering. Fourier, Laplace, systems, filters and all that stuff is timeless math and hasn't changed in more than a century.
  • 1
    @molaram Fun fact: we didn't even have assembly in any uni course - but my final thesis consisted largely of implementing shit on a DSP in assembly.

    How was that possible? Because the uni expected the students to also learn on their own. Uni isn't school, after all. Academic or scientific research requires some self-reliance.
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