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More convinced than ever that engineering 101 should really just be shopping 101 Every class would just be a teardown of some random junked thing, build up a bill-of-materials, spreadsheet of parts and what they do, links and prices. Then you’d shrink or cost-down the design.
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No textbooks. Just McMaster Carr, Digikey, Adafruit websites. Field trips to Home Depot. Some special sessions for speciality supplies sites/catalogs. Sessions on eBay and Alibaba. Homework: converting designs from metric to imperial. YouTube if you have to learn concepts.
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I didn’t go tech-shopping until grad school. Even the practical lab classes of undergrad were basically applied theory. We learned to control the one stepper motor already set up in the lab, not how to pick one out of a catalog.
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Vast numbers of things you have to learn names and part specs for, in multiple competing standards. Electrical connectors alone would fill a history book.
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It’s both horrifying and fascinating. And there’s no way to learn except by shopping. Bugs = buying the wrong thing.
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Replying to
i often think about how software is so much cheaper because of that (but then you have to audit all the competing libraries for a given thing for fitness) also atom manufacturing process is mapped onto bits when really both have a bit process, just one has the atoms cut off
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Yeah most of the cost of say a nut-bolt pair is in the bits defining the standard. The cost of making a bespoke non-standard bolt on a lathe reveals that. You’d probably spend a hundred dollars in labor/machine time to get something comparable to a $0.05 standard one.
Replying to
yeah that and i was thinking just the bits of designing the physical object and all the bits involved in assembling it. that's what's ∝ software; the dollars/hours/atoms of buying parts and fabbing nonstandard parts is on top of that