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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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I spent an hour this morning with calipers first figuring out, then buying... nuts and bolts. And there’s a chance I got it wrong.
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The polarity of build vs buy decision-making has flipped in the last 30 years. There’s really no such thing as pure building anymore. It’s all degrees of buying. A “from-scratch” design really means “from commodity COTS” — the baseline is not unrefined raw materials but China.
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I didn’t realize how utterly bad I was at this part till I tried doing non-trivial amounts of shopping in the last few months.
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Example: a typical early mechanical engineering class is called kinematics of machinery. It’s applied geometry. You work a lot of problems about how one thing will move if another moves. The things are connected by pins, sliders etc. In the textbook, the pin is just a point.
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