by Bryan Bergeron, Editor by Bryan Bergeron, Editor
DEVELOPING PERSPECTIVES
Electronics Enthusiast - Is It Time
To Redefine The Term?
Ihad lunch with a fellow electronics enthusiast on his return from a trip with his daughter in search of a
college of engineering. He was blown away by the level
of electronic automation in many of the campuses they
visited. Not only was there ubiquitous Wi-Fi, but at several
colleges, smartphone-toting students could monitor the
status of the washing machines and dryers in each of the
dorms. Tablet-sized LCD panels affixed to classroom doors
announced activities in that room for the day, and
numerous PC kiosks enabled students to check their email
or class schedule. My friend’s daughter wasn’t as
impressed with the modern electronic accoutrements, but
instead expected what they found and more. Perhaps this
explained my friend’s frustration with trying to teach his
daughter the ”old fashioned” electronics of resistors,
transistors, and other discrete components. With sights set
on creating a startup company using mobile computing,
she couldn’t see the relevance learning to flip a few LEDs
on and off with a complex circuit or of building a power
supply from scratch when a single chip would do the job.
My automatic response was that learning the
fundamentals is, well, fundamental. If you’re going to
design or build electronics, you have to have a handle on
the fundamentals. We decided that sooner or later, she
would come around and delve into the basic physics and
discrete components the way we did when we discovered
electronics. However, I began to have second thoughts
soon after the meeting. Is it really necessary to deal with
capacitors, resistors, and discrete components to
understand and — more importantly — leverage modern
electronics? Is it a waste of time for someone planning to
create a business based on new devices to play with and
learn to use ‘outdated’ components? Is it better to move
directly to, say, microcontrollers and programmable field
gate arrays (FPGAs)?
8
October 2010
