My current goal is to get a job as a developer and work towards combining my career with my revolutionary activity. But I’d like to build skills that are as applicable as possible to digital revolutionary struggle. Any thoughts?
My current goal is to get a job as a developer and work towards combining my career with my revolutionary activity. But I’d like to build skills that are as applicable as possible to digital revolutionary struggle. Any thoughts?
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Can confirm, also some parallel path for training and spreading knowledge in the industry is desperately needed. Like for continuing education on applied electrical engineering. So much knowledge, practice and the like is siloed off and proprietary in each individual tech company. Lots of the smaller government contractors are staffed with engineers who are shockingly incompetent as a result, it's like the blind leading the blind, repeating rules of thumb from 1989 hardware electronics.
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Definitely. Something as simple as the basics for "how to get a custom pcb made" world be good to have somewhere independently controlled and with up to date information for people interested in turning their arduinos into something mass produced
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The number one thing I've seen there is that in a lot of companies it's common for the team doing the schematic and the layout to be totally different. like to the degree where the design engineers will often act as if they're above working with the proles (layout techs). This is especially common in older east coast companies with roots in MIC work.
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It's something that's definitely been segmented since they were doing this shit with wire wrapping and literal drawings done by drafters. It's mostly division of labor, like how anyone can be trained to use solidworks. I elaborated here
I typed up a whole rant about that in particular but I hit something wrong and lost it and also my edible is kicking in, so I'll get back to you.
My chocolate is kicking in, and I'm a high level pot mage. .... lemme try to channel that lost idea.
The production pipeline from schematic to device is horribly fractured in corporate practice. This practice is unsuitable for a distributed group of revolutionaries. In order to arrive at usable devices for direct action one must vertically educate individuals on the entire design chain and pipeline, allowing them to then specialize and develop the skills of others as work flows through the design pipeline. In order to accomplish this a process of deontolgization and re-delegation must take place over the whole of the design, production, and supply chains.
We are talking about a very large re-organization of knowledge. A technological revolution of sorts.
How'd i do?
Pretty much, it really feels like there's just so much knowledge that's just left inaccessible inside corporate structures. I've worked with a bunch of interns by now and pretty much all of them were learning from first principles. So their knowledge about how PCB design process works was only going to be informed by the corporate internship they happened to be able to get. It's not a great indicator for overall scientific progress if things are this disconnected from reality.
Re: hardware design specifically I'd say doing layout reflects a proficiency with a CAD tool, much like doing 3D modeling, it doesn't really require any specific electrical engineering knowledge but that definitely helps. Tools like xDxD/expedition are actually set up so the person doing the schematic can plug in all the design rules per net like impedance, max and min trace widths and the person doing the layout can have everything set up and not require someone breathing down their neck. For stuff like turning an arduino project into a custom PCB you probably don't need much or any electrical engineer involvement, as long as long as you're not doing anything exotic or novel the process is pretty simple.
It's still important work, but in the context of companies doing stuff like consumer product development, industrial equipment development, or SBIR mills/MIC contractors, it's something that is increasingly farmed out. It's definitely something that engineers can and should be familiar with, especially the entire process for ordering and assembling PCBs. The entire PCB fab/assembly process is something that I only really see being done for industry and get-rich-quick kind of crowdfunded projects. Probably more just that the knowledge isn't out there and there's a monetary and tool barrier to entry. (https://kicad-pcb.org/ Highly recommend this open source project)
Open source hardware projects in general are kind of anemic. I'd like to see more sorts of open hardware development around shortwave radio, you can even get chips that do encryption off the shelf!
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Yeah, there's a lot of support for doing atmel/Arduino projects and nothing for even beginning to approach anything deeper.
Often times knowledge of firmware is also relevant (mostly in C). For example hooking up a memory to a microchip, which protocol do you choose, how big does it need to be, how fast can it read/write all depend on the specific application. That sort part selection requires knowing how you plan on using it in the firmware as well as how fast you intend on using it.
There will then be the nuts and bolts of what supporting hardware is needed, but every manufacturer will include implemention details for their chips. Reviewing the latest data sheets is a decent way to keep up on modern techniques too.