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Asked by DrProfessorKit on 13 Dec 2014.
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Peter Green answered on 13 Dec 2014:
Good question. The hardest thing I have every constructed is probably my first computer – a Gemini Galaxy (http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/11357/Galaxy-1/). I built this in the evenings whilst I was at studying my A-levels, soldering 1000s of individual joints over many months. My mom checked them all with a meter and a copy of the circuit diagram! I remember switching it on for the very first time; no smoke, but no image on the screen! I then remembered to turn the monitor on, and there was the command prompt. It was a great feeling. It is amazing to think that the Raspberry Pi delivers so much more computing power for a fraction of the cost, size and power of the Gemini!
Many years later I was asked to design a wireless communication system which could transmit a data signal between England and Sweden by bouncing it off the cloud of electrons (the ionosphere) which sits hundreds of kilometers above the surface of the Earth. This was the most complex design I had ever attempted, but the confidence I had gained from building my first computer from scratch kept me going. Seeing the first signal arrive in Manchester was great.
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Andy Hearn answered on 13 Dec 2014:
I think it was 8 or 9 years ago, when a customer’s requirements were for a machine to switch between very complicated states, by the minimum amount of button presses. It would have been easier if we were able to write the software from scratch, starting it all again, but no, I had to add onto and change their existing code without breaking anything! That really stretched my thinking and figuring out, a *lot* of drawing diagrams on paper – when I managed to get it all working, and passed all their very strict testing, I just had to walk out of anyone’s earshot, throw my fists in the air, and mutter “YES!”!
Other hard stuff sometimes is coming up against old huge code, written by someone else, with very little or no documentation, no notes to explain why the code has to be this or that way. It is like trying to unravel long pieces of string from a crazy, massive, pile of tangled up mess. But when all the important strings have been laid out straight, and the rest just thrown away, it is a brilliant feeling 🙂
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Steve Cox answered on 31 Dec 2014:
I spent many years working on the engineering of car doors. They’re something that you take for granted as you get into the car, but the next time you do think about all of the different functions the door has to be able to carry out, and all of them in a wide range of conditions (heat, cold, wet, dust etc).
Designing and testing them is quite a complex business. -
Wallace Viguier answered on 4 Jan 2015:
I think the hardest and most interesting thing that engineers get asked to do is to create “something new and exciting”
My last company relied heavily on innovation and we had some freedom to experiment with new idea during the job. This is both very rewarding to be able to developp new ideas and also quite difficult to find something that can enhance an already very optimised product.
A good example would be to decide to use orientation sensors data to optimise the use of antennas on a smartphone.
The more common version of this is to simply get asked to solve an issue that no one really know where it comes from. It require both strong techhnical knowledge and problem solving skills.
A good example would be why my prototype phones keep randomly catching fire?
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Fiona Dickinson answered on 6 Jan 2015:
I work on a much smaller scale than everyone else, in that I work with molecules, I wanted to design an experiment that would cut DNA in a particular place when you shone light on it. It is a classic example of ‘I got lucky’ in that I thought I would need to have two reactions (DNA has two long strands called backbones that go down the length of the chain) but the molecule I used did it in one go! Awesome!
Comments
DrProfessorKit commented on :
Reply to first answer:
I can’t even begin to consider how that thing would work… How did it work?
Reply to second answer:
I use something called scratch to sort of teach myself very simple coding, and so I can test ideas to see how it’d work, I struggle more with actually using the game engines (like Unity) than the coding itself, and sometimes when I look through other peoples work on the scratch website it’s like what you just said… You don’t know where to begin! So how do you get round that problem? How do you choose where to start?
Andy commented on :
Scratch is great especially when used on the Raspberry Pi, using the GPIO pins (the long 2 rows of vertical pins). That’s where we get to interact with the outside world, i.e. wiring up your door to the RPi and use something as easy as Scratch to take photos of whomever opens it!
You’ve asked a fantastic, fantastic, question re where do I start when faced with a heap of code with no “signposts”! Each program has to have an entry point, that’s where the operating system i.e. Linux (coolest stuff around), Mac OS X (nicely engineered stuff), or Microsoft Windows (no comment) uses to start the program. That’s where I usually start inspecting to figure out what is going to happen next.
With experience, we can begin to spot patterns here and there, which then leads us to find the main program loops where the program waits for something to happen; an “event”. This event could be the user pressing a button, or clicking on something, or another program wanting to talk to it (“Yo ProgramA, this is ProgramB here. Tell me if you have this or that ready for me?”)
Then from there on we follow the program to the next function call, and so on.
Peter commented on :
Like all complex engineering problems, you solve them by breaking them into a set of simpler problems. In our case we knew that radio waves in the frequency range 3 MHz to 30MHz would be most suitable, and so we designed the transmitter, receiver and antennas (aerials) to operate in this range. You can find out how the signals reflect off the ionosphere from the following article:
http://www.radio-electronics.com/info/propagation/ionospheric/hf-propagation-basics.php
We are so used to data transmission rates measured in tens and hundreds of millions of bytes per second, you may be surprised to learn that we were very pleased when we achieved 1000 bytes per second over these communication channels! The ionosphere has its own weather, and this can distort the signal significantly.