Chip
@bytex64@awesome.garden  ·  activity timestamp 6 days ago

I picked up a prerelease copy of “Designing Electronics That Work” by Hunter Scott. And I think I can recommend it on the force of this paragraph alone. #Electronics

When you're writing your requirements, think about the product's whole life cycle, not just how your customers will use it when they first get it. It's easy to overlook that a product will eventually grow old and become ob- solete. With that in mind, here's an exercise that all hardware engineers should do at least once in their lives: Visit the nearest dump. The bigger the better. Get out of your car and look at how big the dump is. Think about the billions of pieces of trash in there. Consider that everything that isn't organic matter was once a manufactured product. Engineers designed it, produced it, and sold it. Maybe people used it for a generation, or maybe they used it for an hour. It doesn't matter anymore because now it's sitting in a huge pile of other products waiting for ... nothing.
When you're writing your requirements, think about the product's whole life cycle, not just how your customers will use it when they first get it. It's easy to overlook that a product will eventually grow old and become ob- solete. With that in mind, here's an exercise that all hardware engineers should do at least once in their lives: Visit the nearest dump. The bigger the better. Get out of your car and look at how big the dump is. Think about the billions of pieces of trash in there. Consider that everything that isn't organic matter was once a manufactured product. Engineers designed it, produced it, and sold it. Maybe people used it for a generation, or maybe they used it for an hour. It doesn't matter anymore because now it's sitting in a huge pile of other products waiting for ... nothing.
When you're writing your requirements, think about the product's whole life cycle, not just how your customers will use it when they first get it. It's easy to overlook that a product will eventually grow old and become ob- solete. With that in mind, here's an exercise that all hardware engineers should do at least once in their lives: Visit the nearest dump. The bigger the better. Get out of your car and look at how big the dump is. Think about the billions of pieces of trash in there. Consider that everything that isn't organic matter was once a manufactured product. Engineers designed it, produced it, and sold it. Maybe people used it for a generation, or maybe they used it for an hour. It doesn't matter anymore because now it's sitting in a huge pile of other products waiting for ... nothing.