> Just don't like the feeling of not having an idea of how this thing works just by looking at it.
I find it pretty funny that, since we're no equipped to sens electrical flows just by looking at it, it's more the visual / sensorial support for you mental model that helps you. E.g. you don't really have more information by seeing the circuit physically than looking at plans, it just that your brain finds it easier.
But it's also pretty clear that having physical objects in the loop actually changes the brain thought process, so it's not just an affair of having the information at hand, how it's presented to our senses must imply changes.
That’s right, the analog circuit has clear topology which I can easily imagine what’s going on just by looking at it and sometimes by manipulating it.
It’s simply more enjoyable to look at, like looking at mechanical watches or industrial machinery. Chips are kind of dull. Not to take anything away from their enormous utility and impact of course.
Well, this us true for only the simple analog circuits. A modern analog front-end of a 5G modem or so is absolutely impossible to understand visually. Even the sub-blocks like the phase-locked-loop (PLL) or the analog-to-digital converter (ADC) are often vay too complex to grasp alone. But with a good hierarchy of the schematic one can divide each of these into sub-blocks and understand each of the sub-blocks. The whole is still too complex to understand fully, even for its designer. This causes a lot of simpe mistakes to happen like forgetting to connrct two nodes and not realizing till the silicon failing after the production...
Yes, but there is a certain magic feeling of power in knowing that you could, with a steady hand and a soldering iron with thin enough tip, meaningfully alter or repurpose the analog parts of the circuit.
It's like the difference between a game whose logic is 90% Lua or Python scripts, included plaintext in the game directory, vs. one that's 100% compiled C++. One is susceptible to modding by a 12 year old kid armed with a notepad, or a 22 year old kid trying to make a flashy visualization of finite state machines to get a good grade on CS labs for little work[0]. The other is... still mutable, if you get into reverse engineering, and probably pay for (or pirate) SoftICE[1]. More importantly, one lets you learn how to make similar things, through looking and experimenting; the other doesn't[2].
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[0] - Well, that involved Processing to show an animated diagram of a simple FSM, and Colobot with a flying Moon robot programmed with that FSM for the flashy vis, plus some half-assed IPC using text files...
[1] - Ghirda wasn't a thing back then.
[2] - See also "Show source" in browsers - used to be a great on-ramp to webdev and programming, back when JS was just a toy language.
It's different in that analog circuits aren't just a physical representation of a wiring diagram - they are something I know I could manipulate if needed. Cut out a part there and replace it with a substitute, splice some wires in and add more parts to add extra functionality, etc. Digital electronics? The chips are magic black boxes. And when they communicate using digital protocols, like SPI, I2C, UART, etc., then the physical properties of connections between the chips become irrelevant too - the connection is either present or missing, you can't manipulate the behavior by messing with the wire from outside. No soldering in a cap to change delays, or a 555 to add timed behavior. Almost all of the circuit is therefore hidden in magic black boxes, and whatever remains either works or it doesn't.
Now sure, I know now I can do digital electronics with the right tools. But the tools I can use, that most hobbyists and professionals can access, allow only limited control. You can't just fab yourself an alternate chip to do something, you have to buy the very specific one that happens to do what you want, or a more general one that can be reprogrammed. And you rarely can reprogram existing chips on a board you modify, because the vendors don't want to see the magic.
Yes, I too, as a kid, was pissed off about digital electronics, and regularly remarked to a friend that soon we'll have light switches and fridges implemented using microcontrollers. If I only knew how true that prediction would turn out...
Now the irony is, at that same time I was making those complains, I was also studying X86 assembly and C++, trying to learn how to make video games. Turns out, the common thread that connects programming computers and analog electronics is accessibility. I could do both for almost free, while gradually learning through experimentation. I couldn't do that with digital electronics - the cost and educational barrier was just too great.
I find it pretty funny that, since we're no equipped to sens electrical flows just by looking at it, it's more the visual / sensorial support for you mental model that helps you. E.g. you don't really have more information by seeing the circuit physically than looking at plans, it just that your brain finds it easier.
But it's also pretty clear that having physical objects in the loop actually changes the brain thought process, so it's not just an affair of having the information at hand, how it's presented to our senses must imply changes.