Vitaliy wrote:
> You may be right... but personally, I think it's more fun to spend my
> time and resources on something that would be useful to myself or
> other people.

All good EEs I've ever met tinkered with electronics from at least late
grade school on.  This is a necessary step in becomming a good engineer.
Conversely, for those people doing that *is* fun.  I remember a number of
"pointless" and "dumb" experiments I tried with electronics, often ending up
with fried parts but always learning something and ending with the desire to
try new things and learn more.

I think around freshman year in high school I thought of the idea of a
regulated power supply, but couldn't quite come up with the right concept.
I never did create a regulated power supply in high school, but having
thought about them made it instantly obvious when exposed to them for real
in college.  Others that hadn't gone thru that process seemed to struggle
with that and anything else there were supposed to design.

Another example was I often tried to make ways to boost a audio signal, even
at a preamp level.  I could get high gain, but things would often oscillate,
and even when they didn't the result didn't sound good.  Even though most of
my audio amplifiers in high school were failures, I learned a lot and did
enjoy trying to make them.  Eventually I learned about things like negative
feedback and power supply decoupling.  Those instantly made sense because I
had experience with the symptoms of not taking them into account, despite
not knowing that at the time.  When we had to do something with audio in a
college EE lab and we got "motor boating", I right away suspected unintended
feedback thru the power supply, which turned out to be right.  Others just
sat there stumped while our group got the thing working because I had been
there and done that before.  It turns out we were supposed to be stumped and
learn about power supply decoupling, and the TA came around and told us to
keep our mouth shut when we proudly told him what we found and how we got it
working.  He did quietly give us extra credit though.


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