Electronics Education

I was an electronic technician for my working career, and I enjoyed it a lot.   Part of my career was teaching electronics, which I also enjoyed.  One of the problems as an instructor was getting the students enough electronics information so they could succeed at being a competent technician, because the college I taught at was concerned with putting more liberal arts into the program.

This got me thinking.  When I was still teaching, I was pondering how someone like Montgomery Scott ('Scotty' in the TV/motion picture series Star Trek) what his education looked like.  As I watched our electronics program get dumbed down with less basic electronics and more liberal arts classes, how much more would that happen in Scotty's time, when there is so much more high level physics that would have to be taught?  So they would be looking at deciding between introductory electronics/physics, liberal arts, and high level physics/electronics courses.  System level stuff would be incredibly important as well.  How much electronics does one need to replace a failed box instead of repairing it at component level, and what are the drawbacks to having no one that can repair things at the component level?

There are a number of products that I've seen that are really BADLY designed today.  A friend had a rain/temperature sensor designed in a black case that was insanely hot and nonfunctional - I have a poorly designed one wire weather station where the wind speed/direction/temperature device can run 10-20 degrees hotter than the surrounding ambient temperature because of the power supply and electronics inside the case.  The result, I think, of poorly trained engineers.  Is this because of the amount of information these engineers need to get, but cannot, because of poorly designed engineering programs?  If so, my question about Scotty's education is not a problem in the twenty third century, but is relevant today.

Another thought that I had happened while working at Physical Electronics.  Phi (abbreviation for the company's name) designed, built, sold and maintained scanning electron microscopes that did surface analysis.  They sold both older, refurbished machines (that still could cost almost a million dollars) to new machines, which they sold less than 100 a year of.  EVERYTHING they made is going to be repaired - because even after 40 years of production, there are still only a few thousand of, say, the main imaging supply, a 30KV 1000watt power supply that allows the devices to do the imaging.  So I was repairing everything from boxes that had through hole and point to point circuits to working on surface mount boxes just designed, and writing technical reports for new boxes just being first produced that didn't work, so the engineers could figure out the problems in production. Compare that to most modern electronics - cell phones, $20 dvd players, $50 blu ray players, and lots more.  When repairs are $50-100 an hour, none of this stuff is going to be fixed, just tossed.  So we have expensive electronics that will be repaired, and a type of electronic device we can consider a commodity that will be replaced and tossed.

So move to the twenty third century and the starship Enterprise.  EVERYTHING on board is going to have to be repaired - so Scotty's education needs to cover everything from component level repair to system wide maintenance.   Things not able to be repaired will have to be manufactured, somehow.  We are doing such a lousy job these days of training technicians to engineers that, if we had an Enterprise starship today, the folks maintaining it couldn't.

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