Robert Casey wrote:
Patrick Turner wrote:

Happy number crunching, but I prefer late nights with a soldering
iron & cro.

I number crunch (via simulations) first (to filter out the bad ideas
that are doomed to perform poorly) and then plug the soldering iron
in....

As a mechanical engineer with project management experience, we always
first brought in the number crunchers for proposed designs before we
went and built anything, big or small. Even though we recognized that
simulation has its flaws, so one should not blindly accept the
results, the models were sufficiently accurate that it at least put us
in the right ballpark before we went out and built something.

I'm glad bridges are designed and built with this process, and not
Patrick's process.

Now the question is how accurate are the simulations of circuits
which include factors for real-world (e.g. non-linear) performance?
Patrick keeps saying to get out the soldering gun and see how things
turn out, which I find perplexing since I assume the circuit
simulation codes that exist today are quite powerful. It would not
surprise me if many commercial electronic circuits are first
designed entirely by computer using simulation and optimization
techniques, then prototypes built for final tweaking and testing.

Jon Noring