Analog engineering is really difficult because you need to solve differential equations that Wolfram is unable to solve. Most designs were made by very smart people in the 50s at RCA as far as I can tell. Please tell me about how wrong I am. I admit the analog circuit engineering world has looked totally unapproachable to me even as a reasonably competent working computer scientist.

the good news is you don't need exact solutions and there are pretty robust tools for numerical diffeq solving now. the best are Julia's ecosystem, but sundials is pretty decent also.

"LTSpice is all you need," in the vernacular of the times.

>Most designs were made by very smart people in the 50s at RCA as far as I can tell.

I am very interested to know this. Do you have any resources on this development work done by RCA and how it has shaped the modern world?

When I was looking at catalogs of various analog circuit designs, a lot of them were circuits RCA patented that now are public domain because the patents are now expired. They probably aren't the only ones, but they certainly contributed a lot.

https://patents.google.com/?q=(analog+circuit)&assignee=rca&...

Something like making a new audio amplifier is pretty specialized, but you don't need any advanced math (Not even algebra) for some of it. As long as you're still pretty much thinking time domain and you don't need to calculate frequency responses and RF stuff there's lots to do.

But then again my only analog experience is just IO stuff for digital, I've never done anything interesting in pure analog, I think if you're a real analog enthusiast you might get bored of what you can do without math.

You'd love Sam Zeloff http://sam.zeloof.xyz/ he makes DIY transistors

I find Sam a little too dismissive sometimes. He has relatively wealthy parents who let him convert a garage into a home fab, and talks about dropping $30k on a second hand ESM like it's no big deal.

Don't get me wrong, he's a genius, but everytime he transitions into "anyone can do this stuff!" It rubs me the wrong way

Your comment reminds me of those woodshop youtubers with clickbait titles like "diy your own coffee table for only $50", only to find they are using about 10K or more of shop equipment.

And then there's New Yankee Workshop "and now let's go over to the xyz machine for <next-step>".

> He has relatively wealthy parents who let him convert a garage into a home fab, and talks about dropping $30k on a second hand ESM like it's no big deal.

The envy I feel when I see these guys with such equipment is enormous. I really would love so much to have a loaded electronics work bench especially oscilloscopes, LAs etc. and of course the time to actually play with it. :-(

Check if you've got a local hackerspace! There are a lot of good ones out there. By and large you will find excellent people who want to enable you to do amazing things.

He spends an order of magnitude more than necessary for convenience.