On 09/05/2016 09:54 AM, scott wrote:
>>> It's not irrelevant if you actually plan to make anything work. All
>>> digital electronics (apart from in some basic simulator) is analog
>>> anyway :-)
>>
>> Yeah, but it helps to understand the theory before throwing all the
>> obfuscating real-world complexities into the mix.
>
> My electronics course at university, and that book I linked to, both
> take the approach of teaching the "real-world" stuff first. In fact, my
> university electronics course started with explaining what
> "conductivity" meant in terms of electrons. I guess you could ignore all
> that and assume all logic gates are ideal, but typically that's not
> going to be very useful for anything.

I guess it depends on what your goal is. If your goal is "design 
circuitry that can be manufactured in the real world and sold to people 
at a profit", there's an awful lot of real-world stuff that's quite 
important. If your goal is "I wonder how my PC works", then... not so much.

>> Presumably if you were to build a gate out of water valves or lego
>> bricks, it would have a different set of imperfections.
>
> Of course, but for every gate designed and built using lego or water,
> there are probably billions done in silicon, so it's a bit more useful
> to learn about that first. Especially if you ever plan on building any
> circuit (didn't you say you tried a simple circuit before and it failed?).

Tangentially:

https://hackaday.com/2016/04/30/megaprocessor-is-a-macro-microprocessor/

Apparently the LEDs consume most of the power. And where I was thinking 
that LEDs are extremely low-power...

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