'Desert island design:' Bridging the (band) gap without software

摘要

Can anyone design anything anymore without touching a keyboard and invoking a software tool? There was a time when design involved paper, pencil, mathematics and slide rules. Now we have Spice, Matlab, Mathcad, Simulink, Altium, Excel, ad infinitum. The modern knee-jerk reaction to an engineering problem is a request for new engineering software. But can we manage without it? How far can we go with just our gray matter and snapping synapses? Let's find out! You are enjoying the salt air and sea breezes aboard a small touring boat, on a three-hour cruise. Suddenly, the weather starts getting rough and you find yourself beached on an uncharted isle. Your shipwrecked companions are depending on you to save them, so you need to fix the radio beacon that has a broken voltage reference.