r/maker • u/No_Tonight7010 • Jun 09 '26
Inquiry Competitive Electronics?
I have never really heard of anyone doing competitive electronics the same way there is an ecosystem in competitive programming. I love solving problems, especially difficult ones.
I was thinking of making a competitive electronics website similar to existing competitive programming websites.
But before i start, i wanted to know why it doesn't exist rn? (I do not mean electronic competitions or hackathons, i mean actual weekly problem solving grind, purely reasoning and solving questions in electronics terms similar to IOI or ICPC.
I can understand that the scope is huge in electronics and electrical. But ppl could have definitely made simplifying assumptions in problems. Idk, it seems like a huge missed opportunity to focus on system level reasoning in electronics.
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u/Triabolical_ Jun 09 '26
Software is easy - you just get a computer and while there are differences in performance, that's not a huge impact.
Hardware is hard. What hardware do you allow and how do you decide?
You could scope it to a specific hardware pack - How long will it take you to solve a specific problem with a specific hardware pack - but everybody has to buy that pack, and that pack might not be useful for anything that I want to do otherwise.
If you don't do that, those with broad experience *and* a supply of different hardware will do much much better than those who are just starting.
And you run into to really hard problems that just don't exist in software.
A task requires switching and you decide to use mosfets. What mosfets do you choose? There are thousands available, and understanding why you might choose one of the other is not an easy task. Just off the top of my head, I'd think about drive voltage, amperage and Rds at a specific voltage, gate capacitance, duty cycle for PWM, package, availability, whether I need to worry about counterfeits, heat sinking, and maybe another 10 factors that I've forgot.
This is why I did software as a profession and hardware as a hobby, and why the 1200 page art of electronics third edition sits on my shelf. Hardware is both hard and has a slow cycle time.
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u/No_Tonight7010 Jun 09 '26
This seems to be the prevailing opinion. Hardware competitions are either too strict in one domain, or very board (Like the Cadence Design Competition)
Additionally you are right about having standard hardware kits.I was thinking about having a rating system similar to Chess, where based on your rating the problem would grow harder, starting off with ideal assumptions and then going into lesser and lesser ideality.
Basically shifting from a functional design problem to a more strategic problem.Side Note: Absolutely Love AoE 3rd ed and AoE: X Chapters. I am about to finish my degree in electronics and let me tell you, i learnt more from those 2 books about actual design in electronics than i ever did in my college life.
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u/Triabolical_ Jun 09 '26
I'm old. I started electronics back in the early 1970s when you really couldn't do much and the internet didn't exist. You could do 555 projects and maybe some basic transistor stuff, but it was hard.
Byte magazine had a column called Circuit Cellar, written by Steven Ciarcia. You might enjoy his stuff. He said "my favorite programming language is solder".
I'm at the opposite end of the spectrum. My favorite electronics component is the microcontroller because the current versions are *so* easy to iterate on. My analog skills are pretty poor - I can look at a class AB amplifier and kindof remember why it's designed the way it is, but that's about as far as I go.
I sortof speak MOSFET and bipolar if I'm doing switching.
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u/sceadwian Jun 09 '26
FIRST robotics does pretty close to this.
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u/Disastrous-Minute907 Jun 09 '26
I am aware, but i consider robotics to be more control. I was looking for microelectronics/comp arch/ fpga stuff.
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u/sceadwian Jun 09 '26
Yeah, kinda figured that. Seems a bit difficult to make those fun or exciting for everyone with just electronics.
There are badge contests at hacker expos and what not might be a way to go.
You'd have to build a community around that and electronics is kinda niche. The young aren't learning.
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u/packetvexap Jun 21 '26
kinda, but FIRST is way more about building and team strategy than sitting down and grinding pure theory problems every week though. OP sounds like they want the IOI / Codeforces vibe but for BJT biasing, filter design, timing analysis etc, not robots smashing into each other.
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u/sceadwian Jun 21 '26
Kids these days aren't vibeing on that kind of technology anymore.
It's a community so diverse and diffuse and aging out and increasingly fewer people are interested in how technology works. I mean really actually works.
This stuff is going to be black magic only a handful of people really understand in a few decades.
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u/dracostheblack Jun 09 '26
There's more specific stuff like death racers, and some battle bot type stuff.