Things like this were partially why I got interested in electrical engineering & physics. Sadly, 15 years later, my career deviated to financial software, but I still find articles & progressions like these fascinating.
You'd be surprised how quickly it comes back. I recently had to design a simple ~50 node circuit after ~10 years of not doing anything of the sort, and I had it simulated in SPICE and prototyped after maybe 10 hours of work over a few days.
We had to learn SPICE in my ECE program. I found that inexplicable- writing a circuit in SPICE is like using a slide rule. I can derive a circuit on paper (just as I can do math), and I can use an actual circuit analyzer (just as I can use a calculator). Knowing the foundations of simulation programs is justifiable, but using and practicing with them is just excessive. As the circuits got more complex, I "cheated" by using a script to generate netlists and eventually I just used LTSPICE because christ, I have better things to do than type until my fingerprints wear smooth.
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Things like this were partially why I got interested in electrical engineering & physics. Sadly, 15 years later, my career deviated to financial software, but I still find articles & progressions like these fascinating.
It's not too late if you're willing to take a pay cut.
Unfortunately, I've lost a lot of my EE knowledge due to mental atrophy.
You'd be surprised how quickly it comes back. I recently had to design a simple ~50 node circuit after ~10 years of not doing anything of the sort, and I had it simulated in SPICE and prototyped after maybe 10 hours of work over a few days.
We had to learn SPICE in my ECE program. I found that inexplicable- writing a circuit in SPICE is like using a slide rule. I can derive a circuit on paper (just as I can do math), and I can use an actual circuit analyzer (just as I can use a calculator). Knowing the foundations of simulation programs is justifiable, but using and practicing with them is just excessive. As the circuits got more complex, I "cheated" by using a script to generate netlists and eventually I just used LTSPICE because christ, I have better things to do than type until my fingerprints wear smooth.