Forum, Flowstone and Free advice
Posted: Tue Dec 26, 2017 1:09 pm
Hi,
after being invited to come back to the forum by several people, I decided to visit it, after I left it in reaction to the increasing aggressiveness. And the first things I notice is ... increased aggressiveness.
I hate it. It isn't neccesary.
To avoid confusion especially of newbies, here's a few things to consider:
(1) Flowstone is no tool for recreating circuits. Especially it is no tool for creating analogue circuits.
(2) Instead, Flowstone is a tool to work with digital signal processing (hence DSP Robotics). That is a difference like night and day. Most importantly: There are no voltages. Instead, prior to our DSP today, all math was prepared for the digital realm by normalizing to 1V, where 1V means "full power". The digital realm is a discrete, finite realm, whereas the analogue realm is continuous and infinite.
Instead of a continuous signal, in DSP we are working with finite samples of the original signal (for example 44100 per second). Furthermore those samples are binary numbers, reduced to [-1, +1].
A good example for the differences is a level meter. In the analogue realm it would measure voltages like so:
20 * log10(V/V0), where V is the actual voltage and V0 the reference voltage. As a result, the measurement can be both positive and negative, and any number ( like +6, etc.). In DSP the level meter measures slightly different. The reference voltage is always 1V, and so the signal we get from the ADC is already a ratio (V/V0). As a result we measure
20 * log10(abs(sample)) and will always only get -inf to 0 (the whole scale is negative). This is called dBFS and is an absolute scale, in difference to the relative scale dBu.
(3) Never, NEVER, use analogue calculations/formulas in DSP. Since the two realms are totally different, it will end in issues and errors.
(4) Never assume that anything you know from the analogue realm would be true in the digital as well. It might be, but you have to first check it.
(5) Since DSP does calculations on each sample, and a sample rate might be 44.1 kHZ or higher, there's not much time for the math on each sample. For example, 44.1 kHz means 0.023 ms per sample in an optimal environment. Therefore it is important to have the most effective code to save on time. One example is probably known: CPUs are faster at multiplications than divisions. Instead of 0.5/2, write 0.5*0.5 and you saved time. There is ALWAYS something to optimize, so embrace each and any optimisation you are offered.
(6) If someone corrects you, he doesn't hate you. He's pointing to something that you did wrong or inefficient. That's all. It doesn't affect your personality.
(7) No cheap muscle games, please. We are all awesome, so expect to be called out, if you try to put yourself on top of others.
(8) Return to the good old days of friendly, kind and enthusiastic forum participation. I'm so sick of bullies.
I'll retry the forum in a couple of weeks, hopefully it has become a better place by then.
(Note: Everything regarding DSP was reduced to the bare minimum. If you would describe it better, make a DSP guide on this forum, instead of criticizing my remarks. Thanks!)
after being invited to come back to the forum by several people, I decided to visit it, after I left it in reaction to the increasing aggressiveness. And the first things I notice is ... increased aggressiveness.
I hate it. It isn't neccesary.
To avoid confusion especially of newbies, here's a few things to consider:
(1) Flowstone is no tool for recreating circuits. Especially it is no tool for creating analogue circuits.
(2) Instead, Flowstone is a tool to work with digital signal processing (hence DSP Robotics). That is a difference like night and day. Most importantly: There are no voltages. Instead, prior to our DSP today, all math was prepared for the digital realm by normalizing to 1V, where 1V means "full power". The digital realm is a discrete, finite realm, whereas the analogue realm is continuous and infinite.
Instead of a continuous signal, in DSP we are working with finite samples of the original signal (for example 44100 per second). Furthermore those samples are binary numbers, reduced to [-1, +1].
A good example for the differences is a level meter. In the analogue realm it would measure voltages like so:
20 * log10(V/V0), where V is the actual voltage and V0 the reference voltage. As a result, the measurement can be both positive and negative, and any number ( like +6, etc.). In DSP the level meter measures slightly different. The reference voltage is always 1V, and so the signal we get from the ADC is already a ratio (V/V0). As a result we measure
20 * log10(abs(sample)) and will always only get -inf to 0 (the whole scale is negative). This is called dBFS and is an absolute scale, in difference to the relative scale dBu.
(3) Never, NEVER, use analogue calculations/formulas in DSP. Since the two realms are totally different, it will end in issues and errors.
(4) Never assume that anything you know from the analogue realm would be true in the digital as well. It might be, but you have to first check it.
(5) Since DSP does calculations on each sample, and a sample rate might be 44.1 kHZ or higher, there's not much time for the math on each sample. For example, 44.1 kHz means 0.023 ms per sample in an optimal environment. Therefore it is important to have the most effective code to save on time. One example is probably known: CPUs are faster at multiplications than divisions. Instead of 0.5/2, write 0.5*0.5 and you saved time. There is ALWAYS something to optimize, so embrace each and any optimisation you are offered.
(6) If someone corrects you, he doesn't hate you. He's pointing to something that you did wrong or inefficient. That's all. It doesn't affect your personality.
(7) No cheap muscle games, please. We are all awesome, so expect to be called out, if you try to put yourself on top of others.
(8) Return to the good old days of friendly, kind and enthusiastic forum participation. I'm so sick of bullies.
I'll retry the forum in a couple of weeks, hopefully it has become a better place by then.
(Note: Everything regarding DSP was reduced to the bare minimum. If you would describe it better, make a DSP guide on this forum, instead of criticizing my remarks. Thanks!)
