why do cheap Chinese electronics work perfectly at first, but quickly get broken afterwards?
In: Engineering
Engineering electronics is a difficult process. Real life stuff has many more variables and complex behavior than theory and textbooks suggest. This is very hard to teach and even harder to get intuition without a lot of practice and testing and expert guidance.
Anyone with a bit of knowledge can pick out a textbook circuit design, layout a simple PCB and pick components out of a catalog to make a circuit that is supposed to perform a certain task. This is something a 2nd year engineering student is taught.
But it takes the engineer with many years of experience to know why laying out traces a certain way, putting in ground planes, specifying components a certain way and adding “protective” components to reduce noise, eliminate transients and increase reliability. Not knowing this results in a “weak” design that tends to behave unreliably and fail quickly upon repeated use. Many times it takes weeks of rigorous (time consuming and expensive) debugging and testing to understand how a circuit actually performs rather than how it is “supposed” to perform in theory.
Choosing the simplest circuits using the minimum spec components will result in electronics that break quickly.
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