[artemonster]

every time I see such great, simple and intuitive explanations I always remember how these topics were presented in Uni and want to tear-up a little: monotone voiced prof draws some nonsensical formulas and crap on blackboard, explaining zero things, giving zero context and examples. After a lecture you'd go to an excercize and start applying these formulas to artificial isolated problems, like a symbol manipulating machine. I always imagined myself being a person in that famous "chinese room experiment", a mindless monkey, manipulating symbols in equations with zero underlying understandings, just as it was "taught". brrr.

[ilikerashers]

I second that. University education in Electronic Engineering tends to favour rote learning over understanding.

People could be genuinely interested in this stuff if engineering tried to focus more on creativity than memorization.

[TeMPOraL]

Same here. Give some interesting, non-artificial problems to solve. Tune a PID on an actual (real or simulated) pole balancing machine. Tune a controller on a (simulated!) rocket chasing a target in the sky. Give problems that students can relate to and understand, and in context that allows for exploration and interactively verifying solutions.

[arethuza]

The CS course I did had a lot of the maths content of the related electrical engineering courses - admittedly with a focus on discrete maths for the third and fourth years. This did give us a lot of maths, but with no real idea as to what people actually did with it.

Fortunately, for me at least this was fixed when as a postgraduate I joined a research group that was largely control engineers!

[regularfry]

My memory of learning control theory at university was learning some super complicated stuff that was applicable to 99% of control problems. PID controllers, which are good for probably 95% of control problems, were effectively "an exercise for the reader". So trivial compared to the broader theory we were studying that nobody even thought to mention them. The expectation seemed to be that when you needed them, they'd just drop out of the maths and they'd need no further explanation.

We'd already done a form of proportional control with op-amps. It would have been enormously helpful to start control theory with discrete PI and PID to give us a practical grounding and something we could actually use before leaping off into the wider theory, but that's not how academia works...

[HeyLaughingBoy]

This problem persists even in applied classes. I was taking a set of courses in Mechatronics for engineers who were already working in in industry. We went deep into the theory of various types of controls but when one of the students (an engineer with probably 20+ years of experience) asked about PID, it was dismissed as a "special case" of (I think) a Phase Lead control.

Happily the guy teaching the lab portion of the class was himself an experienced controls engineer who actually knew how to use the math to accomplish something useful. We learned far more from him than from the lecture classes.

[Filligree]

As someone who's only worked with PID controllers, do you have any pointers to the more complicated stuff you're thinking about? A wikipedia article maybe?

[regularfry]

It's been a while, but I remember https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Control_Systems/MIMO_Systems#S... as a fair example. State-space representation is very powerful, and totally unnecessary for PID.

[nuclearnice1]

Try Model predictive control (MPC) and linear quadratic regulator (LQR)

[rcxdude]

Maybe I shouldn't be so hard on the teaching at my uni then. There was a pretty decent amount of attempts at getting an intuitive explanation of how the systems worked, and quite a few demos of different control schemes and how they worked and might fail (as well as tons of maths).