Types of Electronic Systems

In today’s session on Andre, we mostly worked on defining electricity, electronics and breaking electronics down into the two types of electronics there are.

Analog Electronics - These types of systems deal with smoothly varying signals, let’s say in the case of Voltage say we had an analog electronic system that works in betweeen 0v and 10v. Said system would be able to sample/consume a signal varying from 0v to 10v and account for all the points in between the two values.
Digital Electronics - In truth there is no such thing as digital electronics, this is because at the base everything is analog. Digital systems simply provide abstrations over analog systems. These systems enable us to consider only two parts of the analog range. Say in a 5v digital system there would be two states (binary or boolean). One of the states would be off or zero, this would be when the input is 0v the other state would be on or one, this would be when voltage would be 5v.

In a short summary the real world is analogue, but we interact with it via digital signals that go through analog to digital converters when they leave our end to become analog signals when arriving to the system in question. Interacting with the world in this way introduces issues such as errors that occur due to generalization and abstraction of data. However this is mitigated by the fact that digital processing happens at such a rate that we humans cannot perceive the errors arising from sampling analog signals.

Happy Today!