this post was submitted on 02 Nov 2023
178 points (98.9% liked)
Asklemmy
43950 readers
672 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
'Not too hard' is a bit of a spectrum I guess ;)
I mean yeah, in principle I could cram textbooks for a few months (I know EE and SE pretty well, but particle physics only very basic stuff), order parts made at the factories I know, and would probably succeed eventually. More realistically I'd have to hire a university prof as a consultant to save time.
What I am really unable to construct is a powerpoint presentation that justifies that expense and labor to management :P
Especially in a cost-driven market (my company is in Vietnam). Often the parts for these things are export-controlled too, that can be a real pain. I've gotten irate phone calls from the US DoD before over fairly innocent parts orders -- it's not super fun. I recall it was some generic diode, I must have stumbled on something with a military application I wasn't aware of. The compliance paperwork ended up costing me hundreds of dollars for 20$ in parts, too.
Anyway, if it was something I could just tack on to ongoing research projects, I could maybe get away with it as a marketing expense. It's for a STEM program. It's hard enough to convince management to take the risk on a nuclear & quantum module as-is! I can mostly get away with it because the locally-manufactured beta-detectors cost like 20$ per classroom.