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Trying to figure out how to teach myself EE. It looks like theres basically two suggestions: A) Following the same sort of curriculum a university would teach
by non-entity 7y ago
Trying to figure out how to teach myself EE.
It looks like theres basically two suggestions:
A) Following the same sort of curriculum a university would teach. I'd have to manage to dredge through the math, but I suppose it's possible but would lead to probably the most competence. Unfortunately however, I was hoping for the big MOOC sites to have more content. EdX has some decent introductory stuff but not much beyond that.
B) The other recommended way is the hobbyist way and what I suspect most other software people wouldnauggest which is just building shit that interests you, ignoring first principles. Unfortunately I'm not sure how this would work out, since my projects in any domain seem to be a bit, er, grand and you supposedly need a strong math background to build anything more than basic circuits.
I'd dread the math a lot less if it were more cut and dry. I wish I could just jump right to calc, differential equations, linear algebra, etc. But more realistically, it would involve me hunt and picking parts of algebra and embarrassingly even simpler stuff. I was looking at some Khan academy stuff and while it turns out I remember more than I thought, theres still plenty I had forgot even existed.
Another alternative that seems good, but not realistic is that there are some community colleges that have professional certificates that teach electronic circuits pretty quickly. Unfortunately this is prohibited by the absolutely fucked "residency requirements" for this state whereby I wont be a resident of my current state for years (at least for tuition purposes, I'm a resident for just about everything in a few months). Also those courses are all in person which, for some unique reasons dont fit my life situation.
- zargon 7y agoWhat kind of "grand" circuits are we talking about here? As someone who entered EE through the hobbyist approach, there isn't much I'm interested in that has me wishing I had formal EE education background. Do you want to do analog? Because there's hardly any math involved in practical applications of digital electronics.
- non-entity 7y agoThe last 2 ideas I had were a ISA SATA card (dont ask) and attempting to build a DOCSIS modem (because issues with my shitty ISP supplied one intrigued me). I actually tried to build a Arduino based EPROM reader for a chip I extracted from an old electronic device, but ran into some issues and am kinda discouraged because that seems like it was pretty basic.
- zargon 7y agoISA SATA card makes perfect sense to me. :) All those MFM drives are dead or dying. Protocols like SATA are implemented in hardware, and you buy an IC controller chip for the purpose. So the task with this project is to implement something that talks to the SATA controller and something that talks to the ISA bus, and bridge the two. Problem is that most SATA controllers will be designed to connect to a PCIe bus. Probably easiest to use a SATA-PATA bridge chip. Not sure how easy those are to find these days. DOCSIS -- yeah, that's a lot of specialized knowledge to make a good one. A huge part of the complexity for that is probably board layout stuff. EMI & EMC, etc. This is a whole separate field of study on its own. Getting that EEPROM reader working sounds like a good starter project. There's huge variation of EEPROMs though, so it would be sensible to focus on just the EEPROM you have. Who knows, your issues could have been a problem with the scavenged chip. But I2C (if your chip was I2C) is finicky and every chip seems to do it slightly differently.
- i_don_t_know 7y agoI'm currently working my way though a three part series of electronics classes offered by GeorgiaTech's EE department on Coursera. Search for "Bonnie Ferri". The recommended order is Linear Circuits 1 & 2, then Intro to Electronics.