>> so I would like to hear what kinds of projects and challenges people who may have actually been employed doing work like this have come across. I've been in

>> so I would like to hear what kinds of projects and challenges people who may have actually been employed doing work like this have come across. I've been in and out of embedded for over 25 years now. Mostly in. Some things I've worked on over the years: Battery monitoring for a Ford EV back in 1997, control software for the Ibot (Dean Kamen's stair climbing wheelchair), a few small prototype gizmos, electric power steering systems (due to my early motor control experience on the Ibot), engine controller test code, airbag controllers (very boring, it's mostly endless diagnostics), ac/dc converters mostly for EV charging but also for other uses (up to 900KW), Electric water pumps, and something really fun that I can't tell you about yet. I've focused on motors because I accidentally became really good at Field Oriented Control and having that specialization pays well while being applicable to a bunch of different things - different products, but also the power conversion stuff was very closely related. That's just the embedded side. I've bounced back to PC apps a few times in completely unrelated areas. It probably helps to be an engineer first, and software person second. This avoids the notion of being a "coder" and gets me involved more at product level design and development. I know a guy who has done a lot of embedded audio DSP work. He's an older guy too and just had a few months out of work. It was fairly easy for him to find a job though and he's happy doing something new. Audio is an area where embedded and AI are actually coming together. If that's your thing, try diving into speech recognition on the Pi or something and then scale DOWN to smaller hardware. IMHO on-device voice control is going to become a mildly big deal in certain areas. Be flexible and always try to work on interesting things!