Electronic Engineering - as in circuit design, routing, computer archetecture and so on.

[BiggestKai]

I'm curious if we have any electronic engineers on the farms. Have any insights on the industry, horror stories, learning resources?

I'll be completely honest, mainly interested in learning resources. I'm trying to relearn evertyhing I can think of from scratch just so I'm a hundred percent sure I don't have any obvious gaps in my knowledge and mainly because my profession is more a glorified tech support center for the software provided to actual hardware vendors instead of actually working with design/architecture in a hands on manner. The issue is that I don't really know where to look and quite frankly too many courses or books appear to be focused squarely on what should be the ABCs(diode physics, BJT, mosFETs,

With the exception of debugging a customer's shitty code or attempting to conjure up a smaller, inhouse scenario that hits the same piece of spaghetti code producing an error as a user it's mainly just planning for future releases and putting out fires and I feel like I'm getting very rusty with what I had hoped to have originally made my living in.

Resources:

• Princeton - Computer Architecture: A free course on Coursera where enrollment only really gets you a degree if you care for that.
• Nand2Tetris : Very well compiled project based course where you create a simple processor from literal scratch, starts off with an HDL language all the way to the decoder/ALU logic.
• <more to add as the thread goes on>

 

[SNEED.EXE]

I've been an electronics hobbyist for a few years. The most fun way I've found of learning digital electronics is by creating replicas of 8-bit computers.

Ben Eater's computer project is a good starting point. After learning how it works, I'm currently studying how computers generate a video signal with off-the-shelf components (e.g. Galaksija, Sinclair ZX80, clones of the ZX81/ZX Spectrum).

 

[Frederica Bernkastel]

I've been an electronics hobbyist for a few years. The most fun way I've found of learning digital electronics is by creating replicas of 8-bit computers.

I think those Commodore PC in a keyboard solutions are really cool, but I haven't found a use for them. I've seen people use Box x64 to run some indie games, or stuff like Diablo II, on them though. I don't think the Pi 5 is fast enough to support them at a decent frame rate however.

 

[Another Char Clone]

I wrote a simple 4-bit toy processor with memory fetch/write purely in VHDL using D-latches and other logic gates. You can find ghdl to compile and do waveform simulations. Sadly ghdl isn't maintained enough anymore.

 

[SirCliveSinclairdabbing]

This isn't solely at you op but it needs saying in general about electronics.
Is it demotivating that the whole thing is full of people using Arduino's and years of programming to turn the kettle on? There is a time and place for software but isn't there a place in your heart for a couple 74xx chips with sensors on one end and a relay on the other? Wouldn't it be nice to own something that works without regular updates?

 

[Byte Doctor]

I really need to get up on my Butt and get to work on a project in SystemVerilog. As, I just have some Altera Fpga Boards and Electrical components that could really be getting put to some good use. The problem is sometimes Just overthinking things and being scared of failing. Though, now I'm feeling motivation to do things again with the beginning of a new year upon us.