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I am a freshman. Can everybody help how to became a hardware design engineers?
hardware design engineers
- Thread starter Lennon John
- Start date
Start by deciding on an application group to specialise in - you won't win taking on the whole world.
later on, you'll find related technologies with more or less familiar circuitry - you won't need much showing the ropes.
Its posted on the digital forum, so I'd assume that's what the TS has in mind - but digital is a whole 'nother book in its own right.
Keep prodding the TS till its narrowed down a bit.
As a freshman (I'm assuming in college and probably in an EE or similar program -- please correct me if I'm wrong) you probably don't have much of a basis to decide exactly what area you want to go into and, even if you do, you are probably not at a level yet where you can do much of anything very specific in that area yet.
So for the next while, focus on really learning the fundamentals and get every opportunity you can to put them to use in a hands-on way. You can start by getting a couple of cheap DMMs (freebies from Harbor Freight, if nothing else) and some scavenged resistors and a couple 9V batteries and just physically confirming the various analyses that you will be learning in class. As your coursework moves into new territory, get new components accordingly. Invest in a couple of solderless breadboards and some hook-up wire. Learn to simulate things using LTSpice or other free/cheap simulator.
As some point pretty early on find some schematics for a simple fixed-output 5 V power supply that can output something in the range of 1 A to 3 A and build it. First breadboard it and then layout and make a PCB for it, either using one of the cheap prototyping services or etching your own. Make a decent enclosure for your supply and make it part of your lab setup.
Try to understand the design as best you can. Then see if you can take what you've learned and try to build a simple adjustable supply, say from 3 V to 15 V, that can output a few hundred milliamps. Build two of them so that you can connect them in series to make a bipolar supply. Don't get fancy -- make it simple and make it work. Then package it and add to your growing lab equipment. As you learn more you can design better supplies.
Start playing around with 555 circuits and see if you can make an adjustable square wave generator that goes from about 1 Hz to perhaps a few hundred kHz. Package it up and set it on your bench.
At some point you will want an oscilloscope. There are any number of cheap ones that are USB based -- you might look into something like the Analog Discovery by Digilent. They don't have much bandwidth, but you really don't need it yet.
Start trying to come up with design projects that push your skills, but not too much. Audio components are probably as good a place to start as any -- and I'm not talking about high-end quality stuff. Try to make a simply amplifier that takes the output from a headphone jack and drives a small speaker. Don't worry about how good it sounds, just get it to work. Then start improving it.
As you take more and more courses in different areas, follow these same guidelines -- get your hands dirty making and designing things. Simple at first, more complex later.
Another avenue to consider is if you can get involved with a local Maker community.
thanks everybody. i am from VietNam and our program university is old . i learn about electrical and telecommunication. it has 3 way: electrical, embeded system and telecommunication
can i learn MSP 430 when i know not much about C program and electrical
There are easier microcontrollers and C can be a bit cryptic for beginners.
It doesn't get much simpler than MSP430 unless you want to go back to 6502 and 6800.
NXP/Freescale/Motorola 9S08 is as simple as it gets.
The PIC is better documented (maybe too much better documented). the AVR doesn't seem to have taken off so fast, but its by no means obscure. Its a direct descendant of a CPU from the same era as the chips you mentioned, and a lot of old code can be easily repurposed.
The 430 isn't a bad choice, but its relatively Johnny come lately with less background resources to draw from.
PICs may be popular but the architecture sucks, imho.
Atmel AVR is not a descendant of the 6502/6800 era. It was a clean design from scratch, optimized and engineered with compilers in mind. The architecture is much cleaner than PICs but it still has a few shortcomings.
MC6809 was one of the cleanest architectures which was superseded by the MC68HC11.
Are we going by popularity or engineering design? The IBM PC was the most popular but it set back the computer industry by about 25 years
Like it or not - popularity means you can find routines already coded rather than starting from scratch.
Sometimes popularity owes more to clever marketing than technical merit, but if I want a job done fast; I pick the nearest suitable part with a resource behind it.
Though if you are trying to learn the fundamentals of microcontrollers and embedded programming to create a strong foundation for your skills, starting from scratch is not necessarily a bad thing.
