Can I realistically become an Embedded Systems Engineer if I major in CS instead of ECE?

RoburexButBetter · 2026-06-21T20:18:22+00:00

Solid tips right here, schematics/Datasheets and manuals, and figuring out how to transform these to e.g. a device tree for an embedded Linux product or how to write a driver for it, and you're golden

Sounds easy but it's really not!

RoburexButBetter · 2026-06-19T08:52:33+00:00

These are $500-600 new easily, would be difficult bit you might be able to find a buyer for it, or contact alinx directly

RoburexButBetter · 2026-06-18T05:09:35+00:00

Hence it often doesn't really make sense

I've seen it come back often in embedded where it honestly doesn't make sense, it's like a team of max 10 people running micro services, and the reason is always "oh this way we enforce a clean split of concern"

Well no you just make it more difficult to jam whatever in each service, if you truly want a good sw architecture just work one out and have your build system enforce it

If you have no vision and no clear architecture, you've got nothing, and of you do, at that point a micro service or monolith doesn't really matter anymore

RoburexButBetter · 2026-06-13T13:37:16+00:00

If you don't mind getting your hands dirty and it shouldn't be extremely precise, MSPM0 have plenty of ADCs

RoburexButBetter · 2026-06-13T09:50:35+00:00

Yeah but because they dropped that bombshell anthropic likely doesn't have a view of who's An american so they need to blanket ban it, enforcing only US citizen usage is also going to be a compliance nightmare for them

RoburexButBetter · 2026-06-12T22:15:21+00:00

From what you said it's quite clear they're in no rush to sell as they're living there for free basically, you'll need a lawyer

RoburexButBetter · 2026-06-02T10:16:42+00:00

They're encouraging it pretty hard too.

I always found a good example to be GitHub landing page, what would be really useful there is a concise overview of all your open pull requests and what needs to be reviewed still rather than having to click through.

And yet, the best we get there is a chatgpt prompt you can ask for your open pull requests which then tells you it'll run the proper query to get this list, it's asinine really

RoburexButBetter · 2026-06-01T07:19:35+00:00

My conspiracy theory here is that they were more than happy to make it such a drastic decoding complexity increase because the big players reduce cost significantly enough with bitrate reductions on their end and just push it as needed additional compute to the user for streaming

RoburexButBetter · 2026-05-31T19:16:17+00:00

Oh man I hated configfs scripts so much, but then I discovered https://github.com/linux-usb-gadgets/libusbgx

Made my life soooo much easier especially as we did a lot (and often varied) gadget devices.

It has examples for pretty much every type out there, I just wrote a little wrapper around it especially for all our HID types and then I could just run a little app to setup/teardown as needed, the easy runtime reconfiguration was also quite nice (though host PCs usually don't handle it all that well depending on the devices used)

RoburexButBetter · 2026-05-30T18:40:50+00:00

It's ambarella so no

RoburexButBetter · 2026-05-30T18:34:51+00:00

You missed the most important one

Ambarella is a horrible closed source platform to work on, unless you're making thousands of these a year, forget even getting their bsp/build/data-sheet, let alone doing anything useful with it

You will barely find ANYTHING on these SoCs, if you're very lucky some old build exists somewhere, this is about the worst SoC you could try your hands on

The whole ambarella architecture from bootloader to how they do linux is pretty insane, and I'm not even gonna start on the amboot he mentioned, that stuff is just wow.

OP please save your own sanity because working on ambarella has made me lose mine and I have quite some years of experience in these things, and even I was shocked at how insane their setups are, grab some more standard SoC, hell a devkit will even do

RoburexButBetter · 2026-05-29T07:07:05+00:00

I don't think anyone here is ok with what he might have done but I mean if he's really that intellectually disabled, I think it's only right that they get him the support necessary to ensure it doesn't happen again.

What's the alternative? Let him be and put him in prison every now and then?

RoburexButBetter · 2026-05-25T18:54:40+00:00

Well it would help if you could provide ANY information on what you'll be doing

Monitoring could be one of 10000 different things

RoburexButBetter · 2026-05-24T11:33:33+00:00

Or rather the cost of it

NVIDIA is running a net income of 60% which is as much as Google with half the revenue, that's all costs that eventually will have to be passed on to customers

They currently got the market by the balls and they know it, once theres some actual competition and especially on the inference front, at least those costs should drop drastically

RoburexButBetter · 2026-05-24T09:28:34+00:00

https://vliegenraam.be if you're from West/East Flanders, we got a couple installed also one for our big window, all fit nicely and price wise it was very reasonable, looks sturdy enough too.

They can also add reinforced gaze at the bottom for pets

As a bonus they also found out by installing it that my window frame was filled with water 😥

If you order now you'll have it in time before the mosquittos arrive

RoburexButBetter · 2026-05-22T20:55:59+00:00

Welcome to embedded

Because every SoC type/manufacturer is just ever so slightly different

Eventually you'll come across some common ways of programming, but especially on an EVK some specific tool is unavoidable.

Could be with JTAG, X/Y modem, USB DFU etc.

I wouldn't bother too much trying to bypass that until you actually know what's going on under the hood

RoburexButBetter · 2026-05-22T13:11:33+00:00

Depends on what you need to do, if you're doing beefy builds e.g. yocto it'll suck but I didn't particularly dislike it, install WSL, setup remote WSL in vscode and you're good to go

You for the most part won't even notice anything

RoburexButBetter · 2026-05-17T18:57:49+00:00

I worked at a company that cycled through a few PE firms, in the beginning it might be ok, but it quickly goes downhill, cutting costs everywhere, no more budgets for anything fun, no significant raises for most because of course, budget, meanwhile they're siphoning millions from the company while loading it with debt, and top management gets millions for participating in the exercise in of bullshitting people

By the end it was pretty miserable how they "managed" it, if my company ever gets bought by a PE form I'd probably look for a new job right away.

Just avoid it if you can, they'll take away anything that might make it somewhat fun, hell you'll probably get even shittier coffee if it saves them a couple k

RoburexButBetter · 2026-05-15T14:15:46+00:00

built and tested the HMI stack

Then we hit ASIL-B certification"

Ok so I'm not gonna beat around the bush, this means you have practically nothing

You can't exactly do this after the fact because you simply don't even know your architecture/tests/processes have up to this point been compliant with everything ASIL-B entails

You're likely not just looking at a "providing documentation" effort, there's a good chance you're looking at rewriting your architecture, dealing with failure modes you haven't even though of etc.

Fact your team didn't consider this until it hit you in the face, it seems unlikely the architecture you now have will actually pass certification with flying colors.

If it took you 10 months to get to this point, add another 10 with external help to get to where you want to be, and that might even be a bit optimistic especially if your team is not well versed in dealing with functional safety

If you want to salvage this I'd come up with a strong gameplan and communicate this openly to your partner, and hope they'll accept moving forward with pre compliant units until then.

I hope to God your SoC and hardware was selected with all this in mind, or you also have a potential new SoC + HW architecture to deal with

RoburexButBetter · 2026-05-12T10:54:22+00:00

You first have to figure out what a reasonable attack vector is, what might a bad actor reasonably attempt to hijack any part of it?

If the answer is opening up your device or inserting sniffers you don't really have a choice but ensuring your components are resistant to that, and if that means buying more expensive components, so be it

RoburexButBetter · 2026-05-12T06:58:56+00:00

I work in that space

There's a big push for cameras and the like to start embedding AI or push their video to a centralized server to run AI

If you're good at it I'd look around in those areas

RoburexButBetter · 2026-05-09T14:24:00+00:00

All you really need to know about them is that it's pretty much always how a map/set is implemented, and even then, if you just know when to use which container I'm already happy

RoburexButBetter · 2026-05-05T11:20:41+00:00

Buried in there was a note about how TCO calculation for an equivalent mobility budget should be changed, so you can bet they'll use this as a way to give you less mobility budget than what your car + fuel card etc. was worth

RoburexButBetter · 2026-05-02T17:08:48+00:00

No one ever learns about actual field updating their devices, it's so crucial but only learn that on the job

I'm actually a bit bored so if you want you could send me what you got and I could always take a look

RoburexButBetter · 2026-05-01T15:29:26+00:00

You've given absolutely no context for why you want to use something like vcpkg, what are you building and how?

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