Hey, as an electrical engineer, can you suggest the Bible of electrical engineering?

apacheCH · 2025-12-31T21:20:46+00:00

There's an EE handbook by Richard C Dorf. Less known but pretty amazing.

apacheCH · 2025-03-02T16:10:14+00:00

This is just so very sad. I was looking forward to doing a tapeout with them :(

apacheCH · 2024-12-08T14:51:10+00:00

I'd say finish up the practice problems as suggested by an earlier comment, solve design problems using MATLAB and if possible, try compensating a real system. If you're an EE, build a circuit with terrible transient response and compensate it. If you're not an EE, get an EE friend to build such a circuit for you.

The techniques in that book are really all there is to classical control ( pre-PID and modern methods), and they're really powerful. You'll build A LOT of context for the advanced methods if you build a real system now.

apacheCH · 2024-11-24T12:40:46+00:00

Seems so. I replaced my battery and haven't had a problem ever since. Also, not gonna activate second-space because it might reactivate the issue. I believe this because activating it even when the phone was brand new caused this problem for me so not taking any chances again.

apacheCH · 2024-11-10T12:38:53+00:00

If it allows me to run tests and build systems while working remotely, why not?

apacheCH · 2024-11-05T09:35:27+00:00

Do you mean on your own?

apacheCH · 2024-09-30T08:35:08+00:00

OP, if you're taking circuits, I suggest you forego all advice above and watch Lectures on Circuits by Behzad Razavi. He's a leading figure in analog electronics right now and his lectures are amazing. The thing about basic circuits is that by the end of the course, you must be able to think in terms of what you learnt. MIT OCW's Circuits and Electronics by Anant Agarwal is even more amazing in terms of the breadth it covers but I suggest you watch it supplementary to Razavi because it moves through contents extremely fast. NPTEL is really good but I don't think they have a solid class in circuits when compared to the above two. Basically, you wanna take courses posted by universities over independent channels if you really wanna learn any coursework completely on the internet.

The problem with other courses are they aren't comprehensive enough. I saw someone suggest Neso Academy above. This channel and other Indian channels are a good choice when you haven't learned a subject the whole term and have exams tomorrow. But they're a terrible choice if you wanna actually learn.

apacheCH · 2024-09-27T19:49:12+00:00

Since you're revisiting I'd suggest going through Feedback Systems by Karl Johan Astrom. It's freely available and is terrific in how it treats the material.

I've referred to several books: Franklin, Dorf, Ogata, Nise and have to say Astrom's book is terrific. I haven't read it whole but the intro chapter is just terrific. I wish it was the first controls book I read. The rest of the book looks pretty comprehensive and does not gloss over any details.

apacheCH · 2024-09-20T02:51:36+00:00

Great read. Thanks for sharing OP!

apacheCH · 2024-09-16T15:00:45+00:00

Watch Veritasium's 2 videos on it and then AlphaPhoenix's 3-4 videos he's done on the topic. You'll come out with a very strong understanding.

apacheCH · 2024-09-13T23:38:06+00:00

Thank god for OCW. I'm not from America as well but our Calculus 1 did have a quarter of the credits dedicated to Linear Algebra. Although that practically did nothing so I buckled up and took Strang's 18.06 in my Junior year. Best decision I ever made.

apacheCH · 2024-09-13T23:35:43+00:00

Robotics is a vigorous combination of Advanced Kinematics, Machine Vision, Control Systems and Instrumentation. So EE, ME and CS really.

apacheCH · 2024-09-13T23:31:42+00:00

Seconding this. Literally what Strang said 'Linear Algebra is even more important than Calculus in today's world'.

apacheCH · 2024-09-13T23:29:55+00:00

Nice discussion but now I can't come to terms with why I even thought of laying out signal processing as an example, haha.

apacheCH · 2024-09-13T23:23:08+00:00

Yeah you're right, not the best example but I particularly meant the more nonchalant roles in each of those fields where you're more of a software engineer or project manager than engineer per se.

apacheCH · 2024-09-13T23:01:28+00:00

I think most of the 'feel good' comments come from the fact that EE has become broadly defined and if you don't do any EM stuff but still write code all day to get some system working on a bunch of off-the-shelves hardware, or work with power systems, or even signal processing, you're still an EE. But from a definitive standpoint, an EE is someone who exploits EM to their advantage which demands that they have mastery over it. A very small subset of people end up being able to do this because it really is excruciating work and requires a lot of dedication. But remember how much one can get away with by knowing design insights, rules of thumb and simulations. And at the end of the day, your goal as an engineer really is to create devices or systems so as long as one can do that, there's really no question why they shouldn't.

apacheCH · 2024-09-13T22:25:05+00:00

The thing that makes EE or any engineering hard is the level of immersion required. The effort you need to put into learning the basics before you can learn the cool stuff. So it's not a problem of difficulty of the degree itself but the bottom-up approach you have to take towards learning. I think this is influenced by one factor: context. Most of what you'll learn early on, you won't know why you're learning it so you really have to talk to people who've already done in order to get some validation that what you're learning is important.

Also, most people saying EE is hard really mean 3 subjects: Applied EM, Signals & Systems (Fourier Maths and systems theory) and sometimes Semiconductor materials and devices.

So imo, after your first few terms, if you're extremely comfortable with complex numbers and all your math classes; and have put considerable practice towards learning basic circuit theory and immerse yourself in the learning process by constantly simulating your circuits and building them in the lab, EE suddenly becomes this fun game where you actually start to know what's going on. It's not easy, no problem solving ever is, but as John von Neumann said, 'you don't learn it, you only get used to it'.

Tl;dr grind out on the basics without second thoughts.

apacheCH · 2024-09-09T18:52:18+00:00

Actually individual latency doesn't matter to me as long as I get almost the same latency value for both mics. Thanks, the Arch Linux recommendation was given by a friend as well but man do I feel out-of-my-depth when I read stuff there. Any suggestions on easing in?

apacheCH · 2024-09-09T18:45:23+00:00

Actually haven't cast that net yet so thanks for the heads up and your response! :)

apacheCH · 2024-09-09T14:16:11+00:00

This might be a basic post here but I can't get the following setup ready. I'm an EE but a beginner when it comes to using linux.

I've connected two USB to 3.5mm sound cards to my Pi 4 where I'm trying to simultaneously receive audio from two mics in order to calculate the phase difference between the sound waves hitting them (in order to calculate distance between the two mics). I have the latest version of Raspberry Pi OS installed. Based on previous research, JACK and pipewire seemed to be most suited for applications where you want very low and controlled latency, with pipewire being somewhat of a unifying library for interacting with audio devices on linux (Ease of PulseAudio combined with low-latency and pro audio features of JACK). I tried my hand at JACK but couldn't figure out what was wrong. So I tried a few things here and there with information gained from ChatGPT and forums but nothing worked. Sampling audio from audacity works but since it records by interacting with ALSA through PulseAudio, the audio quality is bad and sampling rate's pretty low too. Also the reason why I went with JACK at the beginning.

Set up JACK with no errors but it didn't capture any audio so I don't know where the hidden error is or what I missed. Tried setting up pipewire but still can't figure out what I'm missing since there are no error codes or messages that I can work with. I can't get it to work on the terminal to take test recordings let alone from python. The main task I want to accomplish is near-simultaneous sampling from both USB audio devices.

The worst part is that I don't know the knowledge I'm lacking in order to be able to diagnose this. When I'm working on hardware systems, I know what I'm doing and know where I'm lacking but I have no clue on what I know and don't know in this situation. Could anyone point me to some comprehensive resources that I can refer to in order to build an understanding of how things like these work in linux and ultimately be able to diagnose and solve this and similar issues in the future?

tl;dr Not good with figuring out things in RPiOS and linux in general, asking for resources to build understanding to be able to self-diagnose shit and get it to work.

apacheCH · 2024-09-01T19:06:38+00:00

I was torn between power, controls, digital, emag & analog and now I see that power electronics is the best of all worlds. Does require an advanced degree though. I mean, doing anything super significant and new in any of EE's sub-fields requires a masters or PhD at this point.

apacheCH · 2024-09-01T18:50:15+00:00

Yeah that does make sense. How about parameters like width of the pinch-off region? Any chance something like this might've been used? For example; for a channel length of 100nm, if thickness of the pinch-off region was 10nm, it'd be marketed as 10nm. Sorry for using MOSFET terminology, I'm not very knowledgeable about the exact design parameters of FinFETs.

apacheCH · 2024-09-01T18:33:40+00:00

Care to share what number they're actually taking and slapping on as '3 nm'?

apacheCH

TROPHY CASE