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bobparadiso
 
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career

Post by bobparadiso »

Firstly, thank you. Thanks for the great tutorials, and for the kits that built up my confidence soldering things together. It was really really helpful to have these sorts of things as an easy starting point for trying out new things like breadboarding with an LPC810 ARM chip, or all the info on AVR chips so I could work out how to do Arduino type stuff from scratch with a simpler design. It was also really helpful to use your store as a starting point for product recommendations. Often when choosing either a small component like a Hall Effect sensor or a more serious purchase like an oscilloscope, it's great to know that you folks did your homework and are presenting solid choices that will work. In short, there were so many things that would have taken me many times longer to get into if you guys didn't exist. Whole fields like FPGA weren't even on my radar until I saw you had an FPGA starter board in your store. So thank you again.

Secondly, I ask your advice on one more thing, though it's a big topic.
I started getting into electronics in April with Arduino. A coworker of mine was selling 3 small boxes of electronics stuff that he hoped he would get into but didn't have the time for. It contained an Arduino Uno, a Nano, some cables, some servo motors, lots of LEDs, resistors and a variety pack of other discrete components. I'm a video game programmer by trade but the idea of being able to control real physical objects seemed so cool, so I bought all of it from him, not knowing how to use almost any of it.

I looked online and somewhere it was suggested that in general a good first real project is to control an inexpensive RC car. So that's what I did. I bought a $10 one, took it apart, ripped the PCB out of it and replaced it with the Uno and some transistors that could make the car go forward and make it turn right. It took me a little bit to realize that when it would randomly stop working that that was a sign of the transistors overheating. It also took me a little while to understand how to make it control the motors bidirectionally without shorting out. I had started to learn about H-Bridges, which then taught me a little about buying the ICs I would need to simplify my circuits. This taught me other things including looking at datasheets to check for current and voltage limits. Of course, then, I wanted to add to its functionality, not just recreate what it could already do, so then came the robotics. I bought a servo controller board, and learned about getting my Arduino to communicate with it over a serial connection. Soon it had an arm it could pick up light things with. Then of course, this choreographed version running a program on my Arduino was cool, but I wanted to remote control it, so I got into some wireless technologies like Bluetooth, XBee, etc.

That went well, lots of ups and downs, but always learning. Then I tried some projects with Raspberry Pi and BeagleBone. I also got some things going working with breadboarding AVR, PIC, and ARM chips directly. Much of this using tutorials on Adafruit as a starting point. My work in this field to date has been a string of small projects that either let me try something new out or were small contract jobs I found online. Often even if I didn't get the job I would try to do it on my own anyway if it was interesting. I'm currently helping out with a new type of vending machine, and a sculpture simulating neuron activity. Btw, thanks for having those LED strips on your store for me to try out!!! Some of my projects I've put on my site: bobparadiso.BANNED.com

I know I have a tremendous amount to still learn, but I have pulled off enough little things already that I feel like I can really go somewhere in this field. I've been programming computers a long time leading to this and have been professionally programming video games for 7 years, but the physical computing work is much more interesting to me.

Do you have any advice or pointers or stuff I should focus on if I want to succeed in transitioning my career in this way?

Thank you very much for your time. Any info or critique at all that you could provide would be extremely helpful to me. (or if, you know, you need someone to help with a weekly robotics or home automation segment…)

Take care and thanks again for everything.
Keep up the great work!
-Bob

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adafruit_support_mike
 
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Re: career

Post by adafruit_support_mike »

Short answer: build stuff. Build, build, build, and build some more.

There are definitely things you should study.. basic electronics, component characteristics and network analysis, analog and digital circuits, signal processing, etc. Many universities have great information online as Open Courseware.. MIT and Berkeley both being good places to start.

No amount of book learning will substitute for time spent actually making stuff work though. The circuit board is where you pit your understanding of electronics against the laws of physics, and physics never loses. The workbench is your playground, your opponent, and your teacher. All the theory you'll ever learn is just a collection of tools to help you make sense of what's happening when you actually start melting solder and pushing electrons around.

Learn to measure, because that's a much more subtle art than you might think: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFLZm4LbzQU Never accept measurements at face value, and don't rest until you have a well-founded understanding of everything you see. Never give in to the temptation to gloss over or filter out signals you don't understand.. that's a form of intellectual dishonesty that will come back to bite you eventually.

Learn how to design experiments.. how to make a hypothesis and then design a circuit and set of procedures to test it. Cultivate a fundamental distrust of any results until you've run out of reasons to be paranoid. In the words of Jim Willams:
When results seem optimal, design an experiment to test them. When results seem poor, design an experiment to test them. When results are as expected, design an experiment to test them. When results are unexpected, design an experiment to test them.
with a follow-up from Bob Pease:
If anything funny happens, write down amount of funny.
Read everything you can find by both Willams and Pease.. particularly Willams's later App Notes where he stops pretending to be a businessman and gives you tips form the front lines like:
Note 3: The translation of this statement is to hide the probe when you are not using it. If anyone wants to borrow it, look straight at them, shrug your shoulders and say you don’t know where it is. This is decidedly dishonest, but eminently practical. Those finding this morally questionable may wish to re-examine their attitude after producing a day’s worth of worthless data with a probe that was unknowingly readjusted.
Learn to iterate. Nobody builds a nontrivial circuit that works exactly the way it should on the first try and claims to have done it on purpose. Circuit design is research, and you don't know what questions you need to ask until you've built a circuit that fails in a sufficiently useful way.

Finally, let me toss out a recent quote from Neil deGrasse Tyson:
"In whatever you choose to do, do it because it's hard, not because it's easy. Math and physics and astrophysics are hard. For every hard thing you accomplish, fewer other people are out there doing the same thing as you. That's what doing something hard means. And in the limit of this, everyone beats a path to your door because you're the only one around who understands the impossible concept or who solves the unsolvable problem."

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bobparadiso
 
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Re: career

Post by bobparadiso »

Short reply: build more stuff I shall...

Thanks for the info and solid advice.

I watched that video you linked to, it's wild to think about things like other things plugged in or even the oscilloscope screen itself adding noise to the signal you're looking at, cool stuff, except when you don't realize what's going on.

I definitely understand and agree that book learning doesn't substitute for actually making stuff. In fact maybe I went too far the other way and was trying to completely replace book learning with making stuff. The idea of online Open Courseware sounds great, but I presume you don't get a degree for that, I'll look into it. I want to avoid having learned a lot but having a lack of degree held against me. My hope is that if I build enough, and the right, stuff, then that will speak for itself. I'll try to pull off the "hard" stuff to really stand out. And yeah, I'll definitely look up Williams and Pease.

Thanks again for taking the time to respond.
-Bob

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adafruit_support_mike
 
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Re: career

Post by adafruit_support_mike »

Anyone who works in the applied sciences has their back against the laws of physics. That's one of the reasons we tend to be allergic to marketers and business types.. they live in a world of negotiation, and physics doesn't negotiate.

Physics also isn't impressed by credentials. A circuit won't work just because you have a degree. In the long run, the person who can make a circuit work is more valuable than the person who can't, regardless of pedigree. Anyone who stands to make or lose money on "does the circuit work?" will figure that out pretty quickly.

To get perspective on the relative utilities of operational knowledge and abstract education, read the history of Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell. Faraday was, for all intents and purposes, a self-taught peasant. He was also one of the finest experimental scientists in history. In the sciences, rock-star status is associated with having a law named after you, and the superstars have units or constants. At least five basic phenomena bear Faraday's name, including the unit of capacitance.

Faraday did groundbreaking research in half a dozen different fields, but his grasp of mathematics only went as far as basic algebra. Maxwell was a gifted mathematician who was able to coalesce Faraday's work on electromagnetism down to some of the most BANNED beautiful equations in western science (and they bear his name).

Today people who want to show their fandom for science have posters of Einstein. Einstein had pictures of Faraday and Maxwell.

Both paths are valuable. Together they shape the way we define the world.

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bobparadiso
 
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Re: career

Post by bobparadiso »

Thanks again for all the advice way back.

I built some stuff ;)
http://bobparadiso.BANNED.com/

And I've been working through some of the MIT Open Courseware which has been very helpful!

Btw, how do things get chosen for the Adafruit blog? Is there a way I could share any of my past or future projects on it?
Thanks,
-Bob

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Franklin97355
 
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Re: career

Post by Franklin97355 »

Best way is to post in the general projects forum. An explanation of what it is, how it works and why everyone should have one with a link to your blog on that project will be a good start.

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bobparadiso
 
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Re: career

Post by bobparadiso »

Cool, sounds good. I didn't see a general projects forum exactly. Were you talking about "General Project help" or "Announcements"?

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Franklin97355
 
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Re: career

Post by Franklin97355 »

GPH would be the more watched .

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