(Part 3) Top products from r/ECE

I have a EE undergrad degree and work as a software developer (mostly web development).

Best advice is to code as much as possible. I second @jewdai's recommendation to study data structures and algorithms -> learning these will give you a solid toolset for solving problems (w/ code) in the future. The bible for data structures and algorithms is:
https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Algorithms-3rd-MIT-Press/dp/0262033844/ref=zg_bs_132570011_2?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=G4V554CGYNTY1J7NT6AZ

You should investigate what type of industry you're interested in. If you're interested in signal processing, check out companies that specialize in that area (I guarantee they need software developers).

Best chance for getting an entry level position would be one where you can leverage your EE expertise, but spend most of your time programming (it's the only way to get better). Working on an embedded system (e.g. firmware) might be a good fit because you need solid EE knowledge as well as software skills.

I would also leverage my alumni network; talk to your classmates fellow grads who are in software now. Get their advice and network; those connections can lead to jobs (or at least interviews at their companies).

Best of luck!

Since you're wanting to work with the step-response, you are probably looking at a FDTD (finite-difference time-domain) solution. One open source implementation of this is OpenEMS. It's a simple enough concept that if you have some time, you could write your own implementation: it's basically just solving Maxwell's equations repeatedly at a number of points through your domain.

Most software will let you work in 3 dimensions, the limit will simply be on the computing speed/power you have access to. Any program will let you program different media, and study their effects. Finally, many programs will not calculate the step response directly, but will calculate in the frequency domain, which you can convert to step-response using a Fourier transform.

ANSYS HFSS is a good commercial software for this purpose, and is about on-par with the difficulty of any other program out there. These software programs are complex because they have to be a CAD program (for you to design the shapes and structures), and then a simulation program, which has a lot of complexities on its own. Other software out there is FEKO (3D, good for antennas), ADS (2.5D, mostly for circuit board design), and NEC (free, and best for antennas made of thin wires).

Computational electromagnetics is a huge subject, and there is a right tool for every application. The problems you're trying to solve don't sound too complex, but you still need to know what you're doing in order to get accurate results from the software. Some good books on the subject are this, which gives an introduction to the techniques used by many of the programs, and this, which gives you information on how to build your own FDTD solver using Matlab.

Best of luck with your simulations.

Hi,

I have two-part suggestion for you. Naturally, this is really just what I did to move from your shoes to where I am now (writing device drivers, and using real-time operating systems) on nice toolchains (sets of IDEs coupled with compilers and debugger interfaces).

The first thing you ought to do next is focus on learning C. ANSI C.

This is book to use: Introduction to Embedded Systems by David Russel

By actually stepping through the book, you'll get to learn what is embedded is all about, without having to learn a new debugging interface (because you won't have one), and without having to buy a new board.

The book uses the Arduino Uno board, and the Arduino IDE to teach you how to NOT use the Arduino API and libraries. This teaches you about the "building" process of C programs - the compilation, linking, bootlaoders, etc. You'll learn all the low level stuff, on a platform (The AT Mega 328p) that is easier to understand. You'll even get into making interrupt-based programs, a buffered serial driver, pulse-width modulation, input capture on timers etc.

Ever since having gone through the book, I've been able to move to other platforms, knowing that the ideas are essentially the same, but more involved. If you were to jump straight into the Arm Cortex-based 32 bit processors, you would feel rather overwhelmed by the complexity of the peripherals that typically get placed onto the same die. You would end up resorting to high level hardware abstraction libraries (like ST Microelectronic's horrid HAL) and MAYBE be able to use them, but you would have no idea what would actually be going on. As soon as a library stops working, you need to be able to know where it broke and why.

So do this patiently.

Start with the 8 bit micro on the Arduino using the book, using basic timers, basic interrupts, basic C types.


Only later, it is wise to pick up an ARM board to start experimenting with. These devices are powerful monsters that get work done. But you won't have an appreciation for what they and their powerful peripherals can do until you've wrestled with their simpler cousins on the AT Mega 328p.

You'll have to pick an IDE, (or none if you really want to know and understand the build process), a set of libraries to use (or none, if you want to learn the monster peripherals the hard way), and an operating system (or none, if you want to stick to bare-metal programs, but really, a 120 MHz cpu with all that power and no OS is sort of a waste).

I would recommend starting with the TIVA C series board from Texas Instruments. It's used in the very nicely paced Intro to ARM Microcontrollers by Jonathan Valvano.

That would be another book well worth the time to go through like a tutorial, because it is.

These book have also helped me along the way: Definitive Guide Cortex M3 Cortex M4 Processors by Joseph Yiu
and Computer Organization and Embedded Systems by Zvonko Vranesic.

If you want to explore this field, please be prepared to be patient. The learn curves here can be steep. But the things you'll be capable of making are incredible if you keep it up. I hope your exploration goes well!

The Synopsys book club has a list of EE/CS books that are either the clear standouts in their topic area or at the very least a good presentation of the material.

Two less theoretical books you might also be interested in, depending on what you are looking for:

The Circuit Designer's Companion by Tim Williams is a good overview of the practical aspects of turning a schematic into a working circuit. Grounding, how to choose the right type of cap/resistor/inductor, EMC, etc.

Practical Electronics for Inventors by Paul Scherz is similar to the Art of Electronics but is written at a more introductory level. It includes a lot of the important small details that either aren't covered in EE coursework or tend to get muddled in the slog through theory and are therefore easy to forget.

Best way to get back into EE stuff is to build some projects! Hackaday and EEVBlog are your friends, as are Sparkfun, Futurlec, and Digikey.

I was in your situation exactly. My schools microcontroller course used TIVA C for learning. I knew nothin else before that, just CS 1, and circuits/electronics. This was about 12 months ago. Tiva C is arm based, 32 bit architecture. And so it is very deep, it can do a ton. But as a result, the documentation is extremely deep, and it is very easy to get lost in.

I tried some textbooks like this one , but all they did was retell the data sheets after the first 2 chapters, and they assumed a lot of assembly/computer organization knowledge which I didn’t have yet. So I stopped using it.

Eventually I asked around, and realized that TIVA-C is really not the best for educational purposes. I picked up an MSP430FR6989, part of the MSP430 series which is extremely popular for educational purposes. I bought this udemy course for like $9 on sale which has been wonderful so far. It has thorough labs which help a lot, and lectures too. It’s been really good for the sake of just learning the microcontroller concepts. So Idk if that’s what you want, but that’s been working extremely well for me.

Also to answer your question about TI-RTOS, that is not what you need right now. RTOS is something you would put on your MCU for a heavy, multithreaded project which is doing many tasks at once. I did the training videos you found, because my senior design group is using TI-RTOS, but you won’t need those yet.

Not sure about EE-related topics, but for CE you're almost guaranteed to use these textbooks:

• Computer Organization: Patterson and Hennessy.
  
• Computer Architecture: Hennessy and Patterson. Same people as the computer organization textbook, but this one goes a bit deeper into architecture.
  
• Algorithms: Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest, Stein, AKA CLRS. Standard algorithms textbook for 99% of CS/ECE algorithms courses.
  
• C: Kernighan and Ritchie, AKA K&R. Ritchie is the original creator of C and a co-creator of Unix, so this content comes straight from the source.
  
• C++: Stroustrup. Like Ritchie, he's the original inventor of C++.
  
  And of course, the most important and useful textbook of them all for almost anything coding-related.

Here's some lighter reading I've liked:

• Analog Circuit Design: Art, Science and Personalities
  
• The Chip : How Two Americans Invented the Microchip and Launched a Revolution
  
• Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
  
• Feynamn Lectures on Computation
  
  Readable, but more hardcore
  
  Hardware:
  
  
• The Design of CMOS Radio-Frequency Integrated Circuits, Second Edition
  
  
  Mathy:
  
  
• A New Kind of Science. I liked this book a lot, it is worth the price just for the interesting pictures. Make up your mind for yourself, and don't let negative reviewers unduly influence you.
  
• Probability Theory: The Logic of Science
  
• Information Theory, Inference and Learning Algorithms
  
  
  Programmy:
  
  
• Mastering Regular Expressions
  
  Unixy:
  
  
• Unix Power Tools
  
  
  Off the wall:
  
  
• Molecular Biology of the Cell
  
  

I'm mostly self-taught, so I've learned to lean heavily on App Notes, simulations, and experience, but I also like these books:
The Howard Johnson Books:
High Speed Digital Design: A Handbook of Black Magic
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0133957241/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_I0Iwyb99K9XCV
High Speed Signal Propagation: Advanced Black Magic
https://www.amazon.com/dp/013084408X/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_c3IwybKSBFYVA

Signal and Power Integrity - Simplified (2nd Edition)
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0132349795/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_J3IwybAAG9BWV

Also, another thing that can be overlooked is PCB manufacturability. It's vitally important to understand exactly what can and can't be manufactured so that you can make design trade offs, and in order to do that you need to know how they are made. As a fairly accurate intro, I like the Eurocircuits videos:
http://www.eurocircuits.com/making-a-pcb-pcb-manufacture-step-by-step

Wanted to chime in besides Balanis (he explains MoM in antenna theory as well but much better in Advanced Emag) you could try this this video course

or this book which I learned from myself


Also if you like using python you could pick up an intro to computational physics book with python and then look up FENICS, MEEP or gprMax

Probably not a single book. My picks for this are:

Syntony and Spark: The Origins of Radio

Continuous Wave

These are not "equation deriving technical" books but highly footnoted historical overviews of the key events and technologies involved in radio between Maxwell's and radio by the 1930s.

What's interesting (to me) about the 2nd book is the focus on Federal Telegraph which made a bizarro radio technology called an "Arc Converter". Federal Telegraph were originally located in Palo Alto, site of Silicon Valley.

In fact if you read the history of Hewlett-Packard in The HP Way (which is juicy in its name-dropping historically reality: Varian, Litton, Tektronix, Fleming, Terman, and... Federal Telegraph) you'll see there is a line of causality from these early technologies to present-day Silicon Valley that is quite spectacular.

Filling these out post-HP are:

The Secret History of Silicon Valley

The American Experience: Silicon Valley

There are crazy people in engineering who claim this history is irrelevant. Honestly it only makes sense and is only really interesting knowing it.

James McClellan's DSP First: A Multimedia Approach is a great beginner book on DSP, along with his follow-up Signal Processing First.

Yes, the same James McClellan of Parks-McClellan fame.

For vector calculus: Div, Grad, Curl, and All That: An Informal Text on Vector Calculus

For complex variables/Laplace: Complex Variables and the Laplace Transform for Engineers - Caution! Dover book! Slightly obtuse at times!

For the finite difference stuff I would wait until you have a damn good reason to learn it, because there are a hundred books on it and none of them are that good. You're better off waiting for a problem to come along that really requires it and then getting half a dozen books on the subject from the library.

I can't help with the measurement text as I'm a physicist, not an engineer. Sorry. Hope the rest helps.

It's verilog based but I like ciletti, mano, and patterson:

https://www.amazon.com/Advanced-Digital-Design-Verilog-HDL/dp/0136019285

https://www.amazon.com/Digital-Design-Introduction-Verilog-HDL/dp/0132774208

https://www.amazon.com/Computer-Organization-Design-Fifth-Architecture/dp/0124077269

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0124077269/ref=pd_luc_rh_ebxgy_01_01_t_img_lh?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1

I just went through a project course and here were some good project ideas:
Conway's game of life with VGA/LEDPanel
Single Cycle CPU
2D convolution with Systolic Arrays (really cool)

The research project I was working on was specifically geared towards improving TLB misses by restructuring the cache, but over the course of being prepared for this, I read this book front to back. I learned a lot about how a microprocessor is designed and how its pipelined stages work together, and I wanted to know if that knowledge could be translatable to a hardware related field. I know I'm probably not qualified to work in this field full time but I was hoping I could get at least get my foot through the door with an internship

First start with a very basic digital logic design course or book.

This is the one I used. Its ok but there are better books out there.

A third option might be to get this one used. It provides a good amount of design examples which are always helpful. Plus its cheap.

http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Electronics-Electrical-Computer-Engineering/dp/0195117018/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1453689790&sr=8-2&keywords=elements+of+power+electronics


Also coursera offers a power electronics course by UC boulder (Erickson) which you may want to look into. I know the other ones were free, but I don't know how these new specializations on coursera work
https://www.coursera.org/learn/power-electronics

At my school we used the following (an older edition when I was there):

Fundamentals of Digital Logic - Verilog

There is a VHDL version if you want to focus on learning that language.
Fundamentals of Digital Logic - VHDL

I remember the book did the job fine, and it came in handy as a reference when I took more advanced courses in Computer Organization and Digital VLSI. It wouldn't be a bad idea to get a Schaums guide in digital logic to give you more practice, and worked out examples.

The second book is good. You might also want to check out: Modern Processor Design: Fundamentals of Superscalar Processors https://www.amazon.com/dp/1478607831/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_M8YmxbVCM44YW

If you need a quick, dirty, and practical explanation of EE concepts, I find that the Practical Electronics For Inventors is a good book. Otherwise the other books mentioned in this thread are quite good too.

It sounds like you are actually talking about power electronics. Power ellectronics are the power conversions outside the motors that control the motor and motor/drives is more the magnetics of the drive.

I just finished a class on power electronics last semester and we used [this book](http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0195117018/ref=mp_s_a_1_14
?qid=1452095997&sr=8-14&pi=AC_SX110_SY165_QL70&keywords=power+electronics)

If you really want I can send you all of the lecture notes too. I'll update later with the motor drives book we will be using. I also have an electronic version of the power electronics book.

Digital Design with the Verilog HDL is my favorite book on the subject.

https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Electrodynamics-4th-David-Griffiths/dp/0321856562

Sigh

See here (start on Pg. 9)
https://courses.cit.cornell.edu/ece303/Lectures/lecture28.pdf

Also here:
http://whites.sdsmt.edu/classes/ee382/notes/382Lecture32.pdf

If you want to google more, your keywords are "hertzian dipole field solution"

The gist of it is that for an oscillating current I(r), you immediatley know the auxiliary fields A and Phi (they follow the wave equation, with I as the source). From the auxilliary fields, you can immediately know E and H. (This is on Pg 8 of that second link). Actually just follow through those slides, you'll notice how the near-field terms you circled in red pops out from the equations.

When I took EM in addition to Cheng the professor suggested getting Div, Grad, Curl and all of that. I found that to be alot of help in solidifying the math and intuition needed.

Go to the library and look up this book:

http://www.amazon.com/Fields-Waves-Communication-Electronics-Simon/dp/0471585513

About the simplest way I know to calculate it is in Chapter 6, transmission line equivalence of plane wave reflection on inhomogeneous dielectric boundaries.

Hodges and Jackson from the university library

Analog Circuit Design, 4 volume set D. Feucht

Analysis and Design of Analog Integrated Circuits P. Gray and R. Meyer

Analysis and Design of Digital Integrated Circuis Hodges and Jackson

Audio Power Amplifier Design Handbook D. Self

Optimizing Op Amp Performance J. Graeme

AVR

http://www.amazon.com/AVR-Microcontroller-Embedded-Systems-Electronics/dp/0138003319

Start here:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Elements-Computing-Systems-Principles/dp/0262640686

you could start here. or here.

Signal Processing First by McClellan is what we used. DSP never really peaked my interest so I can't say how good or bad of a book it is.

http://www.amazon.com/Signal-Processing-First-James-McClellan/dp/0130909998

I recommend Griffiths' Introduction to Electrodynamics.

You will find it difficult to escape vector calculus in understanding electromagnetics, but Griffiths begins with a quite clear refresher of what you need to know. He continues into electrostatics and magnetostatics, then to electrodynamics, EM waves and radiation, and finishes with relativistic electrodynamics. He also has an informal, conversational style. The text suffers a bit from putting necessary concepts in the exercises, some of which can be quite difficult.

The Amazon reviews will say much more than I have - also look at the reviews for the 3rd edition (which I have, and which has been out for longer).

I'm currently reading 'AVR Microcontroller and Embedded Systems' by Muhammad Ali Mazidi. I'm on chapter 4 and it's pretty good but I did have to go back a read a little bit.

http://www.amazon.com/AVR-Microcontroller-Embedded-Systems-Electronics/dp/0138003319/

This here is a FULL and DIRECT download of the same book that I just happen to find about a month ago, 100% legit, no malware...

http://www.radiosovet.ru/book/mikroelektronik/programmirovanie/2681-the-avr-microcontroller-and-embedded-systems-using-assembly-and-c.html

Also very strange that I came across your question that you just asked 4 hours ago through a search engine.

This is a short tutorial on the very basics. I have my programmer, breadboard, and all of it set up, I'm just waiting on my microcontroller chips in the mail.

http://www.micahcarrick.com/tutorials/avr-microcontroller-tutorial/getting-started.html

Assuming radio:

If you want not-so-technical but academically rigorous (a bajillion footnotes for every fact):

The Continuous Wave: Technology and American Radio, 1900-1932

Also:

Various ARRL Radio History books much with a slant of Amateur/Ham radio but the reality is that the leading edge of radio for most of the 20th century was the work of amateur radio folks.

Man, i hated verilog. If you need any books if i remeber we used https://www.amazon.com/Fundamentals-Digital-Logic-Verilog-Design/dp/0077211642/ref=sr_1_7?keywords=fundamentals+of+logic+design&qid=1573737210&sr=8-7 and https://www.amazon.com/Digital-Design-RTL-VHDL-Verilog/dp/0470531088/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=digital+design+frank&qid=1573737251&sr=8-1.