Don't do a degree or two like I did. Just build shit, get yourself a 3D printer and some electronics, and again just build shit.
The only maths you'll need at the beginning is basic control engineering (PID Loops), forward/inverse kinematics and Extended Kalman Filtering. The only other thing is maybe V=IR, anything else and you're just placating some professor's ego.
>Hot take: CE is a better foundation for programming than CS
Not at my uni for sure. First (and only) microcontroller that we actually programmed that wasnt an arduino was in the final semester of the entire degree.
>But university isn’t about leaning to uses tool and apply it somewhere else, it’s about the underlying concepts and the people you get exposed to.
You’re not wrong at all on the software side. With regards to the concepts though, we did a whole bunch of theory, but fairly often we did not do even the basics of applying it. I mean we literally did not do any, we did zero circuit/PCB design (the thing I’m trying to currently learn).
Outside of the dissertation no not really. Best we did was in the group projects where at most we attached a couple sensors and maybe a motor to an arduino.
*Technically I did a robotics degree but the difference between mine and the EE degree at my university was at the most 5 modules, roughly 60 out of 360 credits.
The replacement modules certainly were not in anything to do with design or fabrication either. No soldering, no CAD, no ECAD.
You could have got through the entire degree without having once picked up a soldering iron or built a circuit. As long as you were good at maths you would get through, nothing else meaningfully mattered, except the dissertation of course.
>Have you tried using an Arduino or similar first?
That’s why I went to uni to do EE/Robotics. I wanted the next step, suffice to say I did not get the next step from university.
I see what you’re getting at though. Just in time learning seems to be the way it will be. It’s just frustrating I don’t even have a base to go off of. Pretty much all my background knowledge has come from stuff I learnt outside of uni.
I know your pain. I'm the person who tries a dozen things and when none of them work, then grudgingly reads the manual, etc.
If your base doesn't help you launch, even in a small way, then you need to go below that base, back towards the fundamentals. I'm sure you learnt about logic gates, digital signals, transmission line effects, power glitches, etc. Unless you went to one of the well funded universities with youngish academics, then what you learnt was probably 5+ years behind the current state of the art. Add to that the years since you graduated. That is the knowledge gap in years that you need to traverse to establish an up to date base.
Until recently, I taught post-grad EE/SE (as an ex-industry, adjunct) at one of the country's top universities. My colleagues were dismayed at the inadequacy of STEM education of the first-year students. Year 1 has become a remedial school. Starting from such a low-level of knowledge 2-3 years doesn't provide enough time to teach all that is required to be successful in industry. In the field of digital electronics you typically need 3+ years of industry experience to become competent. Of course, motivated autodidacts can accomplish far more in far less time.
The only maths you'll need at the beginning is basic control engineering (PID Loops), forward/inverse kinematics and Extended Kalman Filtering. The only other thing is maybe V=IR, anything else and you're just placating some professor's ego.