Seeking for suggestions from embedded professionals

If you already have experience with H/W design and these designs contained microcontrollers and you also have C/C++ experience (I guess on computer platforms?) then you are >>80% of the way to being an embedded engineer already.

I doubt there is a formal qualification you NEED to acquire. I would advise picking an architecture, gaining some experience with it, assembling a portfolio, and approaching potential employers.

Some people will argue with this comment but I don't recommend you position yourself either as a "just firmware" guy or a "just hardware" guy. I'd advise you to make the most of the synergy. Employers want people with experience on both sides of the HW/SW fence.

Also if you have 5+ years of hardware experience, I'd suggest you aim at an intermediate-level position rather than entry level, even though you are changing fields.

You already have something that many embedded designers lack - formal qualifications in a related field. Now go and read a book or two, get a small contract, come back here for advice, and learn on the job.

Try these books:

-- Joe Legris

Hi,

If you know c/c++, the best way might be follow the books previously mentioned. It may be good idea to learn RTOS concenpts. This will be useful in developing real time systems. There are many free RTOS are available on the net like ecos,RTlinux.

Regards

As an earlier poster said, if you can do hardware and program in C/C++ you are

80 percent of the way there.

Some things to try:

Try to find a local consultant that is doing embedded development that needs some help with the hardware side. Try to form a relationship and work on shared projects.

Where are you located?

Try to build some kind of embedded device from scratch. Make sure you understand the software aspects specific to embedded design such as Linker scripts, memory maps etc... Often with some thing like C/C++ or java on a PC you don't even see that part of the compiler setup.

You could buy a 32 bit embedded devkit and play with that.

An Arm, Coldfire, PPC, I'm personally partial to our products ;-)

Try :

The world seems to be moving toward 32 bit parts even in applications that were formerly

8 bit, as a result I would shy away from such 8 bitters as the Z-80 , 8051 or Rabbit. If you think the work your looking for will be in minimalist systems then maybe do some 8 bit stuff. I personally like the AVR for tiny devices. See

You say that you are proficient at C/C++, the exact details of this will make some difference. If you've always used the project builder wizard witn microsoft visual C then you have more to learn than if you have been hand assembling makefiles for a linux system.

Study the GCC manuals with specific attention to the linker. Make sure you know what CRT0 is and what it does. (the startup code)

Paul

CTO NetBurner.

I'm with larwe on this issue. Having myself started in electronics back in

1969 and picking up the programming of micro-controllers (my first was the 6800 in the early 70's) as I went. Latter employers seemed to appreciate having someone with experience on both sides of the hardware/software divide. The dichotomy also allowed me to see simpler solutions than would have been obvious from the standpoint of just a hardware or software point of view.

You, the OP, are already a long way towards having all you need to be a good embedded systems engineer. You just need to see a few projects under your belt that require both the hardware and software to be done by you. Whether this is an own (documented) project or one for an outfit willing to hire you on-spec would not matter.

On the topic of doing home-grown projects, be sure to document the project in a suitably detailed fashion which would indicate the development process you used to produce it.

--
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