On Home Projects as a Reentry into the Job Market

Sixty pinball machines? Damn, I'm in love.

Back to the main question, I think doing something very public (Makerfaire, Circuit Cellar article, etc) is a good idea to show you at least have a clue.

I suppose not taking an engineering job is better than taking an engineering job you don't want. For instance, you want to design but you take a job in test.

Getting back to Jeri's DIY chip, it is quite possible to do a chip on open source software. It is just a pain in the ass. I guess to be clearer, some of the commercial EDA of say Cadence is just cleaned up Berkeley software. I've played with those open source layout tool and it's pretty ugly, but haven't tried so in years. Once you have a layout, take it to Mosis Obviously you design with their spice parameter file. Basically, it's like how you made chips in college.

Do what you love to do. Even if it doesn't get you the job, you'll have fun doing it, and learn things.

Expecting that a single "whiz-bang" project will get you hired is a mistake. It will carry a lot more weight if it is one of many projects in various areas and of varying complexity.

Ed

Only if it's not done very well, or shows no imagination, like somebody putting a kit together?

Got to scratch your own itch, lots of people ask about learning to program, to move into that area. Well, early '80s I took a five month break from work and 'learned programming'. Along the way I built a Ferguson Big Board Kit, ran cp/m, and was first in my neighbourhood to write the SIO interface for cp/m serial comms for zmodem (or ymodem), also wrote a keyboard macro stuffer that someone else picked up and wrote a UI for. This was in the days of user groups meeting in halls, and the odd rcpm site for swapping info.

Successfully moved from analog electronics design to embedded controllers.

Worth it? Dunno. I stayed too long in one company and painted myself into a specialised corner. In any case I left electronics design in '93, returning not for work, but to catch up on the technology and enjoy making some stuff. Maybe some money in it? But I don't care, got to stay busy.

Looks big? But you got to start somewhere, knowing where to start I find a bit difficult, so I have project on the go for a friend, not for pay, but for the experience, and motivation of producing a needed solution.

Too many people makes solutions for non-problems ;)

Simple, have a go. Once during my recovery way back, a doctor told me to try going back to school, "to do what?" I ask --> Anything you like, he tells me. I did some shorts courses, going nowhere, then went to uni, best move for me -- but you already been there.

Other interests you could add to? Or you model alternate energy with web interface? What I'd like to know is why people put sunseeker motors on their panels when knowing your long+lat and time you know where the sun is in the sky? Or, did I miss something?

Grant.

Yep. You know where to aim today, at xyz o'clock. But that won't be optimum at a different time today, or as days pass. Besides, you can design once for sunseeking for the mechanism that will be installed at your palace in Timbuktu and use the exact same design for a different long+lat for your mansion in Timbukthree. :-)

Ed

You made chips in college? Any others here?

Since they came out? The Lego set must have been found in the closet.

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Don't know about Linux, but I use USAPhotoMaps for Windows. It uses the old USGS data available at the replacement for terraserver.com, don't recall the URL off the top of my head. What's the big deal needing Linux? None of that is very portable. When I need directions or am geocaching or in my kayak, I don't want to have to break out a laptop. I want something to replace the proprietary crap they sell for GPS receivers, not a simple map program on a PC.

Rick

I guess it's more or less expected with open-source hardware designs. Why bother going to open-source hardware the application you meant for it requires the purchase of a commercial OS? -- You might as well buy closed-sourced hardware at that point, as there are plenty of perfectly good single-board computers that run Windows or QNX or other commercial OSes.

Actually I think that the majority of GPS navigation systems (the aftermarket ones for cars) run Linux -- they just license the maps directly from TeleAtlas or NavTech, and have the volume/money to make it viable.

---Joel

I didn't, but the courses (and connected labs) were available. They only did some pretty simple stuff when I was there, though. They were given a complete set of tools for ICs a couple of years after I graduated.

Same here- they had a small fab on campus (maybe 3" wafers) for researchers and grad students. This was before MOSIS.

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HP was doing fabrication for students prior to Mosis. If it is not clear here, the mosis projects were multichip. That is, multiple designs on the same tooling. Very inefficient, but done in companies that have the R&D budget.

I'm trying to recall the computer CAD tools back then. Kick (sp) or Magic (sp too!). I don't know of any universities with a Calma back then. That would have been GDS 1 on Tek storage tubes. If you ever used one, it was buggy wip technology. The GDS 1 was designed for digitizers, not on screen layout. It had a DRC, though not very good.

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The students did the work at UIUC. That was part of the deal.

Well i'll be swaged, it is still around. Cool.

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We are not on the same page here. I'm not talking about a PC. I'm talking about a GPS device... a handheld GPS device. It won't be running Windows or Linux. Trying to power a device running Linux is a loosing battle. How long does an Android cell phone actually run on a charge. I don't mean sleep, I mean run! My GPS receivers run for 12 hours and they are 10 year old technology! A modern GPS receiver needs to run for 20 hours or more to be competitive. Any OS that requires so much memory that it needs an MMU is not an option in a truly hand held device.

Rick

I interviewed a lot of new engineers back in the day. New graduates with a 4.0 average were a dime a dozen and worth about that much. The productive engineers were the ones who had sufficient interest in their craft to try to apply it. I would give MUCH weight to a candidate who had built something on their own and could lucidly describe how it worked.

I graduated college with mediocre grades at a time when nobody was hiring. I got hired by Tektronix primarily because I sent them scope trace pictures, schematics etc. for a sampling oscilloscope front end that I'd built out of old TV parts. Was an entirely useless piece of junk, but it demonstrated that I could do stuff.