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Comment by nether | Hacker News Reader

> Our final design project was our one true chance to show that we could actually build something, and for many teams that too resulted in failure.

This is why student engineering team projects exist. Solar Car, Formula SAE, Human-Powered Helicopter etc. Also, most mechanical engineering jobs are in fact not hands-on, are not "design this radically new machine" (more like "tweak this design so it meets slightly different requirements"), and certainly not turning a lathe (that's for technicians/machinists). Putting more design experience into an ME curriculum means taking out some of the analysis/theory (it takes a long time to build stuff, that's why engineering and manufacturing are separate departments), which is a disservice to the students heading toward pure research and academia.

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I once heard a friend of mine who complain that engineers are too disconnected from their work. They would design the thing but never once go and actually checkout the physical products that they designed.

I wonder if including things like "turning a lathe" would benefit engineering students. They could in theory design a part to accomplish a certain task (maybe design a fan blade that's unconventional) and analyze it, compare with how it is traditionally done, and so forth.

Either way, one of the best feelings in engineering for me is go draw a 3D rendering for a class and watch it show up as something I can hold in my hand 2 weeks later. No amount of deploying/pushing/launching in software can ever beat that, yet.

"Either way, one of the best feelings in engineering for me is go draw a 3D rendering for a class and watch it show up as something I can hold in my hand 2 weeks later. No amount of deploying/pushing/launching in software can ever beat that, yet."

Embedded development offers this gratification.

I'm currently trying to shift my out-of-hours efforts over to more hardware work (Raspberry Pi, Arduino, now Udoo and Cubieboard).

I feel like I'm missing a huge amount of electronics knowledge as soon as I see a discussion about how such and such a trace has been misplaced on a revision of a board or how certain pins could have been better used as an extra SD card reader (ref: the Udoo board)

Is there a less time-intensive way to pick up an understanding of hardware (I'm currently a software guy) than to go an do an ME or EE? I'm certainly not looking for an easy way out but at the moment it feels like trying to go from crawling to supersonic flight.

Have you looked at nand2tetris? http://www.nand2tetris.org/

Going even farther back up the chain there's stuff like this: http://www.jpmsupply.com/servlet/the-1082/AM,-Radio,-Solder/...

NAND2Tetris looks fantastic, thank you!

Actually, building and playing with published Raspberry Pi or Arduino projects wouldn't be too bad a way to go. Most of the designs are open, and hobbyists tend not to overcomplicate things. See how many layers of the onion you can peel back, or what small changes you can make.

Choose a board and see how much mileage you can get out of it.

For the lowest level nuts and bolts, Horowitz and Hill's _Art of Electronics_ is still a classic. Going through the first few chapter exercises will get you thinking in terms of voltages and currents.

Heh, I seem to lose motivation after the first set of blinkenlights, or (this week) when I burnt out my one buzzer by misreading which resistor it needed.

I think I'll go back to a breadboard for a while - Art of Electronics looks like what I need right now.

Edit: Egads! $150AUD for that book

Try for an older edition, second hand. The fundamentals haven't changed.

In fact, that brings up an idea for a way that hardware is sometimes easier than software. The laws of physics that constrain our designs don't go obsolete every 2 weeks.

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