How I Plan to Bootstrap Aspiring Hardware Engineers

by umike • 14 years ago

20 10 14 years ago

iag• 14 years ago

Wow, props to you Mike for actually curating all of your iPhone engineering knowledge and share it with rest of us.

A few questions for you. - How hard was it for you to pick everything up and build the iPhone from scratch? - What do you suggest we do to get access to the equipments in some of these articles? It's pretty out of most people's price range.

Thanks again! This is awesome.

umike5• 14 years ago

iPhone was definitely a team effort, so fortunately I had access to the top engineers at Apple to guide my personal development. The difficulty wasn't really learning the material itself, but rather figuring out what was worth learning. As for equipment, there's workplaces like Hacker Dojo that have community resources, and in a pinch you can rent equipment from places like MetricTest. Oscilloscopes are pretty reasonable, but it's mainly the RF equipment that gets into BMW price territory.

wisechengyi• 14 years ago

nice, could very useful for chinese knock off branch design

umike5• 14 years ago

What's a bit surprising to me is that Chinese manufacturers already know how to do it. They're becoming excellent at manufacturing, while it's become a bit of a lost art over here in the USA. I was lucky that my Caltech college curriculum included so many hands-on projects -- I'm under the impression that many EE majors spend most of their time in IC design. Can any current EE college students confirm?

jpwright• 14 years ago

I can confirm that there is a serious lack of time spent working on hands-on projects in EE curriculum (at Cornell, in my case).

olatief• 14 years ago

There's a ton of good resources in here. Wish I had access to this when I was a TA to point kids in the right direction. It would be great if you could let other people make their own guides. I found that I end up getting asked the same questions over and over again and having something to organize everything would've been extremely helpful.

umike5• 14 years ago

Thank you! If we can get traction, we definitely want to let the community build guides of their own, while leveraging the topics covered in existing guides. I'm hoping this becomes a low-overhead format for experienced engineers to share their accumulated knowledge to students.

anigbrowl• 14 years ago

This is great. My interest in hardware is related to knobular music devices, but there is still a bunch of great relevant content and leads here that will make the learning curve less painful.

umike5• 14 years ago

Thanks! I'm not familiar with knobular music devices (like hi-fi stuff?) Glad I can help, and if you have any suggestions on what other material to add, just let me know!

How I Plan to Bootstrap Aspiring Hardware Engineers

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