Is it possible to teach yourself electrical engineering

I suspect that it might be better as a reference for a project than a self-study textbook. I ended up reading through "Foundations of Analog and Digital Electronics" and was quite happy with it. Though I believe there are other textbooks that are more commonly used for learning basic circuit analysis. The last chapter is on linear feedback systems so you'll get a bit of the control theory background there.

Not sure what I want to read next I have no real goal in mind here outside of an interest in RF , just reading for fun.

Same here. In fact, all of the courses on their website are pretty good, I would say comparable to what you would get at a university minus the TA support when things don't work.

It assumes you're coming from an EE background though, so it would be helpful to do the fundamentals first. It's generally not part of a normal EE curriculum, but really should be! Being able to draw a schematic or lay out a circuit board will be useful if you have any advanced projects you want to try at home. Especially with cheap fabs like OshPark it's a good skill to have. Hi, I have degrees in EE and Physics. Purcell is a physics book, but I think with your math background it might be fine?

Circuit design is kind of unsatisfying these days since on the professional side there's a lot of throwing stuff in the simulator, especially with IC design. I'm an advocate for more hands-on stuff.

For the absolute basics I feel there's no substitute for getting some LEDs, resistors, breadboard, and multimeter, and doing some kid level projects. Then there's audio projects, and RF projects, since once you've learned the textbook fundamentals of amplifiers, there's no substitute for building some.

But honestly, do you really want to get distracted from your main focus? You may have lost interest by the time you're done with the curriculum. There's a lot you can get done by forging ahead and just learning what you need to as you go along.

Why learn amplifier design when the industry is all too happy to sell you a black box gain block? Why learn digital design when microcontrollers are getting faster and cheaper all the time? Electrical engineering is very hands-on. Reading the textbooks should not be 1 on your list. You do need a solid base, but once you have it, you'll get more from building and testing circuits than from reading more textbooks.

It strikes the right balance between theory and practice. You will need to dig deeper in some theoretical areas later, but this will give you a very good starting point. This is the material from last year; I think they will be running a summer school again this year so you might be able to join and learn as part of a group. In particular the Applications chapter contains a summary of everything I used most often from back in my EE days Fourier transforms, circuits, least-squares, etc.

OnlyOneCannolo 7 months ago prev next [—]. Some of your reference materials are overkill and better suited to guided classes than self-study. For basic circuits and electronics, I'd recommend Electronics with Professor Fiore. It's comprehensive with free lecture videos, textbooks, and lab manuals. That's pretty much the core of EE.

Everything else is a specialization. TrackerFF 7 months ago prev next [—]. My main concern is that you won't get anywhere near of lab-time. More importantly - many of those lab projects require: 1. Expensive equipment. Schools spend a lot of money on these things, and have in-house engineers that perform maintenance, updates, repairs on them. These are normally not things you can just build over the weekend, and then use for self-learning. Hell - in many cases, Bachelors Thesis projects consist of building stuff like that, and then validating the generated data measurements, etc.

Sure - one can simulate A LOT of things today, but there are things you need to work on with your hands, in order to learn something useful.

As somebody who got self-learned into electronics engineering on the workplace, I'd say self-learning is the hard way. Engineering everywhere is very hands on, and you cannot be an "engineer in theory only" if you want to perform on a job. Not to disparage you, I know many people who were similarly dragged into electronics engineering by necessity, and got to the level of degreed engineers over many years.

COB But those guys had years, and years to perfect their skills in a time when the industry was more forgiving, and was growing with their skill.

I would say that today, nobody will hire a 18 year guy who was just an electronics hobbyist to a factory, that was not the case years ago. What I can say against modern electronics engineering education is that excessive focus on producing "workplace ready" cadres makes for worse workers past the basic level. I know people who are quite adept with digital electronics, but can't even understand how anything but textbook versions of SMPS power supplies work because of universities thought that analog circuits are now what people pay for.

This the same for many more fields in electronics. I did not study this at school! In phase 2 for analog circuits and DSP you should brush up on discrete math, calculus, and most importantly learn Laplace transforms. OP here. Nice, thanks! I didn't put math down because my undergrad was in applied math and I got to use it a lot early in my career.

But sounds like I'll definitely need a refresher. The former, in particular, is not something that you are likely to acquire on your own. You and I share a love for Purcell. However it has little to do with EE. It is a physics book, and EE is not physics. You will never use or need to even know that the magnetic field arises from a relativistic transformation of the linear charge density of a current.

I have a recommendation. Become an expert in LTSpice. And if you are going digital, you need to learn VHDL. I thought about doing this a while back, but I quickly gave up. Part of it is likely to my extremely poor math education in fairness. The core of EE is Fourier analysis and BCI is no exception but you should be strong there because you've studied applied math. Most of your target books are good after your HN update, but one thing you are missing that will probably make a big difference are some books on measurement science.

Eventually you'll also want to touch on some non-linear and statistical control which play into the implementation of the more modern cutting edge BCIs. DSP overlaps a lot with this but still has some uniqueness you'll need to learn to put things into practice. Parallelism is the name of the game, and analog performance requirements aren't super strict so you won't be designing custom ICs any time soon unless you want to work on the probe interfaces themselves which are more MEMS than circuit design but need a little of both.

Something like Medical Instrumentation: Application and Design by Webster is a great place for a beginner who wants to toy with human interfacing circuits. Back it up with something like The Art of Electronics and that will get you to professional lab tech territory. I've wanted to do the same for a while now, but I'm unable to find a curriculum that lists the textbook for each subject.

It looks like the article author is just "guessing" textbooks. I'm browsing the U. Waterloo curriculum and it doesn't specify any books. The article is still useful, don't get me wrong, but I would love to see a list of the textbooks that are actually used at a university program. I've Googled it many times and I only find the names of the courses. The higher the course the lower the confidence of having the right book.

Araldo 7 months ago prev next [—]. The plan looks quite complete, similar to the list of courses I did in university. I remember I also did a power electronics course which I didn't see in your list. Fabrication of a chip is not really feasible to do at home.

The chemicals you might be able to get, but not the equipment. Why don't you go to Amazon and buy some books on brain-computer interfaces, start reading them and when you get stuck read the relevant electrical engineering information? You can filter for courses that have lecture videos, notes, etc. These courses are usually very well organized and taught by some of the best professors in the world.

Electrical engineer turned software engineer, here. The Art of Electronics by Horowitz and Hill has a permanent place on my desk. Don't try to do too much at once, you won't get anywhere. You probably got inspired by the recent growth of interest in BCIs, right?

Please realize how complicated that subject is - it dwarfs AI and it's closest applications like self driving by one or two orders of magnitude, depending on who you talk to. You will know once you start. Don't plan too much - pick a realistic goal and just start. Build a clock. Program a microcontroller. Log your heartbeat. Measure your brainwaves with OpenBCI. Build a feedback loop of some kind. Get a feeling for it. It will make math of EE, particularly the interaction between electricity and magnetism Maxwell's equations a lot easier to understand.

WaitWaitWha 7 months ago prev next [—]. Depending on the level of electronics background, I have great luck have people fall in love with the subject using Forrest M. Mims III authored books. Given that you already have a job and a family to support at some point? I also had a hardware interest later my career and my approach was slightly different. I found an embedded systems job that pays about 3 times less than what I used to get paid since I have no experience.

It is definitely fun and I learn a lot, but I definitely don't have the financial freedoms that I used to have. I'm not sure which is the correct approach, but surely there is no "easy" way of getting there. Please have in mind that this is a very serious time and financial in my case commitment that you are about to make. Buy some BCIs and reverse engineer them, possibly. Maybe try to improve them. You might want to reach out to the authors of the papers you've been reading for advice.

Neuralink put a BCI in a pig so try figuring out how they did it, and maybe they'll give you a job? Even Elon's pitch for recruitment during that presentation was "we don't know much about the brain anyway", and mostly just want you to have solved hard problems. There likely won't be a straight-forward path since this stuff isn't commercialized yet.

A little surprised to find that many of the books are the same. Noticeably absent from the curriculum is anything to do with gate-level electronic design, which makes up a vast percentage of the bulk of electronics.

I sometimes wonder how much of the practical and theoretical know-home related to designing modern cutting-edge silicon is actually buried in the brains of private sector workers and how much of it makes it back to academia. Being able to get signals from the real world, and manipulate them via a flowgraph lets you do far more hands on than years of labs used to. I had a lot of fun figuring out how to decode and display the local VOR beacon near my house. You can also play with audio frequencies, and your microphone and speakers Neat idea.

I have been wanting to do something like this for a long time to really understand Wireless RF. Everything in GNU radio is a flowgraph a fancy flowchart, actually a directed acyclic graph. The thing is you can take an existing flowgraph, modify it, and see what happens in about 30 seconds. Nicely written. For certain. Would it be cruel to suggest that you might want to advance a bit more before weighng in?

I'd say that semiconductor physics, real math, control systems, real mixed signal and a couple of others should get a go Again- I mean no cruelty in my comments, but seems as if modern curricula are not teaching a person what a person needs to know to go into any related industry job And I could be wrong - as I often am.

They should imho be teaching the ability to learn and adapt to changing and emerging technologies, and to think critically. I'm still using the mathematics I learned in college, to understand things that didn't exist back then such as elliptic curve cryptography.

Well, I don't know how old you were, but ECC has existed in college for a long time - but may not have been so useful to a lot of engineers building machines for sure , at the time.

You might find the following books in addition to those listed by others here helpful; Practical Electrical Engineering by Makarov et.

I would spend more time understanding your motivation for brain computer interfaces. It seems more like a research project with some applications to neurodegenerative diseases, but to actually get anything done you'll need to master several fundamental texts which takes most people years.

Spending just a week or two talking to all the experts could save a lot of wasted effort. Avtomatk 7 months ago prev next [—]. And why not build a team with professionals in each field?

Create a cooperative. I am currently investigating more efficient forms of study which would imply creating a new language for the compression of academic text which is often very long and not very accessible to inexperienced people.

Whoever is interested in studying with me, my email is: fabricioteran06 gmail. Then there's also biomedical engineering stuff, i. I would add this cheap book to anyone interested in EE, or fooling around with circuits.

I disagree; this book is too shallow and uneven. I would suggest a dive into neural networks from the bottom up. Getting the electrical interface is the physical part. For a real brain interface though it's probably going to look like NN at the interface from a software point of view. I would suggest adding Communication Systems by John Proakis. It is the seminal text for digital comms and should be included, given the plan's foray into SDRs.

This is fantastic. I love it. How much time does this person have to devote to this? I think a lot depends on what your goal is. Is it to better understand the methods section in the papers you are reading, or do you want to do some experimental work, or you have a job you are going after, or This is extremely broad and ambitious. Younger me would have said go for it as I loved to learn everything, but older me has forgotten much of the stuff that I so much loved to learn, so I moved to the camp of learning what you need.

Unfortunately I don't know too much about brain-computer interfaces, especially if it's cutting edge research. Some purists might argue on which side of the equation an inductor voltage should be, but it has zero practical effect. Also, this is a book for usually the second physics course in college, so you might have done that already and just need a refresher. The chemistry book is mostly irrelevant for EE, although in the neuroscience case it's more applicable if we are talking about invasive electrodes but still, probably too general and broad.

Books on integrated circuits depend a bit on whether you need to learn about some other topics that are not usually presented on their own, such as fast amplifiers, mixers, oscillators, etc with CMOS technology.

And I'm going to guess that for BCIs the frequencies involved are quite low, so this whole branch might be irrelevant. Probably you'll need to learn the basics of data converters to digitize the brain signals, but again I'm not sure this warrants going through a course versus just the wikipedia page and a datasheet of a specific part you want to use.

Maybe this textbook? Integrated Analog Electronics Maybe this? Rabaey, A. Chandrakasan, and B. Nikolic Radio Wave Systems. Textbook: find one Digital Control Systems. Do I need this? Find a textbook. Radio Frequency Integrated Devices and Circuits. Radio and Wireless Systems.

Is this different from other RF systems courses? 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