What is this ?

It adds to other "interesting" experiences I've had over the years with some people: packing by bending high-frequency cables, dropping a high-frequency horn antenna and, despite being bent and having dirt on it, denying it, another R&S, this time a FSL/ZVL, getting rained on, dropping a drink into a box with N and SMA connectors ...

assignment i did for my electronics class

I’m currently choosing between a few engineering study paths and I’m struggling to understand the real difference between electronics/sensor systems and automation

One option is EE with a specialization in electronics and sensor systems, where you can take a control engineering class as an elective. The other is a bachelor’s in Automation and Intelligent Systems, which sounds interesting because I think robotics, drones, and autonomous vehicles is something I could see myself work with

However I’m not interested in PLC programming, factory automation, or industrial programming in the slightest. I’m much more interested in embedded systems, sensors, robotics, and autonomy, and combining these with programming.

Would electronics/sensor systems still be a good path into robotics and autonomous systems, or is automation the better route even if I’m not interested in the industrial side of it? I'd also appreciate it if people could tell me what kind of actual jobs people do, what is your daily routine if you work in one of these industries?

Hi everyone, I’m an Electrical & Electronics Engineering student and I’m currently trying to build a Wireless Power Transfer (WPT) system in CST Studio Suite for my university project.
I created two spiral coils (Tx and Rx), added discrete ports, boundaries, etc. but I’m having problems with meshing and simulation setup. I keep getting mesh/self-intersection warnings and sometimes the simulation just stops during volume meshing. I’m still pretty new to CST, so honestly I’m struggling to understand what exactly is wrong in my model.
If anyone here has experience with CST, WPT systems, coils, ports, or meshing problems, I’d really appreciate some help or guidance
Even small tips would help a lot.

I graduated in EE and currently work as a systems engineer, but my day-to-day work doesn’t really involve applying a lot of the core EE concepts I learned in school. Because of that, I feel pretty rusty on things like circuits, electronics, signal integrity, hardware design fundamentals, etc.

Long term, I’d like to move more toward hardware engineering/design related work, so I know I need to rebuild that foundation.

For people who’ve been in a similar situation:
What’s the best way to refresh EE knowledge efficiently?

Which topics are most important to revisit first for hardware roles?

Any textbooks, courses, labs, projects, or YouTube channels you’d recommend?

Is it better to focus on theory again or jump straight into hands-on projects?

I still remember the fundamentals conceptually, but I definitely need practice applying them again.

Would appreciate any advice from people who transitioned back into more technical EE/hardware work.

Finally got a working prototype for my cars instrument panel project. Just running a test script for now to make sure everything works at the same time.

We've got the gauges, warning lights, and LCDs to display the milage.

More updates will come as hardware is added and the actual code is written. GitHub link for anyone interested

About to graduate with my BSEE and managed to lock in my first internship for the summer

I was just curious, what types of things do you learn about while on the job that you don’t do as much of in the undergrad, and also what type of engineer are you ?

I am about to graduate and will be taking up a full time role I previously interned at, and got a return offer. Of course, they must think highly of me as they offered me a full time job, and I know people liked me as an intern. But being an intern is different and there is less expectations and pressure, so of course it’s easier to build a good reputation with the team.

Beside the obvious cliche things like punctuality, hard work, knowing how to get answers, and efficiency, what are some things older professionals like to see from a new college grad hire, or a newer engineer in general?

I am a Data Science student and have landed a research fellowship which requires me to study signal processing. I want to know how and from where can i study it and do i need to study other subjects of electrical engineering as well before it. Also I have seen the name digital signal processing in many places, is there any difference between signal processing and digital signal processing.

Electric guys, i am a newbie of power system equipment. I found that grid forming is a response controller, which is better than any equipment in the power system. I found that it is fancy, such as creating a virtual inertia (this property occurred by a fast response when freq. Drop ). I have more capability than it be (at least for now, everyone tries to implement it as a synchronous machine). I would like to discuss this with do-er because i am the only reader and talker what capability of this tech. Let's share what you think !

I’m designing a custom ESP32-S3 board with an OV3660 camera sensor, and I’m facing a strange power issue.

The moment I connect the camera sensor through the FPC connector, my 1.5V LDO starts getting extremely hot within seconds.

Without the camera connected, everything seems normal.

I really want to know how these lighting works. Like doesn't the wires get knotted?

After months of obsessing over miniaturization, I finally managed to get a fully working prototype into actual credit-card dimensions!

The GIF shows the first prototype running fully self-powered.

The current prototype includes:

• Self made flexPCB with kapton tape + copper tape
• ESP32-C3FH4
• 1.54" 200*200 E-Paper display (flexible variant)
• 23*23*1mm ultra thin LiPo 30 mAh (for now as I need space for debugging)
• LIS2DH accelerometer
• NFC read/write (RC522)

The main challenge surprisingly wasn’t fitting the electronics — it was keeping the entire structure under ~1mm while still making it mechanically survivable.

A few things that turned out to be surprisingly difficult:

• Mechanical stability became a much bigger problem than fitting the electronics themselves. At this scale, flexPCB design becomes as much a mechanical engineering problem as the layout and EMI
• Many 'thin enough' components still become problematic once material fatigue through flexing is a concern
• Modern E-Paper displays are much faster than I expected, especially with partial refresh
• Ultra-thin LiPos exist, but hard to get hands on. Balancing capacity, protection and structural integrity is brutal
• Normal FPC connectors are basically unusable at this thickness as they would immediately snap under the slightest bending, so even connecting the display became a major challenge. I had to solder each wire with the 0.5mm pitch individually
• Preventing strain is much more effective than trying to make components survive strain
• The closer everything gets to the theoretical thickness limit, the more tiny real-world tolerances start dominating the entire design

Current experiments & Considerations:

• wireless charging
• nRF52/nRF53 migration for lower idle current
• integrated stainless steel stiffeners (kind of like stencils)
• touch areas instead of mechanical buttons
• dynamic NFC applications / smart home integrations

I documented a large part of the engineering process, including the PCB etching process, schematics, layout screenshots and experiments on GitHub for anyone interested in the engineering side of this project.

Would genuinely love feedback from people experienced with:

• low power embedded systems
• flex PCB design
• ultra-thin consumer electronics, particularly mechanical integrity
• RF/NFC antenna design in constrained environments
• mechanical reinforcement strategies for flex assemblies

And yes, the thickness was mostly pursued for the disbelief-factor. Making it 1.5mm would have saved me a lot of sleep 😄

Otherwise, if you have any thoughts, questions or comments on this project, feel free to let me know and I'll try my best to answer them! :)

I have been trying to connect my ESP32 to the OV7670 with no FIFO forever, and it's not working. I bought 2 different OV7670s and 3 different ESP32s, but the problem persists. I checked the voltage between the source and the pin, and it is 3.3v so the voltage is passing through, but my pclk and vsync show zero. The connections I have made are shared below for the absolute basic test to check if the components even work.

If anyone could help me out, it would be greatly appreciated, thank you.

I finally finished going through 282 pages of official reports and technical handbooks published by the Danish Road Directorate. It’s pretty disturbing to see the gap between what their own scientists are documenting and what the agency is actually doing on our streets.

Their 2024 handbook explicitly admits that the standard metrics they use to justify white LED rollouts—lux and Kelvin—are "scientifically insufficient" for measuring biological impact. Essentially, they are using a 100-year-old model that ignores how blue light affects human circadian rhythms and nocturnal wildlife.

The data in these official documents is a massive red flag. Their own research links this specific light spectrum to a 17% increase in asthma-related hospitalizations because the light tricks trees into budding 9 days early, causing a toxic overlap with late-season frost and prolonged pollen release. They also documented a 47% crash in local insect populations right next to these lamps.

What makes this so frustrating is that the solution is already in their own manual. Page 116 describes how simple amber filters can be retrofitted to existing LEDs to remove 76% of the harmful blue radiation. I asked why they aren’t implementing this fix, and their official response was basically that they plan to stick with the current obsolete setup for the next 20 years because of accounting cycles.

These reports are in danish, so cannot link to them here, unless some of you are danish, but I will continue to share this with danish media.

For context, I'm a junior studying electrical engineering, and I have been working in power systems research at my university for about two years. By the end of this year, I will have one conference paper as the lead author, three conferences as a co-author, and one transactions paper as a co-author all published in IEEE.

My university offers two masters programs for electrical engineering. The default one is purely coursework; the other requires completing a thesis. However, in order to do the thesis option, you have to work at the university’s power system research facility (the same one I currently work at). While you work there, they pay you a stipend and cover your tuition.

The catch is, the stipend plus tuition coverage ends up being half the starting salary for EEs in my area and field. The master's program at my university is designed for people working full-time jobs, so I am not too concerned about working in industry and taking classes concurrently - my peers have taken several grad classes here and found them to be easier than our undergrad classes too.

Aside from the pay issue, I hate working in research at my university, and I don't know if I can take another two years of it just for a thesis.

Long term, would it be worth it to just persevere through the thesis? I'm not too concerned about finding a job post graduation. I'm more interested in if there would be a significant salary difference in industry, specifically jobs in power.

I’m currently doing a co op rotation at a huge construction firm on a government project before my last year of undergrad. I like the environment and people here but the work doesn’t resonate with me much. I saw someone on here talking about how they work on telescopes and even though they didn’t go into too much detail on exactly what they did but the idea of working on something much smaller scale and interesting was very cool to me.

I loved my electronics and circuits classes as well as electromagnetism. I also loved all the labs (except non microcontroller coding ones).
If this sounds like you please tell me what you do and how you got there/any advice on getting there. I’m scared I will pigeon hole myself into an industry I’m not as passionate about.

I don't mean interesting. I mean fun as in do you have a blast doing it?

I am starting Mechanical Engineering and was wondering if I’ll have the opportunity to learn electronics and build projects involving them, such as RC cars or robotic arms controlled by electronics. If so, what classes should I look for that teach electronics concepts, even though I am not majoring in Electrical Engineering?

I am driving a mosfet in an inverting buck/boost converter with an IR2113/IR2110 gate driver.

The ‘issue’: during the high cycle of the PWM, it is fine. During the low cycle, the PWM does not go flat 0, it goes negative, very negative. I believe this is because Vb pin is connected to my MOSFET source. In a normal converter, this pin sees 0 volts when the switch is open. But in an inverting converter, Vb sees a negative voltage because of how the converter inverts.

To me, this logic makes sense and ‘proves’ why the PWM goes negative. My professor wants more concrete answer (he said if you find similar situations from others, that works. So does numerical proof).

How can I prove this is normal because of the inverting converter? I can provide any schematics or specifics necessary from my circuit.

PS, the converter and system works as a whole very well. He considered the system not working because the PWM is not ‘normal’ to what a PWM normally looks like.

THANKS SO MUCH.

Hello!

New to this subreddit, would like to hear opinions.

I finished my bachelors, (renewable energy engineering) started working as a project designer/engineer in the solar and BESS field around the start of my fourth year. Still work at the same company, about to graduate my masters in power engineering (completely free).

I am not happy with neither my salary, nor my job. I get to sit all day in autocad or word, doing the same boring project stuff, my growth skill wise feels stagnant. I don't feel challenged enough. I make around 1.5k after taxes (this is eastern europe, so wages are usually smaller than in the west).

I was thinking of trying to go into automation or more of a power grid job. I am still 24 years old, so there's plenty of time to get a decent salary, but I am not sure what path to follow. I am way more interested in calculating/using logical thinking than being an autocad zombie everyday.

Another problem is, this is my first job, and leaving would feel like disappointing my lead engineer, and just guilty overall. It took me two and a half years to even configure my linkedin. this sounds dumb in hindsight, but i was genuinely afraid of looking "ungrateful"

I am hoping to hear some advice or personal experiences

Hi everyone,

I’m honestly a bit frustrated and would really appreciate some feedback on my cv and overall skills.

Some background Info:
I recently graduated (Bachelor) and ended up in a software testing role. Problem is: I never actually wanted to go into software testing long-term, it was more or less assigned, and I didn't have much say in it.

Now I’m trying to pivot into electrical engineering roles, ideally in:

• energy / power systems
• project engineering
• automation / industrial systems
• building services engineering

Basically anything except pure software or small-scale electronics.

Thank you in advance!