

How I Plan to Bootstrap Aspiring Hardware Engineers - umike
http://bringuplabs.com/hn/0

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iag
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.

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umike
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.

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olatief
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.

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umike
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.

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anigbrowl
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.

~~~
umike
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!

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wisechengyi
nice, could very useful for chinese knock off branch design

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umike
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?

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jpwright
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).

~~~
umike
That's unfortunate! If you know any students who would be interested in my
developing an online hardware engineering course, just send me an email at
mike@bringuplabs.com. Thanks!

