

Electrical Engineering student – When do I learn how to make stuff people want? - eddieschod

I feel like I don&#x27;t have much of a grip on how to design hardware and it&#x27;s sad how little I know about programming, but I absolutely love entrepreneurship and creation.<p>Also not sure if my year round school&#x2F;co-op program leads me to not have much free time to learn programming.<p>Can anyone lend me some sage-like advice to help me move forward on my path to learn how to make stuff people want?
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pdx
I am becoming of the opinion that at this point in time, given how easy it is
to make new gadgets, and how many people are doing it, it's not about
engineering, it's about marketing.

Take a look at this site.
[https://www.chinavasion.com/china/wholesale/Electronic_Gadge...](https://www.chinavasion.com/china/wholesale/Electronic_Gadgets/)
Those products are pretty cool, and there are thousands of them that you've
never heard of. Having a cool product is a necessary but not sufficient
condition of having a product that people want. You also have to have a
marketing story that excites people. A cool product without a marketing story
that excites people, will be lost in a vast sea of other products.

As people are exposed to more and more products, they're harder and harder to
impress. In 2001, just having a blue LED on your product was magical, since
blue LEDs were rare at that time. In 2015, you need pulsing RGBW just to be in
the game. In 2006, a bluetooth speaker was a big deal. Now, it better be
submersible, very loud, and run on rechargeable batteries that last over 10
hours.

You'll spend your life designing products that are obsolete ewaste two years
after you release them. How many years of my life I spent designing mp3
players and ipod speakers, all of which are rubbish now.

I guess this went a bit darker than I intended. It is fun to see your stuff in
stores and hear people's delight when they are interacting with something you
have created. Perhaps it doesn't matter that what delights them today will
bore them tomorrow. You delighted them today.

So, to answer your question, build things that delight people. Make it
magical. Create an experience for the user that is not a common experience
that other products can give them. Then they will want what you built.

~~~
yllow
>Having a cool product is a necessary but not sufficient condition of having a
product that people want.

Make stuff that people need and want to have. It's apparently tough , unless
you are not aiming making tons of money.

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sobraj
You are the 'people'. Ask youself what You want. Look around and imagine what
future will be like.Make something, make anything.start is important. End is
never known.

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brudgers
I'm not sure how sage my advice is, but apparently I feel like pontificating.

Although you are as old as you have ever been, you're probably not nearly as
old as you're going to get. Since you're the type of person who knows they
don't know as much as they will know, use that knowledge to plan to know the
things you want to know.

There's a reason Norvig recommends ten years to learn programming...he has
steely eyed high standards for what it means to learn something.

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auxym
If you're wondering _what_ to make, then pg's essay on startup ideas seems
relevant:

[http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html](http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html)

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nicholas73
Try learning how to sell. Sell as a job, sell your ideas to people, sell
yourself by asking someone out. Practice and learn what people want.

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ownedthx
Read about things, and use things, and you will find out about what's missing
from those things (and therefore what people want).

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chrisBob
I am a little unclear about your question. Are you asking how to get the kind
of _real_ hardware skills that you think is missing from school? I think the
much harder problem is figuring out _what_ to make, not _how_ to make it.

If the question is really about how, then I would say to just dive in. Think
of your own fun project, and build the hardware/software to work with it. I
think there is a lot more work involved in a good hobby project than there is
even in most senior design projects in undergrad.

I recommend thinking full one full project to invest a little time/money into.
Plan everything from the enclosure to the hardware and software. For example:
make a dorm room security system that displays the time since the last person
was in your room. Now you will know if someone snuck in while you were in
class. Start with a box[1], layout[2] and order[3] a pcb. Interface with some
hardware[4], and then write the software to tie it all together. If you want a
little help with the soldering then you can also have seeed solder on the
microcontroller for you for just a few dollars more.

Sparkfun also has some great resources if you need tips on how to layout PCBs.

Don't be surprised if you actually need a few revisions on the board before
you get it working, especially on your first one. Its easy to forget something
like the programming port...

Starting from scratch, doing a full buildup, and having a professional looking
finished product will give you a lot of confidence.

If your question was _what_ to make then you are on your own. I have no clue.

[1] [http://serpac.com/wm031x.aspx](http://serpac.com/wm031x.aspx)

[2] [http://www.cadsoftusa.com/download-
eagle/](http://www.cadsoftusa.com/download-eagle/)

[3] [http://dirtypcbs.com](http://dirtypcbs.com) or
[http://www.seeedstudio.com/service/index.php?r=pcb](http://www.seeedstudio.com/service/index.php?r=pcb)

[4]
[https://www.sparkfun.com/products/13285](https://www.sparkfun.com/products/13285)
[https://www.sparkfun.com/products/9261](https://www.sparkfun.com/products/9261)
[https://www.sparkfun.com/products/9393](https://www.sparkfun.com/products/9393)
[https://www.sparkfun.com/products/11993](https://www.sparkfun.com/products/11993)
and
[https://www.sparkfun.com/products/9276](https://www.sparkfun.com/products/9276)

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anigbrowl
You literally have to ask, and ask, and ask. Getting people to give you
specific information about their needs (or feedback on your existing work) is
time-consuming and frustrating, and that's one reason many people just settle
into a job where they just have to please a few colleagues and a manager or
two.

Also, while it's good to be capable and execution is important, don't feel
that you need to be good at everything, because that often leads to biting off
more than you can chew, followed by disillusion and disappointment. I've had
huge struggles with this and so does any curious person - because you can
easily get interested in many things and because you enjoy learning and
problem-solving, you could become very very good at many different things, and
soon you end up feeling that you have to be good at everything, even though
this is not actually practical. It's an extra risk for technically inclined
people, because dealing with technical problems is often easier than dealing
with human problems, and it was your DIY tendencies that led towards studying
engineering in the first place, no? So when you have to deal with people who
are not wired the same way, it can get frustrating, and you have to fight
against the desire to take over everything and Do It Better, (except that you
can't do everything better because there's too much of it).

So two valuable skills to develop are to a) cultivate insight into why you
think you could do any given thing better than you see it being done now, and
b) develop your ability to communicate those insights to other people who are
happy or even anxious to focus on one particular task rather than the whole
ball of wax - and to radically adjust your insights and ideas in (a) because
they will often turn out to be wrong or shallow.

Back at the quotidian but-what-do-i-do-today level, learn to cultivate your
own taste and develop simple things that amuse you rather than looking for the
thing that will allow you to make a spectacular debut. You probably don't have
enough experience yet to imagine those really big things and project your
imagination into all the levels of detail required. So set aside time to make
simple things well. games are good for this - look at Flappy Bird, which is
only a few steps above 'hello world' in game terms - it's just a simple loop
featuring input, update, and collision detection, the absolute bare minimum
for a real-time game. Angry Birds is just a physics library one simple game
mechanism, and some very basic ideas of character animation. And so on.

Since you're an electrical engineering student, you probably know plenty about
topics form hysteresis to antenna design to power supplies to lasers and so on
(my wife's an EE so I know it's a broad umbrella of electives after the core
engineering stuff). Think of something that you found cool but challenging,
and think how could you make a game out of it that would expose the basic
concept to a 6-year old, like where it basically comes down to some non-linear
equation with only two variables or something. Then find a way to get that
working on your phone and call it a game. Give it a silly name and add bright
colors and bold patterns. Consult actual 6-year olds. One great thing about
them is that they haven't fully developed their social conscience yet so if
your idea is overly complex they will tell you that it is stupid. Making toys
is a good way to learn about making tools, and people want both.

