People love to hate. Insted of using this post to give back with the link of courses knowledge etc, just rage. And we wonder why the world is in such state...
Totally free, don't need to buy anything just a computer.
I've been designing electrical hardware for robots for the last 4 years for a big corporation and I can tell you, the fun and money is in the software but having another skill is awesome. Robotics is a place where multiple fields converge and if you find a good team they will help you to grow.
Embedded is the adjacent field after you complete the course. Maybe something like zephyr project.
If you want to get you feet wet with mechanical. Buy a A1 mini and play with onshape (www.onshape.com) to design your first pieces, supports for the motors or the board, try create you own gripper.
As for the electrical engineering, is the one with most pitfalls and the most expensive. A wrong voltage will release the magical smoke and is another 30$ for a board. Tread carefully. Start with the RP2040 or the RP2350, they are cheap and well documented. This skill will evolve hand by hand with the embedded coding. Start small. Learn about H-bridge and brushed motors before doing the jump to the bigboys and FOC control with brushless. Get a cheap soldering iron. If you can, a clone of the JBC C245 tips. Is the most versatile and you can find stuff in alie xpress for 45 or 50$ and would be similar to the tools you will find in the field without breaking the bank.
Search for ROS meetups. I could point you to some depending where in the world you are.
And above all, it will be a long journey. Don't dispear, do at your own time but don't forget the objective.
I'm in the field and I disagree with the initial direction of this post. You aren't going to 'learn robotics' in a meaningful manner by checking the boxes in a online ROS2 course.
Robotics is a compound discipline which pairs mechanical and electrical engineering knowledge with mathematics and software development. In order to get meaningful practice in all of these areas, I would recommend re-implementing a robot vacuum from 'scratch'.
The actual vacuum part is non-essential, as you're really trying to implement the famous 'turtle' robot and experience all the design steps/compromises/challenges first hand. As a goal, aim for autonomous navigation around your home that works equivalently to a cheap 'throwaway' robo-vac.
Keep in mind you are surrounded by robotics. Most passenger vehicles, consumer drones, micro-mobility devices and modern construction equipment are 'robots in varying degrees of disguise'. Practical knowledge regarding any of these systems transfers well if you know where to apply it.
It's similar, but the advice should be good for a software professional. It's an actionable, well-documented goal which takes you through the basics you're likely to care about. If any step needs some extra explanations, the choice of project guarantees you can find hundreds of good resources for that step in particular. With that basic background, next steps will be easier to find and understand.
There was no advice provided other than to "look it up". That's not particularly helpful for someone new to the field and overwhelmed by the amount of resources and approaches. If you are aware of "documentation" it would be more useful to provide links to such resources for someone just getting started.
A solid resource for me getting started was the textbook Probabilistic Robotics. It may not be state of the art but I feel it is a great resource on the topic -
I did a very basic version of this and it was a lot of fun. I bought a chassis online with tank treads that each had a motor. I used an Arduino to send the signal to each tread to turn and a distance sensor so it knew when it was arriving at an object. If it sensed that something was in front of it, it just turned 90 degrees and kept going.
Super simple but it felt like a big accomplishment to get that far.
Where would you recommend someone to start from a more data-sciencey background, algorithms like VSLAM look interesting to mess around with but building a whole robot just to do so seems daunting.
> And above all, it will be a long journey. Don't dispear, do at your own time but don't forget the objective.
My biggest issue with robotics is that I don't see the point in any objective.
Building a cool robot feels like it's just a toy to me, and I don't know how to get around that feeling. I studied mechatronics at uni and spent a long time learning on my own in addition.
Robotics for business is almost a cliff, very hard to get into and make something that works reliably at a reasonable cost, from a solo developer point of view
>very hard to get into and make something that works reliably at a reasonable cost, from a solo developer point of view
I mean yes, otherwise they'd be even more robotic stuff wandering about
In products they have the trade off triangle where you can pick things like fast-cheap-good, pick any two.
In robots it's cheap-reliable-featureful pick any one.
The problem with the term 'cool' is it sets no boundaries. Those constraints limit your costs and scope. That's the hard part for most people when they think about cool.
And reliable is more of a time factor (+effort). QA on products takes a massive amount of time and effort to figure out what is not reliable.
> As for the electrical engineering, is the one with most pitfalls and the most expensive. A wrong voltage will release the magical smoke and is another 30$ for a board. Tread carefully.
I enjoyed reading "Exploring Beaglebone" by Derek Molloy a few years ago, because the book has sections "how to destroy your beaglebone" and "how to interface with electronics". The website seems broken. The book's ISBN is 978-1-118-93512-5. Some of the recommendations there (voltage clamping circuit on the 1.8 V analog inputs) can save your board.
Microcontrollers and PLC are historically different fields that have some overlap as the fields converge somewhat. PLC come from relay logic and so learning Ladder Logic and playing with a cheaper Automation Direct PLC might be good if you're looking to do control systems like industrial machines and those robotics. RPi series micros are good to learn embedded electronics, servo controls and Realtime OS. Computer Engineering and Control System Engineering are treated differently even in the California State Engineering License Exams, so they tend to be different paths but the skills have some overlap. My degree was in computer engineering and didn't cover any PLC, but I contract and PLC comes up a lot in one-off things that need to be reliable.
Yeah. As some has said already PLC are more oriented to robotic arms in factories etc, where space is not a premium. Robots like anymal from anybotics, spot from boston dynamics or the unidog from unitree to name a few don't use PLC at all due to lack of space. Also energy efficiency, mcu at most will push less than a watt to move something complex, a motor control for the FOC, I mentioned earlier.
I worked for the past 4 years in HP siteprint.The main problem was developing all to fit inside a pelican case that you could check in on a plane. The smallest PLC was almost the full internal volume of the robot. That's why I said microcontrollers, more ready available to experiment at home, faaaaaaaar more cheaper and those two, very well documented. STM32 in europe is the big player but is harder to get into, the documentation tends to be cahotic.
Though by total coincidence, it looks like I'm about to inherit responsibility for a fleet of Raspberry Pies that manage dashboards on a factory production floor. But they are older, and it's probably just going to be like managing any other low spec Debian server, albeit connected to a monitor.
Mmmm true, but will not replace a good coder. The software team has been experimenting with AI. Is useful and can guide you to do a Proof of concept fast but if you want to start doing very specific custom stuff all crumbles down fast.
In the next years? Yeah I see resolving path planning without a doubt or reverse kinematics or object recognition, for example. AI will be another tool, one you have to learn to use it. But replacing a full software guy... I don't see it, to be honest. I see it more like in the novel Beyond the Blue Event Horizon. The first chapters explains AI as the AI agents that are being rolling out nowdays. But they will be more like what a junior engineer is to a senior, more than replacing a full team of engineers.
All we really need for the robotics AI revolution is to deploy many tens of thousands of well built, cheap, reliable robots sold at a profit that customers get tons of utility out of, get petabytes of data back from them while complying with data privacy regs, train a model on this data on a few thousand H200s, and then deploy that model back to the robots, repeating the cycle every few weeks. The rest will be easy.
AI trivializes coding: the complexity and scope of robot software will increase.
Robotics-oriented ML trivializes current robot design problems: demand for robotics engineers increases, the projects do cooler things but the day-to-day gets less interesting.
actually is 1/6th gravity, because you are going to produce it on the moon. I don't know how long the process is but maybe a vomit comet with a different parabola profile to imitate the moon gravity could do the trick.
I'm the electronics engineer working in a project involving ROS. And for what I see is quite powerful. My main gripe is that there is not a cheap way to get into the programming side if you are a engineer at home.
The cheapest robot out of the box is 600 euros, which is not cheap. Then you could try to build one yourself which is doable but requires time and could be a project in itself.
And I cannot find a standard DIY robot platform with a well explained tutorial. Maybe there is market for one of those kits?
I'm Europe based at the moment, but I'm curious about how to validate your degrees from an European country to be recognised in the USA as a valid diploma and search for a job. Maybe is not your area of expertise, so I'm sorry for the question if is not.
Not the OP. The validation probably comes in the background check stage (not the hiring stage) and the background check companies should have the expertise to check degrees in Europe.
And from a US immigration perspective, you can get an education evaluation service to evaluate your education in terms of its US education equivalency. These evaluations aren't expensive at all.
Well, I worked with altium and kicad for almost 8 years. There are more subtle differences than the autorouter, and this is basically a trivial thing because I rarely use it. For example, kicad does not have some advanced features like via fencing, via picking, lenght matching, and some more. Is true that you could download a third party plugin, but is not the same.
Variants are the same, you cannot do it in kicad and altium is a breeze. It give you the flexibility to build different versión of the board in seconds.
Also, the library management is, in my opinion, very error prone. I get the flexibility and I find it useful in some cases but...
And the last is the design rules UI/UX is very simplistic, and you need to know what you are doing. Which is not bad per se, but for a software oriented to mainly begginers, I think is a bad idea. Besides you cannot import/export rules from one project to another and this is a killer for me.
I hope some day kicad will be a solid competitor to altium but right now I cannot fully do all my work in kicad as a electronics engineer, so even Altium is expensive, is a much needed tool.
Edit: I stand corrected, kicad indeed has lenght matching.
That's a great list of differences, and I'd also like to throw in "documentation" to the list of things that Altium does great. Outjob settings plus Draftsman documents mean making changes to even a massive PCB are "one click" away from documentation generation.
True. Generating documentation and more important, a structured documentation, for all projects is another point for Altium.
Another one, much more niche is rigi-flex PCB (stackup, simulation of flex, definition of areas) Is true that I've only done 2 in all this years (and both in the last 2) but altium saved my ass with the wiki and documentation.
Have you checked out Horizon-EDA? It was built to address some issues with other tools, but it's a newer project so not as far along as KiCAD in other areas.
I dind't know about it but as far as I seen is a well thought out software.
But the main attraction to Kicad is that is a CERN backed software. So has some pedrigree and that pedrigree is needed if you want to sell it to your manager as a backup tool for simpler non critical boards.
You nailed. True, less work means more time for side gigs, ideas and self-improvement, you are not the only one that hopes for a future like this. Every day more I think Star-Trek predicted the future with a degree of precision quite impressive.
Yeah, but I think that would be a good think. A lot of the people you mention, are underpaid strained workers that do jobs with high level of responsibility (The bus driver that pick up your kids, the nurses) and the ones in services industries that, are straight exhausted and overloaded.
BUT while I think that the 4-day week would be awesome, more days to rest, more consumption and other stuff. This measure, by itself would have a minimal impact. Needs to be in conjunction with others, like Universal income, taxes to the corporations and wealthy.
We are in a world where AI is here to stay and it will only get better. Self-driving cars, Store free-clerks, hell AI can now co-write code. A lot of jobs will be reduced within a few short years, and I think that we are not prepared to absorb all that people and inequalities are going to explode all around the world.
For me, what worked is actively searching for activities that force me to interact. For example, learning languages. I just started to learn french in a classroom enviroment. And I got couple of good friends out of it.
In the work area, I still work in an office so talking with people is not so difficult. But if was online, I would create a group chat to talk , send memes (funny ones related to your job)and unwind in general. I would also propose, for example, play the among us game. Is funny, and force you to talk.
But one thing it took me some time to understand is that making friends (coworkers or not) is a marathon. Takes time and effort.
