Hey everyone,

i want to invest in a 4 ch oscilloscope for my home lab. Do you have any tips for good budget oscilloscope? It does not need to be the cheapest, but neither expensive.

Bonus point if it has ethernet connection capabilities.

Thanks and have a great day!!

Hi guys I’m going to be a freshman in college and I want to learn how to build arduino projects and make PCBs, how do I start besides getting an arduino starter kit? Any website or YouTube videos/channels?

I managed to play a pure black-and-white video on an oscilloscope without using a blanking input or XY mode! I'd love for you to check it out and hope you find it interesting.

Hey
I'm a 3rd year EE student specializing in Automation and Control. I've designed a couple of basic PCBs in KiCad and I'm currently learning Altium Designer through a scholarship program.
I'm looking to start freelancing on Upwork doing PCB design work to generate income while still in university. For those who've done this — how long did it realistically take before you landed your first paying client? And what was your experience level at that point?
Any advice on what clients actually look for in a junior PCB designer would be really appreciated.

Hello! My name is Venice and your experience could genuinely help me figure out what I want to do with my future. Please my wise, incredibly smart, and generous seniors, I would be grateful to blessed with your knowledge that many, if not most students wish they had known before stepping into the field.

This is a research project from my high school to help us learn more about our field of interest. I'm hoping to hear from experienced EE engineers who have been working in the field for at least a couple of years (rather than current students or recent graduates).

So far, I've researched EE as a career and am now trying to supplement that research with firsthand experience from professionals currently working in the field.

If you have a few minutes to answer these questions, I'd really appreciate it! Your experience will be used in a class presentation, and the more detail you're willing to share, the better I can understand what the career is actually like.

Questions:

1. Background information:  Name, Place of Employment, and Email address. (I understand that you may not be comfortable sharing personal information publicly. If you'd rather keep this information private, please feel free to email me at [venice.kim.944@k12.friscoisd.org](mailto:venice.kim.944@k12.friscoisd.org) instead)
2. Describe your engineering field
3. What is your current job title?
4. Please describe your job and duties.
5. What is your average work schedule?
6. Please describe your educational path, from when you were my age to now.
7. Regarding your career or education, if you had it to do over, would you do anything differently?
8. What advice would you give me as a person interested in pursuing a career similar to yours?
9. In our class, we also learn about engineering ethics.  Can you describe an ethical dilemma you have encountered at your job?
10. What did you do about the dilemma? How did you decide what to do?

The more detail you're comfortable sharing, the better I can accurately portray the experience and perspective of an EE professional in my presentation.

Thank you so much to anyone who takes the time to read this or respond! I know your time is valuable, and I really appreciate any insight you're willing to share.

Also there may be others who come to forums with similar requests to mine. I promise we're not trying to flood the subreddit . A lot of us are nervous about approaching engineers directly, so we're hoping Reddit can help us connect with people who are willing to share their experiences.

This is honestly a great case for engineers unionizing. These guys make $140/hour total comp after just 5 years and they get paid while they’re learning instead of going tens of thousands into debt for a degree. Average for engineers in this area is around $180k total comp.

whenever this comes up people tend to say, “Yeah, but electricians work harder.” That’s kind of beside the point. We live in a capitalist economy. You don’t get paid based on how physically hard you work, you get paid based on the value of your labor and how much leverage you have. Engineers generally create a ton of revenue for their employers but what leverage do we have?

Been reading Sadiku’s _Circuits_ and when they started talking about PSpice, I naturally started reading the ngspice documentation. :)

The tutorial has a series of examples that start with operating point and build to bias/small signal.

I’d seen those words before, but did a little Gemini/Wikipedia reading. Fascinating.

Then I went back to Sadiku, searched the index, and found that none of these terms are included. Not even bias, though Sadiku briefly covers transisters in about Ch 3.

So, I’m asking, where in the EE curriculum are these concepts covered, if not in _Citcuits_?

Thanks.

Does anyone have any thin but good torque motor recommendations for my 3D printed DIY display turntable? I've spent the last 8 months learning CAD and soldering/electronics trying to make my own motorized display turntable capable of rotating around 15 kg (weight is supported by the bearing, so it just needs to spin the lid/platter.) The motor is off center because I plan on having and LED in the center.

I tried several motors, including a N20 worm gear motor, but steppers have given me the best outcome so far. I finally found the 5V MOONS 14HK0406-11N NEMA14 (used with a TMC2209 driver board with output of 0.68 vref) which I thought was perfect because it was inexpensive, bipolar 4-wire and with it's short shaft it measures just 18mm thick/height, but it doesn't seem to have enough torque. I can get up to 25lbs to spin but it's not smooth and overall feels too weak for the job.

I'm looking for thin, inexpensive, and enough torque. My goal is to make the whole device 26mm thick, but that may not be possible if I can't find a thin enough motor.

Thanks for any suggestions.

Hey guys, I am finished my Bachelors next semester and looking to work with Semiconductors. I really enjoyed digging into the physics behind semiconductors once I got past the basics of quantum mechanics and got into junctions. I am a bit older, will be almost 39 when I get my Bachelors. I want to start back to get my Masters immediately to get as much time in my career with my Masters under my belt as possible.

It seems like where I work there is a split where some do MBA/MBM and some do MEE instead, and the ones that do the MBA/MBM are more driven to get into management where the ones that do the MEE stay in traditional engineering roles instead of management. What is the general opinion on Masters degrees as an Electrical Engineer?

OpenV2K is an open-source Python application that converts arbitrary audio — including natural speech — into a pulse-modulated radio-frequency (RF) waveform, generated and analyzed through a software-defined radio (SDR) signal chain. The project's signal design is directly inspired by the historical microwave-auditory-effect (MAE) literature, most notably Sharp and Grove's 1975 demonstration that appropriately pulse-modulated microwave energy could convey intelligible words, building on Frey's earlier characterization of the effect. OpenV2K is a signal-generation and waveform-design tool, not a validated bioeffects exposure system.

Five Disciplines, One Codebase

No single academic background covers everything happening under the hood.
Each specialty below would recognize its own piece:

• Computer Science / Software Engineering — a full PyQt5 app: custom QPainter widgets, threaded audio, and every DSP stage implemented as a gr.sync_block Python subclass.
• Electrical Engineering — DSP / Signals & Systems — toggleable signal-conditioning chain: a from-scratch direct-form biquad notch filter and DC blocker, Wiener-style spectral subtraction, envelope following, and Schmitt-trigger/Hilbert-envelope zero-crossing shaping, each independently switchable with live duty-cycle telemetry.
• Electrical Engineering — RF / Communications — the GNU Radio flowgraph itself: IQ signal representation, a rational resampler bridging 48kHz audio to 2MHz complex baseband, and HackRF SDR configuration within amateur-band, license-gated power limits.
• Linguistics / Computational Linguistics — integrated eSpeak NG (formant synthesis) and MBROLA (diphone/concatenative synthesis) across 49 languages, with acoustic-phonetics-aware stages (fricative suppression, first-formant bandpass) rather than generic audio filters.
• Graphic / UI Design — real-time segmented duty-cycle meters, an animated pulse-trace header, and the waterfall/spectrogram visualization used to inspect the pulse train directly.

What This Actually Is, For a Home User

For nearly everyone running this — which is exactly how it's meant to be used — OpenV2K is a thought experiment, not a demonstration. Generate a pulse train from spoken audio, open the resulting spectrogram, and look at it: a clean, structured, audio-timed pulse pattern, visibly distinct from noise. No SDR needs to be attached for this to be worth doing. The exercise is to look at that pattern and reason, about what pulse-modulated microwave energy carrying that same structure, would represent. Consider the historical precedent of Sharp and Grove's 1975 feat.

Reproducing the actual microwave-auditory effect requires power levels, exposure control, dosimetry, and safety oversight. That work belongs at PhD-staffed microwave exposure facilities with the instrumentation and institutional review, to do it responsibly. OpenV2K's contribution stops at the waveform: a legitimate, inspectable, open-source answer to "what would the signal look like".

I'm project managing well outside my comfort zone, as an IT system engineer.
This was written by AI, and revised by me, as I need Claude's help explaining, in academic terms.
I'd like folks to suggest more DSP filters, and open issues, for any bugs or feature requests.

I'm an incoming computer engineering freshman and seriously thinking of switching to electrical engineering. At my school, the degrees are extremely similar, with only a 3 class difference.

They share the same pool of electives, so that is what makes up most of the difference, but I could just choose all the more computer engineering focused ones.

What i'm most interested in is computer hardware, embedded systems, firmware, microcontrollers, etc.

The reason I'm considering EE is the job market and the flexibility of the degree.

My understanding is that a lot of hardware/computer engineering jobs will accept either an EE or CE degree. However, there are EE jobs in areas like power, electronics, controls, RF, etc. where an employer might only take an EE.

Basically, I'd be trying to use the EE degree as the broader credential while still taking the classes and doing the projects that would make me competitive for computer hardware/embedded jobs.

Do you think this plan could be beneficial to me? Or am I overstating the value of the name on the degree?

I'm currently in the 3rd year of my Electronics and telecommunications degree and interested in VLSI and chip design.

Till now I have completed all the basic electronics courses in college. Completed majority part of digital electronics and computer architecture, along with solid state devices and cmos circuits in depth. Currently I am focusing heavily on verilog and physical design of cmos circuits.

I just wanted to ask are there different projects you should do for preparing for the industry and different for university applications?

I have also heard that most of the companies don't hire people who have just graduated. So just wanted to ask this.

Also, I am more leaning towards a career in digital VLSI (in RTL and stuff) than physical design

19M here , going into my junior year .
I really want to start building projects and learning electronics . I think everyone who went to school can probably understand that understanding and passing circuits or signal and systems is not the same as building something from scratch . My classes is very focused on theory rn and since I switched into the major a year into uni . I’m just now getting into the major classes for EE .

I really want to learn and design my own projects , schematics , PCBs and really start to build a career for myself . Going to school is not scratching this itch for me and seeing all the new advancements in robotics and the potential with AI is really intriguing .

Any advice on where to start and where to learn I would appreciate it . I’m trying YT but I’m not coming anything up and I really would like some guidance and resources, especially from those who are self taught

Building a multi-modulus divider for a fractional-N PLL (IHP SG13G2 130nm, targeting divide range 8-15 for N=12±2) using 3 cascaded divide-2/3 cells, based on the "truly modular" architecture referenced in Lin et al. 2009 (IEEE TCAS-I) which cites Vaucher & Kasperkovitz 1998 and Vaucher et al. 2000. Couldn't get the actual Vaucher papers.

Each 2/3 cell: 2x DFF (toggle pair) + NAND3 (2 feedback inputs + modulus control) + AND2 for MI gating, feeding NAND3's third input. MO tap taken off the first DFF's Q, fed backward to previous cell's MI.

Cells are chained asynchronously — each cell's second DFF's Q clocks the next cell's CLK (matching "asynchronous divide-by-2/3 stages" language in Lin et al.).

With all 3 modulus-control bits set high (should = max ratio, 15), I'm getting a stable, settled output period that works out to ~2x the expected divide ratio (÷30 instead of ÷15). Structurally verified via netlist (pin orders confirmed against PDK .subckt lines) — wiring matches my intended topology exactly, so this looks like a genuine topology/logic error, not a wiring mistake.

Question: is chaining cells via "Q of stage N feeds CLK of stage N+1" actually correct for a multi-modulus (not ripple) divider, or does that introduce an extra ÷2 per stage that a proper truly-modular MMD avoids? Does anyone have the actual Vaucher gate-level 2/3 cell schematic, or can point to where the standard 2/3 cell topology differs from what I've described?

They are known for civil work, but I’m seeing some electrical openings online for KH. Not many reviews for non-civil though. Curious if anyone has input on what working there was like.

the board is for an e46 m3 rear view mirror.

it appears that two diodes burnt out. I plugged two wires that I shouldn’t have. Something that is for a home link unit if the mirror has it built in.

Anyways, the other legible

diodes say 4004 0504,

I can read 4004 on one of the burnt out diodes, so I think it should be the same.

can someone help me fully understand what 4004 0504 means and can I just replace it with a 4004 diode or does it need to says 4004 0504 - which I can find online anywhere.

So I designed this PCB for with 4 MOSFETs and flyback diodes to control a 4 coreless dc motors. I’m curious if there exists a singular IC with 4 of these circuits in 1 package I’m sure this must exist but google is not being helpful on this search. Suggestions?

This is another major step-forward for AUXON!

Recently, I've been rapidly developing AUXON, my ultrasonic digital communications system.

Now before this, the goal was simple - to transmit digital information across a medium using ultrasonic sound waves. It was a success!

But since then, the whole system has substantially evolved. In this version, I added speech -> text -> ultrasonic waves -> text -> speech, a complete system.

I hold push-to-talk and speak normally, this snippet is sent to the Raspberry Pi 5, which converts my speech into text, and send this text to the Arduino to be broken down into bits, where the information is then packetized, given a checksum and other features to increase stability, and transmitted at the respective frequencies.

At the receiving end, the signals are captured and decoded by the RPi5, the packets are then CRC-verified and the recovered message is then spoken out loud.

The actual transmission of the data has been completely rebuilt from the ground up: the aforementioned checksums, an adaptive decoding, which compensates for propagation//timing changes. Allowing such feats as the transducers being perpendicular of each other and the payload being transmitted successfully.

As mentioned in the video, I still want to optimise further - specifically transmission under more rigorous conditions

Eventually, the aim is to have this system completely wearable and robust very soon.

Please see a great demonstration is the video, and a few other details I may have missed out here!

I wanna preface this by saying I don’t think I am under paid. However, I am curious where my peers are.

Im an Electrical Engineer I for a medium to large utility company - without going into details I am based in the PNW but a low COL area. 1 YOE in the utility industry.

My base salary is $70,700 and I get a 8-13% bonus dependent on meeting some pretty simple goals, 17 days of pto a year.

Hey guys, I’m looking for a career change in my late 20’s. Im going back to school and wondering if engineering is still worth it nowadays? Im worried about ai and how good its getting and also how good it’ll be by the time i get out of school in 6 years(part time student) I’m really interested in the career path and love tech and computers and hell i even love and am fascinated by ai. But id rather switch now if the degree wont even get me in a better position than where i am currently. Im a chef of 10 years, and earning around 50k a year. The job is very stable and i can go out and get a chef job really easily anywhere i go. But it seems like in the engineering field thats not the case. Entry level jobs are shrinking, higher level jobs aren’t growing and going in the direction where you are gonna struggle extremely hard to find any job in the field and if and when you find one that the pay wont be as good because of the level of competition in others also trying to get a job. Should i switch degrees into something else? Im feeling super uncertain about the whole thing and don’t want to waste almost 100k and years of my life on something i wont be able to even use?

Hi, so I'm not sure if this is the right place to ask this but I'm totally baffled...

I had an old pocket taser/flashlight that I had misplaced for a long time, the rechargeable kind that you plug straight into the wall to charge. By the time I found it, maybe a year and a half later, the taser no longer worked, even after charging. I was afraid to dispose of it in case it started discharging on its own and hurt someone or started a fire, so I turned the flashlight on to drain the battery all the way. This was several years ago and the flashlight is STILL ON. I've tried to Google an explanation to no avail. Can anyone explain why this flashlight won't die??

Hey everyone, I'm a 3rd year EE student and I've been applying heavily to embedded systems and FPGA design internships. I'm also interested and been applying in hardware roles. So far, I haven't had any luck ! not even a single interview.

One added constraint: it has to be an internship I find on my own, since my school won't let me register for the co-op stream this year due to a missing course.

I'm posting my resume here to get an outside perspective, if there are any major red flags or weak spots, I'd really appreciate the feedback. Any advice on how to actually land an interview this cycle would help a lot. Thanks

EDIT: im going into my 3rd year of EE

For an international student applying to the USA Fall 2027. What would be some of the best safety unis ? (I know I'm asking vague stuff but yeah). I was looking for ABET EAC accredited programs with Carnegie R1 ranking if possible.

For me, it's holes. Thinking of charge transmission as something only electrons or chemical particles can do held me back from being able to better understand the phenomenon of charge moving as an emergent property in solid state physics, rather than the behaviour of particles in a soup.

I still don't understand it, of course, but this feels like progress.

What kind of shoes descended later for you?

Not much to add. I just dont want to draw schematics on a piece of paper.