About stm32 or the rp2040?
105 karma · joined November 26, 2019
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I wish you good luck!
The problem I see, is that companies don't want to share platforms, the example is the streaming war services that we have right now, so I don't know how Epic is going to group that many companies and IP under one roof.
I agree with you. I didn't know how to label it but feudalism sounds right. And I think that employees are greater at fault that employers. We must know when to say enough is enough.
In the second company, I had a couple of interns and I saw that the first week they where doing like 1 or 2 hours every day more than they should by contract (4 hours/day contract). I invited them both to a coffee outside the company and talk about them about doing more hours for free.
I still have contact with one of them and before this thing of Covid exploded, we talked and said that he had with his intern the same conversation I had with him about free hours.
I think that we need a strong class / work mentality, something lost in recent years, and that it comes from education.
Businessmen in Spain sees the worker as another machine in the factory and a lot of them work actively to fired the workers that try to unionize. I talk from experience having worked in 2 some what small (50 to 150 workers), family-owned companies, where in one, the union representative was the son of the owner and in the other there wasn't any union because 2 years before I entered, the person who tried to create a union office in the company was fired and reported to the police with false pretences.
You have exceptions of course but the vast majority are very very conservative with ideas between right wing or extreme right wing.
My opinion is that the wealth, like in any place, is very very bad balanced. Studies are viewed as useless, because they won't give you a good job or because there are some part of society that sees them as something not cool. We don't have a solid STEM-based industry like for example Germany or France. Also, We are highly dependant from tourism, being tourism the largest sector in our GDP (in some regions is the 25% )and we don't re-invesment that wealth in R&D, which is arround 1,25%.
Plus political instability from various populism movements is the perfect mix for a country stuck in time. Without any project of future.