(Part 2) Best products from r/ECE

Since you're wanting to work with the step-response, you are probably looking at a FDTD (finite-difference time-domain) solution. One open source implementation of this is OpenEMS. It's a simple enough concept that if you have some time, you could write your own implementation: it's basically just solving Maxwell's equations repeatedly at a number of points through your domain.

Most software will let you work in 3 dimensions, the limit will simply be on the computing speed/power you have access to. Any program will let you program different media, and study their effects. Finally, many programs will not calculate the step response directly, but will calculate in the frequency domain, which you can convert to step-response using a Fourier transform.

ANSYS HFSS is a good commercial software for this purpose, and is about on-par with the difficulty of any other program out there. These software programs are complex because they have to be a CAD program (for you to design the shapes and structures), and then a simulation program, which has a lot of complexities on its own. Other software out there is FEKO (3D, good for antennas), ADS (2.5D, mostly for circuit board design), and NEC (free, and best for antennas made of thin wires).

Computational electromagnetics is a huge subject, and there is a right tool for every application. The problems you're trying to solve don't sound too complex, but you still need to know what you're doing in order to get accurate results from the software. Some good books on the subject are this, which gives an introduction to the techniques used by many of the programs, and this, which gives you information on how to build your own FDTD solver using Matlab.

Best of luck with your simulations.

Sounds like what you're interested in is computer architecture. This is the study of how a computer system (whether it's chip level or system level) is organized and designed from a higher-level abstraction (usually at the register-transfer level or above). There are plenty of good resources on this, including many books (this one comes to mind). Not knowing your background, I can't say if this would be much of a stretch for you. I would say prior to jumping to this level you should have an idea of basic MOS logic design, sequential and combinational logic as well as some background in delays and timing.

Your best bet is probably to find a good old book on amazon or ebay and read to your hearts content. Feel free to PM me if you have any questions (I design microprocessors for a living).

I've used Fundamentals of Microelectronics by Behzad Razavi and I thought it did a great job. I've also followed up with his book on analog CMOS IC design in more advanced courses. I unfortunately don't have any recommendations for comms textbooks.

As far as software goes, there are a few basics you should learn: matlab, a scripting language (python, perl, or tcl depending on where you go and what you do), and enough C programming to get by, or a lot of C programming if you go into embedded systems. You will also want to develop a familiarity with linux, especially when it comes to using ssh and a shell in general (shell scripting is a plus). People will argue left and right about matlab vs. numpy+scipy but realistically it's not hard to learn both, and as a student you likely have access to matlab through your school, so the cost is a non-issue. Matlab remains a de facto standard, and python is gaining popularity.

A lot of this stuff just sort of comes up incidentally in coursework, but I really think the linux fluency is something that is overlooked by many. Knowing how to use version control (learn git, everything else has feature parity or is simpler), knowing how to edit from a command line (it barely matters if it's vim, nano, or emacs, you just need to know how to open a file and make some changes without spending time trying to scp files around or googling how to use the editors, if you're in a hurry), and knowing how to perform basic tasks like renaming files or folders, which I've seen other grad students struggle with, are all pretty important. I've considered putting together some key points on this, along with software to understand how to use to improve your effectiveness, which I'd be willing to do up in the next week or so if there's interest.

My advice comes from my own experience going through the ECE undergrad program. I learn embedded systems on the Arduino, but we only used the board. We used the Arduino "IDE" (no debugging), but we did all of our class projects and HWs in ANSI C (no Arduino APIs). Why? Because the Arduino IDE worked on all the student's laptop OSs, and because the ATMEGA328p is a great entry level processor with some decent internal peripherals.

The Book we used was "Introduction to Embedded Systems" by David Russel. Let me tell you, he is a competent writer. He shows you how to flip bits, handle interrupts, and make a basic buffered serial stream, all without the Arduino APIs. Looking back, I would not choose to have learned how to do these things on any other platform.

Now as I'm going forward and using the STM32F4 devices on the chibiOS RTOS, I have an appreciation for the levels of integration required to make reliable high-level, multi-threaded applications. The device peripherals, the processor, the workflow, the debugging, IS more complicated - BUT I see these features as a luxury now. Knowing first how to flip the bits really leveled the learning curve for me, and now I'm on my way to more complex and interested devices.

Book: https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Embedded-Systems-Development-Environment/dp/1608454983/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1464811640&sr=8-1&keywords=introduction+to+embedded+systems

Let me know if you have any questions are anything (you can PM), my own experience in learning embedded was quite a journey, and I'm happy to make specific recommendations based on your project/career goals.

The Synopsys book club has a list of EE/CS books that are either the clear standouts in their topic area or at the very least a good presentation of the material.

Two less theoretical books you might also be interested in, depending on what you are looking for:

The Circuit Designer's Companion by Tim Williams is a good overview of the practical aspects of turning a schematic into a working circuit. Grounding, how to choose the right type of cap/resistor/inductor, EMC, etc.

Practical Electronics for Inventors by Paul Scherz is similar to the Art of Electronics but is written at a more introductory level. It includes a lot of the important small details that either aren't covered in EE coursework or tend to get muddled in the slog through theory and are therefore easy to forget.

Best way to get back into EE stuff is to build some projects! Hackaday and EEVBlog are your friends, as are Sparkfun, Futurlec, and Digikey.

I bought an Extech EX330 for the exact same purpose as you. Eventually I will upgrade to a higher end model, but this one is a good balance of price, size, and durability to keep in a toolbox or have banging around in my backpack. I expect it to last for many years, so I plan to keep it as a backup when I upgrade. Right now, looks like Amazon is running a discount on them, as well. http://amzn.com/B000EX0AE4. Also, the EX430, which adds RMS capability, is about the same price right now: http://amzn.com/B0000WU1AC.

Good luck!

I was in your situation exactly. My schools microcontroller course used TIVA C for learning. I knew nothin else before that, just CS 1, and circuits/electronics. This was about 12 months ago. Tiva C is arm based, 32 bit architecture. And so it is very deep, it can do a ton. But as a result, the documentation is extremely deep, and it is very easy to get lost in.

I tried some textbooks like this one , but all they did was retell the data sheets after the first 2 chapters, and they assumed a lot of assembly/computer organization knowledge which I didn’t have yet. So I stopped using it.

Eventually I asked around, and realized that TIVA-C is really not the best for educational purposes. I picked up an MSP430FR6989, part of the MSP430 series which is extremely popular for educational purposes. I bought this udemy course for like $9 on sale which has been wonderful so far. It has thorough labs which help a lot, and lectures too. It’s been really good for the sake of just learning the microcontroller concepts. So Idk if that’s what you want, but that’s been working extremely well for me.

Also to answer your question about TI-RTOS, that is not what you need right now. RTOS is something you would put on your MCU for a heavy, multithreaded project which is doing many tasks at once. I did the training videos you found, because my senior design group is using TI-RTOS, but you won’t need those yet.

I had purchased this book to brush up on the general stuff since EE/CompE wasn't as versed in the general mechanics stuff. I liked it and passed. The Computer stuff seemed trivial in 2011.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1591263336/ref=oh_aui_search_detailpage?ie=UTF8&psc=1

I can see if I still have it but I remember selling a bunch of stuff to half priced books a few years ago.

edit: Found it!
Seems like most of it is pseudo code and excel manipulation.
Part of it may just be picking up a language and sitting down and getting comfortable with it. I know from my friends who ended up not specializing in CompE they hated programming because they took fortran or something ancient so C/C++ is a little friendlier since it can be read more easily.

edit 2: I bought this book for $48 back in 2011 why is it worth $200 today?

Like other's here who recommend the arduino, i think that learning to program a microcontroller is such a core skill electronics - and it's good to learn it early , so you'll have a good basis for building projects and in general.

But i think for EE's it's better to start with the mbed, because it's a professional platform , used in industry, so you could use most of what you learn there in the future.

A good place to start is this book:
http://www.amazon.com/Fast-Effective-Embedded-Systems-Design/dp/0080977685/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top

And this also looks useful:
http://husk.eecs.berkeley.edu/courses/cs294-84-fall14/index.php/Mbed_in_a_Nutshell

Earn an amateur radio license. Challenge yourself & see if you can attain Extra-class by the end of summer. It'll help you learn the electrical & electromagnetics side of things, opens the door to hands-on projects & social geekery, and could even open career opportunities.

Starting points:

• Find an exam scheduled near you: http://www.arrl.org/find-an-amateur-radio-license-exam-session
  
  
• Drill on exam questions via free Android app "Ham Test Prep" by iversoft.com from the Google Play Store
  
  
• Great book: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1625950136/
  
  If you do nothing more than drill on the pratice app while you're in the bathroom, you can be ready to pass the Technician exam in a couple of weeks.
  
  (Caveat: Technician-class license exam questions change at end of this June)

For the absolute basics I'm a big fan of Nathan Ida's "Engineering Electromagnetics". Lots of worked examples, clearly written, even has a multi-variable calculus review as the first chapter.

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https://www.amazon.com/Engineering-Electromagnetics-Ida-Nathan/dp/8181282736/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1538005228&sr=8-2-fkmr0&keywords=nathan+idea+electromagnetics

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My university teaches from David Cheng's "Field and Wave Electromagnetics". I'm not a big fan of this, but it's what we use for our first course in EM.

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https://www.amazon.com/Field-Wave-Electromagnetics-David-Cheng/dp/0201128195/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1538005311&sr=8-1&keywords=cheng+electromagnetics&dpID=51QAAAV1DVL&preST=_SX218_BO1,204,203,200_QL40_&dpSrc=srch

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When I took the same class a long time back, we used Inan and Inan's "Engineering Electromagnetics". I think it's a little better written than Cheng, but still not great.

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https://www.amazon.com/Engineering-Electromagnetics-Umran-S-Inan/dp/0805344233/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1538005413&sr=8-1&keywords=inan+electromagnetics&dpID=511yMwfuVSL&preST=_SX218_BO1,204,203,200_QL40_&dpSrc=srch

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If you want to get into more practical applications, there are a whole bunch of other books I'd recommend. There are also a couple "classic" physics type books on EM that we do use pretty regularly, but those are more at the graduate level.

I forget the name of the book, but it's yellow. They have a great big one for the general part of the FE and they make smaller ones for the individual tests. I thought those were great study guides. Also, my university had a class to review the major subjects of the FE.

EDIT: General FE [book] (http://www.amazon.com/Review-Manual-Preparation-Fundamentals-Engineering/dp/1591263336/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1323889740&sr=8-1)

Electrical Engineering book

The SAM S70 has a Cortex-M7 core, there will be two broad types of documentation for that part:

• How the Cortex-M7 works
  
• How all the peripherals Atmel has glued to the Cortex-M7 work
  
  The Cortex-M7 is a reasonably complicated CPU core (significantly more complex than the AVR) so be prepared for a steep learning curve if you want to get into its inner workings. I highly recommend this book; it is specific to the Cortex-M3 and M4 cores but the M7 is very similar (basically an M4 with a longer pipeline/higher clock rate and the option of hardware double precision floating point support). I'm impressed enough with that book to list it as a text for a university course I'm writing.
  
  Atmel's peripheral documentation will probably be in this ~1600 page datasheet.
  
  There's two ways to approach your "where to start?" question. The "formal education" way is to read the textbook above and enough of Atmel's datasheet to know the basic capabilities of every peripheral. The (arguably more fun) hobbiest way is to get a project idea and read just enough of the documentation to make it work.
  
  This CPU is insanely powerful compared to the AVR so feel free to explore ideas that involves CPU heavy calculations like touchscreen fractal generators, realtime audio DSP, high speed mass storage with SD cards etc.

Wanted to chime in besides Balanis (he explains MoM in antenna theory as well but much better in Advanced Emag) you could try this this video course

or this book which I learned from myself


Also if you like using python you could pick up an intro to computational physics book with python and then look up FENICS, MEEP or gprMax

I recommend Bob Cordell's "Designing Audio Power Amplifiers" . It will definitely help you get up to speed on analog circuit design. Plus, there's a tutorial chapter on how to download and use the free circuit simulator LTSPICE, which is a skill that will put you miles ahead of most other EE undergraduates.

Johnson's High Speed Digital Design has a few chapters on power planes and multi-layer stackups, as well as being a good overall reference. The Circuit Designer's Companion is another popular book that covers PCB design techniques as well as several other electronics basics.


The best way to learn is to have your designs reviewed by experienced engineers; but if you're asking here I'm guessing you are doing this as a hobbyist. Maybe post your designs on some EE forums for review?


Also knowing 'how' is not as useful as 'why', ECAD tools generally are different enough that the specifics of how to accomplish something are not the same. Which tool do you use? Most have online user groups or forums for specific questions.

My Extech EX330 just survived a pit bull, so I'm impressed with it. It's a pretty good multimeter for the price. I bought mine at OSH for $49.95.

Gonzalez is a good book. I highly recommend Pozar's Microwave Engineering (It's my favorite textbook, ever):

http://www.amazon.com/Microwave-Engineering-David-M-Pozar/dp/0470631554

You can get a copy of 2nd edition on Abebooks for cheap. (4th ed. for $60, sold!)

I didn't full understand the material that well when I was in school but I wanted to learn it better after school. I, like you, tried to find something to supplement my existing texting books. I came across the A student's guide to maxwell equations and I began to understand more. It's a small book and what the author does is break down what the equation means. One chapter might be just on what does the surface integral mean.. Or another chapter might be on just the E vector. I found breaking it down to be more understandable than trying to take the entire equation(s) in together.

First things first, come check out /r/amateurradio. Good group of guys over there.

The books from the ARRL are generally used to study for the exams:

• Ham Radio License Manual for Technician (most basic) class
  
• General Class License Manual to upgrade your license to General - this is the really fun license to have, because you get access to the HF (shortwave) frequencies
  
  You can usually find older editions of these books at libraries or from other hams. The older editions are still relevant, but the specific questions in the question pool will be out of date.
  
  The big ham radio store is Ham Radio Outlet although that is certainly not the only avenue. For example, you can get cheap handheld radios on Amazon.

Optics takes a fair amount of math. If you want to read something useful, I recommend:

• All the Mathematics You Missed But Need to Know for Graduate School
  
  
• A Student's Guide to Maxwell's Equations

If you can find it, Pozar is a pretty good foundation to work from.

Get a good handle of digital electronics (statemachines, combinatorial logic and registered logic). They'll give you a good basis for building up an understanding of how a computer works.

Digital Design and Computer Architecture
http://www.amazon.com/Digital-Design-Computer-Architecture-Harris/dp/0123704979

That book will take you through basic digital design, Verilog HDL, and then show you how to use Verilog to build a MIPS-like microprocessor (DLX http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DLX).

Much of the later material is derived from this book.
http://www.amazon.com/Computer-Organization-Design-Fourth-Architecture/dp/0123744938/ref=pd_sim_b_1

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Steve Gibson did a series of podcasts called How Computers Work.
http://www.grc.com/securitynow.htm
Search for HOW COMPUTERS WORK

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If you have any questions or need any other resources in the future, reply to my post.

Fundamental of microelectronics

I'd recommend between this book and Sedra & Smith's book. But, Razavi's book might be easier to understand.

I've had a few colleagues recommend A Student's Guide to Maxwell's Equations.

See if your library has this book:

http://www.amazon.com/Computer-Organization-Design-Fourth-Edition/dp/0123744938

It's what we used in my computer organization course and I found it to be quite helpful. If you are desperate, a PDF version of your book is comes up as the second result on google...

As far as I am aware, Ted Williams' The Circuit Designer's Companion is considered to be the bible on layout and PCB design.

For electrodynamics, it has to be Cheng: Field and Wave Electromagnetics

Razavi -- Fundamentals of Microelectronics

http://www.amazon.com/Fundamentals-Microelectronics-Behzad-Razavi/dp/1118156323

I used this book to get a high level overview of my signals class:

http://www.amazon.com/Signals-Systems-Made-Ridiculously-Simple/dp/0964375214


Much less math then the much used Oppenheim books, I'd read a bit in that book then check the Oppenheim books if I needed more detail /something specific.