Don't visit or buy goods and services from a country whose policies you disagree with.
If it can work at the retail level, why not at a national level?
Then again, this requires people to look for alternatives. If only there was a local version of Alienware...
I got my Technology Diploma, then went on to get my BEEng. One thing I found was that the libraries and instructors usually had a stack of textbooks they were tossing and were free to whoever wants to carry them away.
Tech schools tend to be better for the practical side of things. They will teach what works. The instructors there have usually had several years out in the real world. The instructors are there to teach.
Universities teach why things work. The instructors may have had some real world experience, but they may have also spent their entire careers doing research in one form or another. The instructors are there primarily to do reasearch and get research grants. The instructors tend to lecture, not teach.
Admittedly, I have only been to one college and one university, but students I have talked to from other institutions generally agree with me. If anyone thinks I am wrong, feel free to flame away. My virtual skin can take it.
Universities do tend to offer you a higher starting wage and a more broadly acknowledged certification.
There are different catagories for different areas of the circuit board:
-Basics of LRC circuit design - Boylestead
-Controls - make motors turn and LED's blink (It's almost mandatory to have a blinking LED)
-Embedded Design - making a board work around a control chip. Try to get one that is based on an actual processor or microcontroller. To really understand how the controller works, do some basic stuff in the Assembly language for that controller. If you are trying to squeeze every clock cycle out of your controller or are limited for program space, do as much as you can in Assembly, otherwise there are good IDE's for PIC and Atmel that I have seen.
Eagle CAD is available for free for non-commercial use from cadsoft.de It can be a pain, but free is much cheaper than Altium's package. If there are better free packages, POST IT HERE!
Try to keep your boards single-sided if you can. Mount your components on the side away from your traces. It makes it harder to roast them with your soldering iron. Toaster ovens (with some themal controls) do well for budget surface-mount boards.
An easy way to put the traces onto your board is to print a mirror image of your layout onto ultra-gloss photo paper with a laser printer. Gently use a clothes iron to transfer the toner to the copper-clad board. Use etchant as normal and clean with alcohol.
About books... I have a couple of classmates from India who get their relatives to send textbooks here for them. Same content, cheaper paper, and it costs 1/3 to 1/4 the cost at North American bookstores (both north and south of the 49th). It costs less to buy each book than it does to ship it.
I've worked with a variety of processors and microcontrollers, and a number of development enviroments tailored to them. The results really varied depending on the priorities of the coompiler designers.
When dealing with PICs, I never bothered with using C, and instead just went straight to assembly. The PIC-C (how many pixies use PIC-C?)compiler did a really poor job, and I could write much more efficient code myself.
However, when I was designing audio filters on a TI test bed, there was no way I was going to write assembly for processors working in parallel and try to get it more efficient than what the compiler was going to offer. Besides which, that compiler offered various optimization priorities, like minimizing storage, memory use, or maximizing speed.
Of course, this is only 2 examples, but basically the only right answer, besides doing a little investigation to see what the compiler is actually spitting out.
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Vote with your feet/wallet.
Don't visit or buy goods and services from a country whose policies you disagree with.
If it can work at the retail level, why not at a national level?
Then again, this requires people to look for alternatives. If only there was a local version of Alienware...
I got my Technology Diploma, then went on to get my BEEng. One thing I found was that the libraries and instructors usually had a stack of textbooks they were tossing and were free to whoever wants to carry them away.
Tech schools tend to be better for the practical side of things. They will teach what works. The instructors there have usually had several years out in the real world. The instructors are there to teach.
Universities teach why things work. The instructors may have had some real world experience, but they may have also spent their entire careers doing research in one form or another. The instructors are there primarily to do reasearch and get research grants. The instructors tend to lecture, not teach.
Admittedly, I have only been to one college and one university, but students I have talked to from other institutions generally agree with me. If anyone thinks I am wrong, feel free to flame away. My virtual skin can take it.
Universities do tend to offer you a higher starting wage and a more broadly acknowledged certification.
There are different catagories for different areas of the circuit board:
-Basics of LRC circuit design - Boylestead
-Controls - make motors turn and LED's blink (It's almost mandatory to have a blinking LED)
-Embedded Design - making a board work around a control chip. Try to get one that is based on an actual processor or microcontroller. To really understand how the controller works, do some basic stuff in the Assembly language for that controller. If you are trying to squeeze every clock cycle out of your controller or are limited for program space, do as much as you can in Assembly, otherwise there are good IDE's for PIC and Atmel that I have seen.
Eagle CAD is available for free for non-commercial use from cadsoft.de It can be a pain, but free is much cheaper than Altium's package. If there are better free packages, POST IT HERE!
Try to keep your boards single-sided if you can. Mount your components on the side away from your traces. It makes it harder to roast them with your soldering iron. Toaster ovens (with some themal controls) do well for budget surface-mount boards.
An easy way to put the traces onto your board is to print a mirror image of your layout onto ultra-gloss photo paper with a laser printer. Gently use a clothes iron to transfer the toner to the copper-clad board. Use etchant as normal and clean with alcohol.
Good Luck!
About books... I have a couple of classmates from India who get their relatives to send textbooks here for them. Same content, cheaper paper, and it costs 1/3 to 1/4 the cost at North American bookstores (both north and south of the 49th). It costs less to buy each book than it does to ship it.
Umm, why not outsource to Canada?
We don't get paid as much in many professions, our accent isn't too terribly difficult to understand, and there's no time zone issues.
But this does't work for Java, the holiest of holies!
Actually, my friend's knowledge of Ada is the basis for him getting work in Canadian and US Aerospace-related fields.
Obsolete or not, it's still used.
I've worked with a variety of processors and microcontrollers, and a number of development enviroments tailored to them. The results really varied depending on the priorities of the coompiler designers.
When dealing with PICs, I never bothered with using C, and instead just went straight to assembly. The PIC-C (how many pixies use PIC-C?)compiler did a really poor job, and I could write much more efficient code myself.
However, when I was designing audio filters on a TI test bed, there was no way I was going to write assembly for processors working in parallel and try to get it more efficient than what the compiler was going to offer. Besides which, that compiler offered various optimization priorities, like minimizing storage, memory use, or maximizing speed.
Of course, this is only 2 examples, but basically the only right answer, besides doing a little investigation to see what the compiler is actually spitting out.