Hey everyone.
I’ve asked the Lemmy.world admins to make me a moderator of the /c/ece community. I’m a ECE major from college, but all of my real-world work job is programming. So the only electrical/hardware stuff that I do is for hobby work. Still, I’d like to think I know a thing or two worth sharing.
I’ve got an imagined list of topics that I’d like to cover to help seed and generate discussion. But what would be helpful for me is to know the skill level of my audience. I’m sure there’s plenty of experts who are stronger than me in the field of ECE, but I remember being a young high-schooler trolling around EE USENET asking stupid questions. So I also imagine a few precocious high schoolers out there might be lurking around.
So… what is your skill level? Who should I be writing for? Are you hobbyists with no formal training? High-school level with just a propensity to look at various Youtube videos? Or are you formally trained but no practical knowledge? What subjects do you think would be best that I covered?
Over at another lemmy, I’ve mused upon the skill levels I imagine: https://lemux.minnix.dev/post/81220
The skill tiers I think of are as follows:
Tier 0: Wires and “Lego” sets. Arduino-boards connected with Qwiic and/or Mikrobus
Tier 1: Breadboarding and Through-hole rapid prototyping.
Tier 2: Low speed simple PCB design. Large surface-mount parts.
Tier 3: Higher speed PCB design. Smaller parts to minimize parasitics.
Tier 4: Design with BGAs. “Transmission Line Theory” all across the board, delay matched lines
I’m a software engineer and have a CS degree. I did a GCSE (UK high school qualification) in electronics and also got an amateur (ham) radio licence around the same time which requires a little bit of electronics knowledge.
As for what I do today with that—I mess around with SBCs/microcontrollers usually for home automation and sometimes build eurorack synthesiser modules, usually from kits or at least premade PCBs.
Kinda here mostly out of curiosity, predominantly because I just like making things and it’s cool to see what ideas other people come up with.