Getting started with Embedded Systems

Hey everyone,

I have planned to document all the small electronics related projects that I do in my free time so that it would be of some use to all the beginners of the same interest as mine. I will try my level best to post the most optimized content of what I have done. When I was a beginner, I found many blogs really useful, which actually made my learning curve smooth. I am no professional. (which I should have said a few lines earlier). I am a student and I am learning in the course of sharing my knowledge. Any thing I say -or write to be precise- has gone through a lot of thinking and testing so my posts won’t be totally misleading but they may not be always thorough. Any constructive criticism is always welcome. (that means, go ahead and punch me in the nose time)

I have seen and worked with the professionals in this domain, and I strongly believe that spoon feeding is one thing that spoils Engineers the most. So in this blog I will never be giving out entire code for the projects. So please don’t mistake me. I have learnt from my teacher that,

a person asking for the entire source code for a project is just any other guy, trying to impress some one with his apparent geek-ish skills but not really or a developer/designer

But still I do believe in knowledge sharing open sourcing. So I will try to give you as much support that it takes for you to to DO stuffs yourself than just replicating what others have done. So if you are still having the where-is-the-damn-code kind of an idea, then I strongly recommend you to Google it for some spoilers.

As you may already know Electronics is a vast field of study for any one person to be fully well versed in all the fields it has, so I have decided to stream my thoughts and interest into a few particular fields such as the Embedded system Design, Robotics, Power Electronics and computer programming (least to an extent up to which an electronics Engineer should know). So if your line of interest does not come into these categories, then I’m sorry.. You are out of the scope of my knowledge. But there are many other resources. Continue googl-ing until you find a proper ‘trusted’ resource.

And lastly, my observation over a couple years of scavenging the internet, is that there are a lot of resources that are flawed. For example, there seems to be two datasheets for LM339-quad-comparator circulating all over the place.., I am not trying to imply that my content is flawless, for that matter nothing in this world is foolproof (a lesson that I learned the hard way) I am just saying that bloggers are humans and there is a high possibility of error. When it comes to electronics prototyping and testing what the Datasheet (or spec sheet as some people call it) says is final. Always read the datasheet before doing anything with the component.

Lastly, in the embedded world there are a lot of stuffs that can go wrong. So try to know the pitfalls before you fall and try to avoid them. For example, in embedded systems there could be a problem with hardware but you might be going round and round your software till you go crazy -in-my-case- or just loose hope and drop the idea/project. The problem could be the other way round too. The worst thing that can happen is you might loose hope of ever completing any given task. So the rule of thumb is to design the hardware properly with proper design practices that should be the primary objective of any designer, because if you are going to build a system and write its firmware and the ‘hardware’ itself was flawed… then there is no use going ahead. Be smart and ‘work smart’, it’s way better than what they call the ‘work hard’ analogy.