Best electronics kit for computer engineer?

[ainster31]

There are a lot of electronics kits available. Lego has a couple and there are things like the arduino, the PIC, etc.

Which kit should I use that looks best on my resume? I should probably avoid Lego products as those might appear as toys.

 

[analogdesign]

The arduino ones are great because they're cheap and highly relevant.

 

[donpacino]

I would recommend ardunio for the reasons states by analog

 

[JakeBrodskyPE]

None of them. Do not list toys. List projects that you built and make no mention of the toy factor in the resume. Mind you, I have the Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and some MSP430 based stuff. I love to tinker with it. But people aren't interested in tinkering. They're interested in results.

If you built a power scavenging remote temperature monitor that reports back by radio, and it happens to have been built around an Arduino variant, don't mention the Arduino. If you built a web-enabled thermostat, don't mention that you did it with a Raspberry Pi.

Let the interviewer ask you how you built the project. If they do, feel free to answer and tell them in gory detail what you did.

 

[ainster31]

None of them. Do not list toys. List projects that you built and make no mention of the toy factor in the resume. Mind you, I have the Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and some MSP430 based stuff. I love to tinker with it. But people aren't interested in tinkering. They're interested in results.

If you built a power scavenging remote temperature monitor that reports back by radio, and it happens to have been built around an Arduino variant, don't mention the Arduino. If you built a web-enabled thermostat, don't mention that you did it with a Raspberry Pi.

Let the interviewer ask you how you built the project. If they do, feel free to answer and tell them in gory detail what you did.

Hmm but don't people care that I have experience with electric circuits or programming? I guess arduino knowledge isn't helpful in industry?

 

[JakeBrodskyPE]

At the end of the day, the employer doesn't care about your technical skills. They care about what those technical skills can do for them. You could be the next Albert Einstein; but unless you can make money for them by building the things they seek, they really couldn't care less whether it was an Arduino, a BeagleBone, a Raspberry Pi, or some FPGA with an embedded processor.

 

[mal4mac]

Lego is fine, the Open University use it:

http://oro.open.ac.uk/13083/

 

[AlephZero]

To put JakeBrodsky's message a different way: what you learn from project building is the process. The specifics of what projects you build and what you use to build them doesn't matter much. The important lessons are things like planning, time and cost management, persistence, problem solving strategies (when it doesn't work first time!), avoiding "mission creep" so you actually reach an end point, etc.