Hello, Aeyeye,
I've met a good many students in your position. It's unfortunate that college studies focus so heavily on theory without offering more opportunities to practice.
I don't know if the following is appropriate to your situation, but it's what I did.
Special projects classes are an opportunity for you to gain some specialty knowledge before being tossed into industry. During my last two years, I made good friends with my profs and asked them about special projects.
It was a success in that I was allowed to take some graduate courses, perform my own special project, and was allowed to take a C course that was in an experimental phase (everyone took Fortran and Pascal back then). It was really a pleasure in that I got access to training and software that wasn't normally available.
Being a hobbyist helps give you a taste for fundamentals. You can buy o-scopes for less than $200 now, and it was with a scope and a little programming that I finally sorted out what was meant by serial communications.
I also purchased a training set at a pawn shop. It had built in power supplies, signal generators, logic switches, LEDs, and a VOM. All of that with a solder-less breadboard in the middle. This was probably an investment of $80, though I've seen them cheaper.
Finally, I topped my hobby kit off with a set of drawers which I filled with miscellaneous resistors, capacitors, and semi's. This made it easy to build small circuits and study how they behaved.
It's really surprising at first, how the circuits behave different than you would expect. You start noticing things in the data sheets that didn't seem important. You also start noting how your test instruments interact:)
Then, I added a couple of Spice packages in. You can an download an excellent Spice package at linear.com. Just don't become brain dead using it. Spice is an imaginary world, and it's a great help - as long as you know what's real and what isn't.
As for logic design, It's getting hard to get by without knowing VHDL or Verilog. I chose VHDL, because it's more prevalent where I live. To "play" with the language, I got a development kit from Lattice Semi, a MACHxo device along with some development software. I also got a communications device from totalphase.com. I chose the Aardvark so that I could talk to my projects using an SPI port.
Learning C is important to an engineer working with microcontrollers. Even if you standing on the sidelines, you occasionally have to dig in the code when no one else can help. For this, it's good to get a demo board from a company that offers a free C compiler. It's also good to start with a processor that other hobbyists are using - that way you can steal the code and morph it into your own. A good place to look for hobbyist code is at hackaday.com
You can get some of these development kits just for asking. The distributors give them away to develop their market. So, you go to a sales lunch, or simply call and ask. You'd be surprised.
Just remember that if your just getting into the profession, you need to work on your concept portfolio. Building a laser guided mosquito zapper may be a great idea, but it involves too many concepts for the newbee. Instead, work on getting your amplifiers always right, your power supplies always stable, learning to wright logic code that won't hang up, and learning how to decipher and write C.
Best Wishes,
- Mike
