On Home Projects as a Reentry into the Job Market

On Aug 31, 8:40 pm, "JosephKK"<quiettechb...@yahoo.com> wrote:
On Sun, 29 Aug 2010 21:47:40 -0700 (PDT), "m...@sushi.com"



m...@sushi.com> wrote:
On Aug 24, 11:26 am, larwe <zwsdot...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Aug 24, 1:28 pm, Tim Wescott <t...@seemywebsite.com> wrote:

What if they made the CDP1802 in their kitchen oven, from sand found in
the driveway?

The only person I know who is sufficiently hardcore to do that sort of
thing is Jeri Ellsworth,http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeri_Ellsworth-
who apparently has made her own ICs on her home lab bench (as well as
being famous for the C64-on-a-chip FPGA then later ASIC). Looks like
1974 was a good year for cool engineers ;)

Anyway - yes, if you turn sand into digital logic, you get a free
pass!

Sixty pinball machines? Damn, I'm in love.

Back to the main question, I think doing something very public
(Makerfaire, Circuit Cellar article, etc) is a good idea to show you
at least have a clue.

I suppose not taking an engineering job is better than taking an
engineering job you don't want. For instance, you want to design but
you take a job in test.

Getting back to Jeri's DIY chip, it is quite possible to do a chip on
open source software. It is just a pain in the ass. I guess to be
clearer, some of the commercial EDA of say Cadence is just cleaned up
Berkeley software. I've played with those open source layout tool and
it's pretty ugly, but haven't tried so in years. Once you have a
layout, take it to Mosis Obviously you design with their spice
parameter file. Basically, it's like how you made chips in college.

You made chips in college?  Any others here?

Check out
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/MOSIS_Users_Group/

"rickman" <gnu...@gmail.com> wrote in message

news:186d949f-d3dd-461a-8823-ac823dd13013_at_n3g2000yqb.googlegroups.com...

What's the big deal
needing Linux?

I guess it's more or less expected with open-source hardware designs.  Why
bother going to open-source hardware the application you meant for it requires
the purchase of a commercial OS? -- You might as well buy closed-sourced
hardware at that point, as there are plenty of perfectly good single-board
computers that run Windows or QNX or other commercial OSes.

None of that is very portable.

Actually I think that the majority of GPS navigation systems (the aftermarket
ones for cars) run Linux -- they just license the maps directly from TeleAtlas
or NavTech, and have the volume/money to make it viable.

---Joel

I do not -- thank God -- have to reenter the job market. But I've seen
a lot of posts recently that start something like:

"I haven't worked in engineering since 20xx, and I'm (starting)/
(looking for) a job. To make my (job search)/(first week) more
successful I'm thinking of doing a project to put on my resume
and get the juices flowing."

Does this seem to actually help? Is anyone here in a position to hire,
and if you saw a resume (or interviewed a person) who had done some
hobby/home project just to get back into the swing of things, would you
give that much weight? Would you give it _more_ weight than, say, going
back to school and taking a class or two, or teaching math to villagers
in Africa for six months*, or doing something that was obviously meant
to keep your hands busy and make ends meet, like sweeping up at
MacDonalds or being an engineering manager?

I'm not dissing the notion in any way -- in fact, I have several
back-burner projects here that I pull out whenever work gets slow. I'm
just wondering if, when looked at with a cold and cynical eye, the time
and money spent does a reasonable amount of good.

* A distant friend / good acquaintance of mine is doing this, more for
himself than for the job prospects.