Is anybody here an Electrical Engineer?
- Thread starter blacklistedbully
- Start date
Not I - my least favorite discipline
I’m a degreed ME - now working in the renewable energy world and I find myself remembering why it was my least favorite
I find Clark Griswalds use of extension cords is ingenious, but did leave it a little messy and cluttered around the outlet. I’d clean that up with a couple hand fulls of zip ties. How can I help?
The number of times someone has asked me about their "free" energy designs....
I get a lot of home wiring questions, which I can do, but I didn't get that knowledge in Simrall...
Your comment just unearthed a deeply buried childhood memory of the guy from Lucedale that invented a perpetual motion machine
Undaunted backwoods inventor claims energy generator will change world - UPI Archives
Joseph W. Newman, a self-educated inventor in the Mississippi backwoods, has built a contraption he claims converts mass into more energy than it uses and...
www.upi.com
Hear me out - solar road panels. They can use solar energy to melt snow & ice in the winter. Light up the roads so you can see better in bad weather.
Need you to do some where is he now research. Is his kid carrying the baton?Your comment just unearthed a deeply buried childhood memory of the guy from Lucedale that invented a perpetual motion machine
Undaunted backwoods inventor claims energy generator will change world - UPI Archives
Joseph W. Newman, a self-educated inventor in the Mississippi backwoods, has built a contraption he claims converts mass into more energy than it uses and...
Panels embedded in the road? They would break too often and cost a lot. Also, not a lot of sun will reach it if there is snow already covering them.
Better use of roads + electricity would be to inductive charge electric cars/tractor trailers on the interstate, but that would also cost a ton and would break.
Sadly enough, you don't have to just rely on common sense to determine that. People have actually tried. Never quite understood the rational for wanting to do solar roadways before fully utilizing surfaces that didn't have tons of weight and wear and tear put on them. But I'm sure somebody got some grant money and subsidies for it, so there's that.
KETCHUP AND MUSTARD IN THE SAME BOTTLE
I was going to be. Then I discovered Len Lews
Had totally forgotten about that guy. I wonder what ever happened to him.Your comment just unearthed a deeply buried childhood memory of the guy from Lucedale that invented a perpetual motion machine
Undaunted backwoods inventor claims energy generator will change world - UPI Archives
Joseph W. Newman, a self-educated inventor in the Mississippi backwoods, has built a contraption he claims converts mass into more energy than it uses and...
ETA: Turns out, he might have been a little nuts. There's a Wikipedia article on him. This is one of the sections:
My oldest daughter is a CE with SoCal Gas. She has no regrets about her degree, but has said she sometimes thinks it might have been more fun or interesting to get an ME degree instead.
My dad taught me all I needed to know about electricity.
1. It's invisible, at least until you 17 up
2. It will knock your "Richard" in the mud w/out advanced warning and needs to be treated accordingly. That's all the average guy needs to know i.e. leave it alone......
1. It's invisible, at least until you 17 up
2. It will knock your "Richard" in the mud w/out advanced warning and needs to be treated accordingly. That's all the average guy needs to know i.e. leave it alone......
Throughout my career I’ve believed that my one EE class was the biggest missed opportunity in my whole engineering curriculum. They wasted my time with theory when some real world examples would’ve been soooo much more useful for the non-EEs in there.
Whenever I saw a circuit on a test, I knew I was screwed unless the guy beside me understood it. Thankfully ME’s didn’t have to deal with electricity problems often.
Well, it was likely led by a prof who had gone to EE school, gone to EE school again, gone to EE school again and did not have any relatable experience or idea how all that stuff might actually work in in the real world.
My last semester, a professor told me to think about electricity as if it were water. Circuits made a lot more sense then. Where was he 4 years earlier?
I remember thinking he was crazy for sure. Looks like there's a documentary available on Freevee. Might have to check it out.
I had to take EE Systems for my ChE degree. The message I took home from this class was hire an Electrical Engineer. That **** is voodoo. They have a practical, real world, use of the square root of negative one, a number that does not exist.
Once I got the fluids analogy ingrained I never had a problem with circuits.
There is nothing worse than an engineering professor who never had a real job. I remember in process design Bricka freaking out when he learned half his class had gone through heat transfer and didn't even know what a heat exchanger was because the prof who taught them taught nothing but theory. She was soon run off from the department.
The better professors for EE and CE were always at the higher level classes. I felt it was to weed out some people. Circuits almost weeded me out. My dad talked me off the ledge and it got easier in the upper level classes because the teachers were better.
ETA: I work in the software side of things now so I don’t remember much about circuits now.
I’m in a position where power factor and VARs are relevant. Hydraulics analogies are no longer helping this process hand, unfortunately.
I am guessing some of you might have had my Dad for physics. If you didn’t work out your answer on paper… you weren’t gonna get a good grade. I have been told by many folks he was the real deal… Hard as hell…. But fair. Watching his mind fade away last year was the hardest thing I have ever had to deal with. That and his heart just stop working more every day.
But he loved to teach.
What I've been kicking around lately are some new electric guitar design ideas. Not so much the aesthetics, though that will be a concern at some point, but in function, new capabilities, etc. I have a number of ideas with a general sense or thoughts of how it should work, but I'm likely to reach a point where I'll want to collaborate with someone with a deeper understanding of how to actually put the ideas into practice, or working prototypes.
Hell, I may also want to talk to an ME as well. Plenty of those out here in Cali, but if I can find a fellow Bulldog who is interested, I'd rather that.
First time I've seen the terms "fun" and "interesting" applied to an engineering field.
BTW, I was an EE major for approximately three weeks my freshman year before matriculating across the Drill Field to McCool Country Club.
That is shocking. I thought that analogy was basically universal for the entry level circuits type classes. Hell, I had an electrician use that analogy with me in high school. But I also thought that became less useful later on. I don't remember much beyond the very basics, and didn't do any advanced electrical or circuits classes, but thought we got to stuff that the water analogy wasn't useful for. Impedence? Right hand thumb rule? those are things, right? Don't think the water analogy was useful for those?
Nah brother. My equipment works fine and my wife does the work.
Since retirement I’m working one day a week as a Sanitation Engineer, it’s very rewarding except when it’s raining, I’ve got a long driveway . Here’s my billion dollar idea for all you EE’s , invent wireless transfer of energy for electric cars and imbed it in the right lane of 4 lane roads. This way when driving in the right lane the auto is powered by the grid but when passing in the left lane or venturing off the 4 lane it is powered by batteries. This solves multiple problems. It solves the problem of long distance travel in electric vehicles. It allows the more practical use of smaller batteries in cars. But mostly it keeps all you slow assed no driving some beaches out of the left lane.