student needs advices in engineering field

[learner]

Hi everyone,
I am a 2nd year mechanical & mechatronic student and very into microcontrollers. can someone with much experience show me a general view of working as an embedded engineer (companies?positions?..)? and how i should  learn myself to become an embedded engineer. i have basic knowledge about PIC, Avr, CPLD. I am familiar with C and assembly but not expert since i havent done many projects yet.
Is it compulsory to study electronics and circuits? I learned basic R-L-C circuits and op-amp in school but i dont think my course is going any further than that.
and finally, is it possible for me to find a job working with u-controllers to earn experience?

[tggzzz]

Hi everyone,
I am a 2nd year mechanical & mechatronic student and very into microcontrollers. can someone with much experience show me a general view of working as an embedded engineer (companies?positions?..)? and how i should  learn myself to become an embedded engineer. i have basic knowledge about PIC, Avr, CPLD. I am familiar with C and assembly but not expert since i havent done many projects yet.
Is it compulsory to study electronics and circuits? I learned basic R-L-C circuits and op-amp in school but i dont think my course is going any further than that.
and finally, is it possible for me to find a job working with u-controllers to earn experience?

I suggest you invent a project that you can do over the summer holiday. If you can create a concept, set achievable goals, implement them, learn what you would do better next time, then employers will like you. It really won't matter that you create a frankenstein's monster, provided you can say why you chose that route, what worked, what didn't, and next steps for improvement. Make sure you can show how the theory you are learning affected your decisions and the results.

Electronics and robotics are remarkably cheap and available nowadays.

[lod]

I'm an embedded engineer and have done a fair bit of firmware work.  I come from a mixed electronics and IT background, doing some electronics design and pc coding so this may skew my view slightly.

Being able to read and understand a datasheet is critical. Have a browse through a chip like the Si860x, anything you can't figure out probably points to an area you should improve.
https://www.silabs.com/Support%20Documents/TechnicalDocs/Si860x.pdf

You need to be able to read a circuit diagram. Complex analog electronics knowledge tends not to be important, you can get that explained on the rare occasion that it is required but being able to pull up a schematic and see where a wire is going, what pull-up/downs are on it etc. is very valuable.

I would suggest also doing some general IT courses. As micros get bigger and gruntier they are being used to do more stuff and code size is growing rapidly. As the code size grows into tens of thousands of lines the complexity increases and keeping the code structured and maintainable becomes harder. Fortunately this isn't a new problem, you can pull in lots of solutions from the mainstream programming space but knowing about object-orientated structures and principles, how and when to build in abstraction layers all that good standard programming stuff. Some firmware developers resist this stuff and keep growing their main loop to stupid levels of complexity but I think it is going to get more and more important as the chips grow.

[f5r5e5d]

I disagree re classic analog EE material - you need linear systems and control theory for mechatronics - although learning them in a cross discipline setting is even better - mechanical systems use linear modeling with circuit analogies
don't dismiss signals and systems courses either if you want to collect, filter, process data to act on in your control system

[tggzzz]

I disagree re classic analog EE material - you need linear systems and control theory for mechatronics - although learning them in a cross discipline setting is even better - mechanical systems use linear modeling with circuit analogies
don't dismiss signals and systems courses either if you want to collect, filter, process data to act on in your control system

Very definitely. If you understand control theory then you will be significantly ahead of someone that has only done "the easy to teach stuff".