Comment by MechaDave

I knew Dean Sutherland at CMU, nice guy. And dad was right. Turns out an advanced grad-student software group had brought me in (back in 2004) because their grad students couldn't build reliable software for the real world, and their military "research partners" were getting rather p.o.'d. But I'm a non-degreed Mechatronics Systems Engineer, in the truest sense of the word. I'm old enough to predate software engineering programs. I learned robotics and automation because I was curious, it fueled my ADD, and I kept at it... in the beginning I used plug-in cards for the IBM PC, but I knew basic electronics as a hobby (ham radio, telephonics, heathkit, etc.) and I devoured books. Anything I could get my hands on. Especially Byte magazine and Steve Ciarcia's Circuit Cellar columns. So get copies of Forest Mims III stuff, and get an arduino or raspberry pi (you can even get/run Codesys on a pi, to learn PLC stuff) and get magazine issues/books from Make: and watch lots of youtube from ElectroBoom and AvE and get your hands dirty. Remember, you can be skilled at robotics without building Optimus. Currently I'm building and programming high speed mail handling equipment. Not sexy, but it pays the bills and fuels my dopamine. It's all servomotors and sensors and decision logic. And challenging too, paper's moving at 1/8" per millisecond at mid-speeds, you need to be an efficient coder and pre-optimizing your logic, and it's all state machines, all the way down. Good luck. I make bank, but I'm driven in a thousand directions and I push and I try and while I may be wrong 70% of the time, that would get me into the allstar game if it was baseball! Never give up, and never surrender! LOL