Engineering Vlogs - How YouTube is transforming engineering education

Reading time 5 minutes. 

Introduction

Universities, Colleges, Bachelor's and Master's degrees, PhDs, training courses, projects, seminars, jobs, managers. These are the usual items that one is interested in a candidate’s background for a position, aren’t they? What about this one: “Does he/she follows any blogs or channels?”

Have you heard the anecdote: Who is the most experienced person at a company? The one who is working there the longest. What about the second most experienced? It’s the person sitting next to the first one, not the one working there the second-longest. 

With the expansion of the internet to professional fields in the form of forums, blogs and YouTube channels the people we can interact with and learn from is limitless. In this article, I’ll focus on the top 5 electrical engineering channels, that I gained an immense amount of experience from and that I can definitely recommend for everyone: for prospective and current engineering students, and also to professionals who would like to deepen and broaden their knowledge, such as myself. I list these channels in chronological order as I came across them.

1) EEVBlog - Dave Jones

The first person I got familiar with, in the early 2010s was Dave Jones, who is running the EEVBlog, probably the largest Electrical Engineering Video Blog on YouTube. His sound background in electronics and down to earth personality makes him a very credible host, and his clear, logical and concise explanations and sense of humor make it very easy to follow his videos, even for those who have a limited background in electronics.

His teardown videos are extremely useful, and they are the source of not only specific solutions but design and conceptual thinking as well. In these videos Dave is taking equipment apart while explaining their anatomy, he goes into detail for example what chips are used, and what kind of technical challenges did the engineers have to deal with during the design process. 

His interviews with senior professionals with decades of experience such as John Kenny - Technology Manager (HP / Agilent / Keysight), Eric Qin - Siglent CEO, and Doug Ford - Analog design engineer, are a goldmine. 

Another crucial activity that he is doing is reviewing and criticizing projects and products. In my opinion, nowadays not enough attention is given to properly criticize, despite the fact that “critical thinking” is advertised everywhere. One famous unviable group of projects was the “Solar roadways” which, despite the fact that they were conceptually flawed from the beginning, gained huge traction in the media. Dave put a lot of time and effort to go step by step with specific data and calculations to explain to the audience why these projects are destined to fail, and after these projects ultimately have failed he did a post-mortem analysis. I feel that most of the articles and interviews in the media about technology are about new and prospective projects, disruptors, high tech solutions, often with complete disregard to feasibility but they also seldom analyze failures, therefore, preventing the audience from learning from mistakes.

If somebody would ask me who was my technical mentor during my brief 7-year career as a research engineer, without a doubt it would be Dave, regardless of the fact we’ve never met.

2) The Signal Path - Shahriar Shahramian

The second channel I came across is The Signal Path run by Shahriar Shahramian who is more focused on RF and instrumentation electronics. The teardowns and instrument repairs he recorded are invaluable and teaches the principles of debugging very well.

One of my favorite videos from him is the #45 Teledyne-LeCroy 100GHz oscilloscope teardown and experimentation. This 1.5-hour long video is the pinnacle of engineering videos, in my opinion, comprising theory, PCB layout, experimentation, and factory tour hosted by professionals with decades of experience at the top of their field. In the first part Peter Pupalaikis, VP Technology Development at Teledyne-LeCroy is explaining the theory behind this masterpiece of oscilloscopes, then Alan Blankman, Project Manager is going through the PCB and the instrument explaining its construction, then showing some experiments on this high-frequency scope. The third and final part of the video is a factory tour by Mark DeVries Quality and Manufacturing Manager. Having such a close and detailed look into the assembly of the oscilloscopes and the factory itself is an extremely rare opportunity and should be watched by every electronics enthusiast.

3) Robert Feranec

Robert is a senior hardware design engineer, he has a background in designing digital PCBs such as CPU and motherboards. His YouTube channel is dedicated to teaching electronics from a schematic, PCB and product design standpoint. He is going more in-depth into the design of the digital electronics perspective of electronics, and implementing the design in Altium Designer, one of the Electronics Design Assistant software in the market. As I’m also using Altium for circuit design I learned a lot of good practices from Robert’s videos.

The first video which really caught my attention was “14 Tips to improve Arduino Schematic and PCB”. The Arduino is an easy to use microcontroller platform, however, it has some design shortcomings. In the video, Robert identifies the issues and explains a proposed better design solution for the platform. This in-depth and forward-thinking mindset that I learned partly from Robert was essential when I started designing instruments.

Another very good video of his was the recent interview of Samson March who designed an open-source smartwatch all by himself. This video was very interesting because it gave an insight into how a hobby project is done, from inception through design, prototyping to a finished product.

4) Louis Rossmann

The fourth channel I'd like to write about is Louis Rossmann's channel. His story is one of the most inspirational in my opinion. Louis is most famous for repairing mainly Apple laptops, he is going through the damaged laptops brought to his shop in New York and fixes them step by step as he records it. His videos are an outstanding source of learning debugging and troubleshooting electronics.

The reason I like Louis’s channel is that he is not only an outstanding professional from a technical standpoint but he has a huge experience of running his business, an experience that he shares with his audience. This entrepreneurial segment with high moral standards and excellent critical thinking elevates his channel to the most valuable ones. His efforts and work for technology sustainability and the right to repair movement are also invaluable not only for professionals but for the general public as well. Demystifying technology is very important in order to give customers the critical thinking skills needed to make an unbiased decision in choosing the right product, and Louis’s straightforward and down to earth style is extremely valuable. 

When I had to take out a fine pitch SMD chip from a PCB without damaging neither of them, I ended up learning the “heat gun” method from one of his videos which help me in that project.

5) Ben Eater

Another very important author: Ben Eater, has in my opinion, the most comprehensive and detailed explanation of digital electronics fundamentals on YouTube. Not only he explains the building blocks in a very understandable way, but actually he is building breadboard demos of the circuits explaining every signal, every wire on it, making it more understandable. His videos culminated in him making an 8-bit computer, guiding the viewer through the design process. This hands-on educational video is a very good and essential tool to understand the fundamentals of microcontrollers and computers and should be a must-watch for students before or during university courses to obtain a deeper level of understanding.

Notable mentions:

• Mike's electric stuff: Great teardowns and hacks
• IanScottJohnston: Instrument repairs, modifications, 
• Gerry Sweeney: Great teardowns and design tutorials
• W2aew: Extensive collection of teardowns, tutorials, experiments
• Jerry Ellsworth: Great prototyping, experiments
• Scullcom Hobby Electronics: In-depth, detailed tutorials, and example projects.
• Mjlorton: Great tool and equipment reviews

Public impact

You might ask: well having a very targeted professional channel is good for a small group of people, but what’s the benefit of them to the general public. Apart from having publicly and freely accessible knowledge is a huge value by itself to society, without channels like these, I’m sure a lot of inventors wouldn’t have been able to make a demo prototype of their work. Professionals like myself who deepened their knowledge with the help of these channels are contributing to society and to the economy. These videos are a huge help to people who don’t know where to start, they give much more confidence in what to do than written material. These can be a huge motivation to students as well, who can watch these videos in their own time and can decide if this is something they want to do as a profession.

So congratulations to all of them for sharing such a vast amount of knowledge and experience. 

Gabor Gubicza

This article was not sponsored.

Photo by Jaredd Craig on Unsplash edited by Gabor Gubicza