Electrical Engineering, for Computer Scientists

Rebuild fluency in calculus, ODEs, linear algebra, and complex analysis in the form an EE textbook uses. Install the entire toolchain (LTspice, KiCad, Arduino, ESP32, STM32, Python, Vivado) and verify each with a hello-world. Build the CS↔EE concept bridge you will walk across for the next 11 months.

The foundation of all EE. Master the analytical machinery of DC circuits — Ohm’s law, Kirchhoff’s laws, nodal/mesh analysis, Thevenin/Norton, superposition, and the transient behavior of capacitors and inductors.

Generalize DC analysis to sinusoidal steady-state via phasors and impedance. Master AC power (real, reactive, apparent, power factor). Meet resonance and three-phase systems.

Master the nonlinear workhorses of analog — diodes, BJTs, MOSFETs, op-amps — via the small-signal model. Build a complete audio amplifier by the end of the phase.

Take the digital abstraction from gates to a working FPGA prototype and a wireless MCU telemetry demo. CS background pays the biggest dividends here — FSMs, K-maps, register files, pipelining are all things you already know; we just rename them for hardware.

Master the frequency-domain machinery — Fourier, Laplace, Z, DFT, FFT — and build a real-time audio spectrum analyzer and EQ on the ESP32. The most math-heavy phase; as a CS engineer, you already know the FFT algorithm and the discrete-sequence data structure.

Master classical and modern control — root locus, Bode/Nyquist, PID, state-space — and apply it to closed-loop motor control and a line-following robot. Feedback is the engineering of error correction; you have already seen it in TCP congestion control and iterative optimization.

Master power converters (buck/boost/inverter), electric machines (DC/induction/BLDC), and motor drives. Build a working FOC BLDC driver. Heavy on LTspice and bench — voltages and currents here will kill components if you get it wrong.

Cover Maxwell’s equations in real engineering problems, transmission lines, antennas, RF front-ends, and analog + digital modulation. Once physical dimensions approach wavelength, lumped-circuit approximation breaks — wires become transmission lines.

Understand the CMOS transistor, layout, fabrication flow, and digital IC design. Prototype a pipelined adder on FPGA plus a custom inverter layout in Magic. Front-end (RTL) is close to CS; back-end (synthesis, P&R, layout) is more EE-specific.

Two halves. First (modules 10.1-10.9): bulk power system — generation, transmission, distribution, protection, stability, smart grids, storage, renewables, EV charging. Second: six capstone projects — pick one or two, budget 4-6 weeks each, ship a working hardware demo.