Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Getting into robotics as a software engineer

bou.ke

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 105 posts

Re: Getting into robotics as a software engineer

#31

Post by chillingeffect »

fake-name wrote: post #11
msadowski wrote: post #7

My journey is a little bit opposite to the author’s: I studied robotics and started learning programming by myself to create software for robots. There are two observations I have that can be useful to people making the software->robotics journey. * Agile for software-hardware is hard if not impossible. For software it can be reasonable, but it’s really hard to iterate on both hardware and software at the same time.…

I'd go one further and say that basically agile in hardware is fundamentally impossible in any way people commonly use agile. If you have any custom hardware, you are basically stuck with a turn time of at minimum a day or two for any changes (often more, weeks + for new PCBs is common if you're not throwing huge amounts of money at people). In this context, any process that depends on rapid small iterations is basic…

Ive done firmware for a long time. Platforms vary considerably and most have surprises. Debugging facilities are limited. Reference examples are sparse and chatgpt hasnt got much info on niche OSes like zephyr, and safertos except some FreeRTOS.

Pieces of code interact more heavily than a linux machine. Testing requires more hand-holding/baby-sitting. Cross-platform architectures don't scale down well. There are many types of comms busses with no/few standard embeddings.

Some teams know how to make it a lot easier. Some CTOs know this, but most find out the hard way. Embedded practices lag webdev by 5-10 or more years bc they were good enough for a long time or for small projects. Expectations are rising, but there is less leverage than adtech so salaries are ok but not explosive.

Re: Getting into robotics as a software engineer

#32

Post by DoctorDabadedoo »

mdorazio wrote: post #17

Really wish the author would have commented on salary. I personally think the reason more people don't end up on the hardware/robotics side is that the questionable-value fintech/adtech/socialtech pure software side of the world pays so much better and most developers follow the money.

Robotics is very niche and the market is dominated by early stage startups (since most of them go out of business a few years in), so salaries are average unless you are working specific jobs for FAANG. Job hoping usually means moving elsewhere, since working close to the hardware makes it much easier, which in turn means having a good picture of what is a competitive salary sometimes is not obvious.

source: I work in robotics. AMA.

Re: Getting into robotics as a software engineer

#33

Post by jsjohnst »

chillingeffect wrote: post #31
fake-name wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd go one further and say that basically agile in hardware is fundamentally impossible in any way people commonly use agile. If you have any custom hardware, you are basically stuck with a turn time of at minimum a day or two for any changes (often more, weeks + for new PCBs is common if you're not throwing huge amounts of money at people). In this context, any process that depends on rapid small iterations is basic…

Ive done firmware for a long time. Platforms vary considerably and most have surprises. Debugging facilities are limited. Reference examples are sparse and chatgpt hasnt got much info on niche OSes like zephyr, and safertos except some FreeRTOS. Pieces of code interact more heavily than a linux machine. Testing requires more hand-holding/baby-sitting. Cross-platform architectures don't scale down well. There are many…

> Reference examples are sparse and chatgpt hasnt got much info

Chicken, meet egg. If a web crawler can’t find plenty of reference examples, then LLMs trained on web crawled data aren’t going to be very useful.

Re: Getting into robotics as a software engineer

#34

Post by badpun »

DoctorDabadedoo wrote: post #32
mdorazio wrote: post #17

Really wish the author would have commented on salary. I personally think the reason more people don't end up on the hardware/robotics side is that the questionable-value fintech/adtech/socialtech pure software side of the world pays so much better and most developers follow the money.

Robotics is very niche and the market is dominated by early stage startups (since most of them go out of business a few years in), so salaries are average unless you are working specific jobs for FAANG. Job hoping usually means moving elsewhere, since working close to the hardware makes it much easier, which in turn means having a good picture of what is a competitive salary sometimes is not obvious. source: I work i…

Thanks for the AMA! Do you see a lot of opportunities for people utilizing computer-vision based SLAM (aka Structure from Motion)? I quite like that technique, but it seems too niche to make a consistent career out of it.

Re: Getting into robotics as a software engineer

#35

Post by andrew_eu »

What would be a good starting platform for a programmable drone?

The article suggests playing around with a Raspberry Pi Pico, but this is a bit bare bones. Are there any kits, or entry level programmable drones on the market with a reasonable toolchain to program sequences?

Re: Getting into robotics as a software engineer

#36

Post by eschneider »

shafyy wrote: post #6
eschneider wrote: post #2

Nice article. As someone who's also gotten into robotics from the software side, I'd also suggest learning a bit about the hardware side. If you're doing anything with custom boards and board bring-up, you'll need to be able to read a schematic and data sheet at a basic level. Being able to use an oscilloscope and logic analyzer is also _very_ useful. None of this stuff is terribly hard, but it's nice to know what to…

What can you recommend to start experimenting at home with robotics? Raspberry Pi?

Arduinos or Raspberry Pi's are both fine. I'd definitely pick up some motors and figure out how to do precision control. Lots of good info online for that. :)

Re: Getting into robotics as a software engineer

#37

Post by jpace121 »

badpun wrote: post #34
DoctorDabadedoo wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Robotics is very niche and the market is dominated by early stage startups (since most of them go out of business a few years in), so salaries are average unless you are working specific jobs for FAANG. Job hoping usually means moving elsewhere, since working close to the hardware makes it much easier, which in turn means having a good picture of what is a competitive salary sometimes is not obvious. source: I work i…

Thanks for the AMA! Do you see a lot of opportunities for people utilizing computer-vision based SLAM (aka Structure from Motion)? I quite like that technique, but it seems too niche to make a consistent career out of it.

Computer vision based SLAM definitely has use cases and you can definitely make money applying it at the right companies to the right set of problems. Building a whole career around a single technique, any technique, probably is probably not gonna work. You need to be broader than that.

Re: Getting into robotics as a software engineer

#38

Post by moffkalast »

DoctorDabadedoo wrote: post #32
mdorazio wrote: post #17

Really wish the author would have commented on salary. I personally think the reason more people don't end up on the hardware/robotics side is that the questionable-value fintech/adtech/socialtech pure software side of the world pays so much better and most developers follow the money.

Robotics is very niche and the market is dominated by early stage startups (since most of them go out of business a few years in), so salaries are average unless you are working specific jobs for FAANG. Job hoping usually means moving elsewhere, since working close to the hardware makes it much easier, which in turn means having a good picture of what is a competitive salary sometimes is not obvious. source: I work i…

What kind of robotics? It's a pretty wide field.

Re: Getting into robotics as a software engineer

#39

Post by 0xfaded »

badpun wrote: post #34
DoctorDabadedoo wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Robotics is very niche and the market is dominated by early stage startups (since most of them go out of business a few years in), so salaries are average unless you are working specific jobs for FAANG. Job hoping usually means moving elsewhere, since working close to the hardware makes it much easier, which in turn means having a good picture of what is a competitive salary sometimes is not obvious. source: I work i…

Thanks for the AMA! Do you see a lot of opportunities for people utilizing computer-vision based SLAM (aka Structure from Motion)? I quite like that technique, but it seems too niche to make a consistent career out of it.

I work for a self driving doing mapping. There are definitely roles out there, more broadly look into other areas of state estimation.

It gets interesting when these systems need to be productionized and scaled. A strong software engineer who can speak the math is invaluable. My first year on the job was basically removing N^2 loops and making 3D visualizations.

Re: Getting into robotics as a software engineer

#40

Post by penjelly »

DoctorDabadedoo wrote: post #32
mdorazio wrote: post #17

Really wish the author would have commented on salary. I personally think the reason more people don't end up on the hardware/robotics side is that the questionable-value fintech/adtech/socialtech pure software side of the world pays so much better and most developers follow the money.

Robotics is very niche and the market is dominated by early stage startups (since most of them go out of business a few years in), so salaries are average unless you are working specific jobs for FAANG. Job hoping usually means moving elsewhere, since working close to the hardware makes it much easier, which in turn means having a good picture of what is a competitive salary sometimes is not obvious. source: I work i…

how would you recommend a software dev break into the industry over the next 3-5 years? Preferably without going back to university. What sorts of projects are best to focus on initially?
Post reply on HN