My self-study plan for electrical engineering

You are not going to start anywhere near the area where you have to go "full custom". That is, you won't be spinning custom ICs, you'll be assembling custom PCBs from off-the-shelf components. Possibly expensive ones. But that $1000 OTS part is an insane bargain compared to any chip fabbed just for you.

First make your thing do something, anything at all. Second, make it do something useful. Third, make it do the right thing, the thing you need, your goal from the beginning. Only then should you optimize it, making it smaller or cheaper or lower power or prettier or.... This is the road to success in the "R" phase of R&D.

Why don't you go to Amazon and buy some books on brain-computer interfaces, start reading them and when you get stuck read the relevant electrical engineering information?

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=brain-computer+interfaces&i=strip...

Also for Digital Control Systems, check out this book by Tim Wescott

Applied control theory for embedded systems

It is less math intensive and more intuitive and aims at folks with a software background like yourself.

Hi, I have degrees in EE and Physics. It's good that you want to get a well-rounded education, but I think focusing on E&M and circuit design will probably pay the most dividends.

Purcell is a physics book, but I think with your math background it might be fine? From there I'd suggest Griffiths E&M, as far as setting up more complicated problems goes. I don't really like the EE-oriented E&M books, but if you need some of the "calculate this value" style of problem maybe you'd want to take a look at them.

Circuit design is kind of unsatisfying these days since on the professional side there's a lot of throwing stuff in the simulator, especially with IC design. I'm an advocate for more hands-on stuff. For the absolute basics I feel there's no substitute for getting some LEDs, resistors, breadboard, and multimeter, and doing some kid level projects. Then there's audio projects, and RF projects, since once you've learned the textbook fundamentals of amplifiers, there's no substitute for building some. Pozar and the ARRL RF project book will take you a long way, though you'll have to buy some test equipment...

But honestly, do you really want to get distracted from your main focus? You may have lost interest by the time you're done with the curriculum. There's a lot you can get done by forging ahead and just learning what you need to as you go along. Why learn amplifier design when the industry is all too happy to sell you a black box gain block? Why learn digital design when microcontrollers are getting faster and cheaper all the time? ;)

> The OP wants to study EE because he has a specific goal. My suggestion was that instead of trying to study everything EE focus only on those subjects that are relevant.

This is something that I've seen often in self study plans for software development - the "learn everything and then try to use it" rather than "learn what you need to start solving the problem... and start solving it."

In software development this often takes the form of a self-learner learnings Java, JavaScript, Python, C, and C++. Once in an interview it becomes apparent that they don't know enough about any one language to solve a problem in that language.

This is where a university class (and degree) have an advantage - they've got a set of problems for the student to solve (homework and labs) and then take the student through learning specific knowledge to solve those problems.

This also shows what self teaching often lacks - those small problems that can be accomplished as part of learning how to solve the big problems.