Introduction
Researching patents do not always define sufficient technical requirements and specifications to start a new project. We often need to go after a little more theory and science to achieve a better theoretical basis.
Online publications
One way to do this is to perform a basic research on Google, Yahoo, Bing or another search engine of your choice. The best results however, you get searching on specialized tools for the scientific and technical matters. Note that the material found is not always free of charge. I frequently use the following:
- Here you can search in IEEE publications:
- In this site you will find webinars, courses, training, white papers, application notes, tutorials and many other resources:
- This site is pretty cool! It gives access to entire chapters of books and other publications:
- In this, the information is more concentrated in the field of electricity:
Virtual Library – Electrical and Electronics Engineering
Webcasts
A very nice feature to learn a new subject or to update your knowledge, are the webcasts. These are lectures or short seminars, on average 1 hour long, where a particular topic is discussed and often presented an good overview of a subject. These online seminars are in general broadcasted live and you can participate formulating your questions to the speaker after the presentation. The webcasts are archived and available for consultation for a long period. Some sources of webcasts:
- TOL- Techonline: In this site you will find webinars, courses, training, white papers, application notes, tutorials and many other features
- Design News & Digikey – Continuing Education Center: Free courses in the form of mini courses with 5-day duration, each class lasts on average 30 min. You can access archived courses as well.
- Other sources of information for webinars, courses and training:
- Manufacturers: Altera, Xilinx, Atmel, Microchip, Texas Instruments, etc.
- Equipment manufacturers: Rohde & Schwarz, Agilent, Anritsu, National Instruments etc;
- Technical journals: Control Engineering, Electronic Design, Microwaves & RF etc.
Online college courses
Expanding the concept of higher education, many universities offer formal courses at a distance. They can be good alternatives to supplement your training when the need arises. The suggestions posted below are sources of knowledge where you can conduct free and quality training.
- Veduca – free online courses at university level with classes from the universities of Harvard, Michigan, USP, Unicamp, Unesp, among others.
- Coursera – The Coursera is an educational platform that forms partnerships with the best universities and educational institutions worldwide to offer online courses and free to all.
- MIT OPEN COURSEWARE – Open courses (and free) at MIT. (There are some in Portuguese!)
- edX– MIT and Harvard University founded in partnership EDX, which offers many free courses online. Currently the EDX has at least another 32 partner universities around the world. It is a must!
- STANFORD ENGINEERING EVERYWHERE – online courses and webinars
- UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY– Online courses
- Open Yale Courses– Online courses
If you know some other sources for free university education, please share it with us.
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Development projects – Before you start
Check out the other articles in this series on how to start a development project:
- What does the customer want? – The art of extracting from the customer what he really wants and needs;
- Search for Patents! – The advantage of researching patent systems to gain knowledge in specific subjects and to know the solutions given by competitors;
- Look for Technical Standards! – The precautions that should be taken in the preparation of a new project, if there is any chance the requirement to be met from specific technical standards requirements.
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This work, “Study some more!“, by Henrique Frank W. Puhlmann, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
