Hypothetically speaking, if all materials were indestructible and could not melt or get damaged. What would happen if there was a short circuit?

I've been spending more time looking at EV motor controllers, and one thing that gets overlooked in general EV discussions is how much the inverter contributes to overall drivetrain efficiency.

Even with a good motor, you've still got switching losses, conduction losses, dead-time effects and thermal limitations in the controller.

And the operating point matters. A controller that's efficient under one load condition isn't necessarily operating at its best during repeated low-speed acceleration or high-current operation.

What's interesting is the trade-off between higher switching frequencies, current ripple, audible noise and heat.

SiC devices can improve some of those trade-offs, but cost and system design still matter.

For anyone who's worked on motor drives or inverter design, which tends to be the bigger challenge in practice: reducing switching losses, managing thermal performance or getting the control strategy right?

I'm particularly interested in how those priorities change between low-cost two-wheelers and larger EV powertrains.

Hi!

I have an interview coming up for an RF / Microwave EE I position at a defense prime (onsite, airborne radar focus), and I'm looking for some advice on how to prep.

My Background:

• B.S. in EE recently graduated.
• Standard undergrad RF/Electromagnetics coursework, plus basic hands-on lab experience with VNAs, Spectrum Analyzers, and MATLAB/ADS.

For those working in defense RF or who have interviewed for Entry-Level RF roles recently:

1. Fundamental Math vs. High-Level Concepts: How much on-the-spot math should I prepare for? Is it mostly conceptual (explaining S-parameters, $P_{1\text{dB}}$, noise figure, Friis formula), or will they ask me to do live Smith Chart matching and transmission line calculations on a whiteboard?
2. Lab & Automation Focus: The job description mentions test automation heavily (Python, LabVIEW, VISA/GPIB). Are they expecting deep scripting questions, or mostly understanding how to set up automated S-parameter / power sweeps?
3. Common Pitfalls: What are the most common fundamental traps entry-level candidates fail on during technical screens?

Appreciate any advice or resources to brush up on. Thanks!

so im still in high school but i love to do electrical engineering,ive made my first pcb motor driver using a l9110 IC and i work with esp32 and all that stuff ive made some pretty cool things i guess you can say im moderate/newish to it ive worked with basic parts too like dc motor resistors sensor compasitors mosfets transistors all that stuff.i know how to code microcontrolers but not with c++ ive been using scratch code,BUT THE REAL QUESTION is for college is there a specific catagory of electrical engineering major that doesnt focus on just theoretical stuff but actually does hands on stuff with parts

So I've been working on this for my engineering thesis and wanted to throw the core idea out there before I sink more months into it, in case anyone's spotted something I'm missing.

WPA3 didn't actually replace the WPA2 four-way handshake, it bolted a new layer in front of it called SAE (Simultaneous Authentication of Equals). The whole point of SAE is that you can't precompute anything offline from a captured handshake anymore, because the key material is blinded through a DiffieHellman-ish exchange instead of a static PBKDF2(password, SSID). In theory that kills offline dictionary attacks dead ie every guess needs a live, rate-limited roundtrip with the AP.

The thing I'm chasing is one specific step buried inside SAE: turning your password into a point on the P-256 curve. The "classic" way to do this (hunting-and-pecking) is a loop, hash the password + MAC addresses, check if you land on a valid curve point, if not increment a counter and try again. That counter, k, is small (geometric distribution, mean of like 2), but it's password-dependent, and it leaks through timing. This isn't new, Vanhoef and Ronen showed this back in 2020 (Dragonblood), and it's why H2E (Hash-to-Element) exists as a constant-time replacement.

What I'm doing differently is trying to actually operationalize the leak with cheap hardware and see how far it goes

Built a timing rig out of ESP32s, timestamping the outgoing SAE Commit frame and the AP's response off the same hardware TSF clock (not a software clock, so no OS scheduling jitter messing things up).

Had to patch the ESP-IDF WiFi driver to even send raw Authentication/Commit frames, turns out the stock driver whitelists frame types and silently drops anything else. Fixed it by weakening one ELF symbol's binding so my own override gets linked in instead of the driver's internal check. One-line, fully reversible.

Instead of just doing classic timing analysis, I'm training a profiled/deep-learning model to recover k from the timing traces, the same way you'd do differential power analysis on an AES key byte treating k as the "leaking intermediate" and SAE's two derivation modes (legacy hunting-and-pecking vs H2E) as my "right key / wrong key" arms.

End goal isn't just "yes it leaks" I want to actually drive a real offline dictionary attack off the recovered k and report how close that gets you back to WPA2-level crackability, under each derivation mode.

First real-hardware run already surfaced something useful (and slightly humbling): at 120 samples/arm on a single receiver, I couldn't separate the two arms statistically yet. Turns out normal 802.11 retransmission noise is in the low-millisecond range, while the actual signal I'm chasing is tens of microseconds. So the noise floor is real and bigger than I'd like — which is exactly why the full version of this is a distributed array of sensors instead of one node, plus way more samples.

Curious if anyone here has played with SAE/Dragonfly timing attacks post-Dragonblood, or has opinions on whether H2E actually closes this cleanly in practice vs just raising the bar. Also happy to go into the ESP32/driver-patching side if that's more people's thing.

On a more practical note I'm a final-year student and this is shaping up to be the basis of a master's/PhD, and I don't currently have a supervisor whose background actually overlaps with side-channel analysis or ECC. If anyone here is an academic/researcher in crypto or hardware security (or knows one who might be interested in this kind of work), I'd genuinely love to hear from you.

Been looking more closely at EV motor controllers lately, and it's interesting how quickly a straightforward classroom concept turns into a proper engineering problem.

On paper, it's a three-phase inverter, PWM signals, some feedback and a control algorithm.

Sounds manageable.

Then you actually try making it work reliably.

Suddenly you're dealing with dead-time, noisy Hall sensor signals, current measurement errors, MOSFET heating, timing issues and a motor that doesn't behave the way your simulation predicted.

And that's before getting into FOC or sensorless control.

I feel like getting a motor to spin is one achievement. Getting it to run smoothly, efficiently and safely under different loads is a completely different one.

For those who've built or worked on BLDC/PMSM motor controllers in college:

What was the hardest part?

Was it the hardware, control algorithm, debugging, or something you didn't even anticipate?

Also curious whether people started with six-step commutation before moving to FOC, or jumped straight into an existing motor-control library.

Would love to hear about projects that didn't work the first time. Those stories usually teach more than the final demo.

I bought this non-working Naomoto HYS-5 gravity-feed steam iron online and wanted to get it working again. I’ve tested the wire paths and it looks like it just needs a new thermal fuse. Before plugging it in though, I want to make sure it’s wired correctly.

The current wiring has neutral going to the on/off switch and hot going directly to the heating element and steam button, meaning even with the thermostat set to zero, the steam button and heating element are still getting power?

I’d taken it apart which is why terminals are disconnected but each one is touching its corresponding terminal. The schematic is ai generated, so a little wonky, but represents the wiring as it is now.

Hello,

For an engineering job I’m applying to, they want me to complete a timed, online assessment. However, I have several disabilities for which I would require accommodations on the test (when I was in school, I received extra time and other aids).

Should I inform the hiring manager of this?
On the one hand, I’m leery about disclosing disability status, since I know they’re not SUPPOSED to discriminate on that basis, but I absolutely don’t trust this in the current job market. Especially since this would be my first full-time engineering job.
On the other, accommodations would improve my chances of success.

Have any other disabled engineers been in this situation while job searching? What did you end up doing?

EDIT: for context, I’m in the US. Employers are generally prohibited from disability-based hiring discrimination, and must make “reasonable accommodations,” but those protections don’t seem very strong right now

So I’m just getting into actual electrical work, I’ve been doing tech repair for a while which has made me interested in EE, at the moment I really only understand the very basics like basic components (resistors, capacitors, transistors, etc).

What are some good free sources online I can utilize to learn Electrical Engineering?

My short term goal is to just understand how to design a circuit.

I’m also curious about physical books that are good, not free of course, for learning electrical engineering.

I appreciate any suggestions and I’m very excited to get into EE!

I mostly work with multi-PWAs systems in which a bunch of complicated PWAs have to come and work seamlessly together. No one really documents anything at my work and if they do, it's mostly either a bunch of overlaying texts on these schematic PDFs that live in some random dude's computer or word documents that are kinda scattered around. I mean it's not the best but it's something. Do you guys mostly do the same lol?

For context in a junior EE and next semester I’m supposed to take classes for my concentration. Not really sure what I want to concentrate in since there are so many diverse options. I’m worried about choosing the wrong one and stuck in an industry I don’t like. Would appreciate any advice, thanks in advance.

I'm a third-year Electrical Engineering student, and I just got offered a co-op position from an MEP consulting services company. I truly want to try out what different industries are like because I interned as a design engineer at an aerospace company last summer, and I learnt a lot about analog design and stuff. However, I kinda want to get the full experience of what it feels like when working in different industries before I graduate so I don't regret when just going all in for just one specific industry. That being said, my boss from the company I interned at last summer also offered me a spring part-time job (circuit design intern at an aerospace company). What would your advice be to me if I am just dumb for burning the bridge with the previous employer, or is it ok to try out different industries?