What EE/EM research can be done at home any more ?

[MathWizard]

Besides making free energy machines or free Britney machines !! What EE or electromagnetism research can be done at home any more, without being super rich?

I guess it really would come down to money. You could maybe do lightning research, or making semi-conductor recipes, or make and measure material properties of insulators for example. Most all that type of stuff has been done already I guess.

Maybe invent some new silicon sandwich device? I saw a few videos of some teenage guy making transistors and IC's on silicon sheets, in his house.

[NiHaoMike]

The easy one would be embedded systems, all sorts of neat hacks have been made by hobbyists. Many have even come up with tricks that previously were thought to be impossible on that particular device.

An interesting one to get into would be DIY audio, lots of opportunity to be able to make it much cheaper than off the shelf equivalents if you're into high end stuff.

[jonpaul]

see Scientific American magazine

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Amateur_Scientist

1928..2001  Amateur Scientist column, by C L Strong, illustrated by Rodger Hayworth.

DIY homemade atom smashers, vacuum systems, , X-ray machines, optical spectrographs, seismographs, quartz clocks, MRI resonance...Lot's of optics, electronics, HV, chemistry. 

I Read the printed magazine in 1950s..1980s.  Built some of the projects.

Inspired many well known physicis,engineers, chemists, doctors.

Enjoy,

Jon

[RJSV]

   A partially tough question.  I suppose the right phrase for it would be to say that the odds start stacking up against having clear success.  But such questions involve resources.
   Some kid in, say, India could experience a need to be more connected with a big industry company, when you g, but later obtain univ. degree and conventional engineering position.  In reverse of that, a person could go ten years, having good career path, then experience accident / sickness or other bad luck, to separate them from professional contacts...

   Myself, I have limits, health wise; chronic fatigue and frequent 'brain fog', but still (attempt) studying of all the myriad of issues to be understood,...er; or at least recognized.  You could claim that a three hour stint, in my own backyard, could constitute a study-preparation session, (complete with handy notebook).

   I've seen lawyers, that couldn't quite make-it, in usual attorney's offices, but studied medical transcription tasks, and became a technical writer, supplying legal teams with case summaries.  That work relation helped replace the lost opportunity that the initial attorney profession had provided.

   There's always something to do, even if it's studying for a future job, with some direction in mind.
Smartphone - chair - notebook - shady tree...What's stopping you ?

[jasonRF]

What EE or electromagnetism research can be done at home any more, without being super rich?

If the goal is personal satisfaction, then whether or not something may have been done before just doesn't matter and there is an endless number of options.  Even if you are basically reproducing something that has already been done, if you really try to understand how it works and how to improve it, you will almost certainly learn something new.  Add in the fact that computers and test equipment are cheaper than ever and there has never been an easier time to do this.  Find something interesting to you and dive in!

jason

[dmills]

I have seen some decent work on the use of metamaterials in antenna structures done in a home lab, quite cool. The modern SDR makes doing network analysis type stuff much more affordable then it once was. 

The big trap tends to be that access to research libraries and literature can be problematic, and as we all know, many hours in the lab can save twenty minutes or so in the library!

Repeating published results is valuable (sometimes they turn out to be irreproducible), and that rather then original research is something that the amateur can hope to achieve.

[Ian.M]

With approximately 200 years of development in the field of electromagnetism, and approximately a century of development in the field of solid state electronics, it isn't at all surprising that all the 'low-hanging fruit' has already been done, in most cases many times.

However some of the early work in these fields is close to becoming lost technology, and replicating that work in your garage, paying attention to historical accuracy and properly documenting it, with proper citations, could be worthwhile to both yourself and the fields as a whole.

[jonpaul]

in 1907, Albert Einstein in Bern, used pencil and paper to discover relativity.

He worked in his appartement.

Equipment = brain

You can do the same!

Havre any absolutely fantastic day!

Jon

[CatalinaWOW]

Doing something truly new demands inspiration.  Which is the hard part.  Realization of that inspiration may or may not require large resources.  Einsteins requirements were time, pencil and paper (plus access to the research journals of the day).   For a more recent example look at the work on using WiFi routers to locate people.

If you want to stay within EM fields you might want to think about the fact that the majority of work has focused on idealized boundary conditions (perfect conductors, planar surfaces, homogeneous materials ....) with minor variations.  There are huge unexplored areas, maybe there is something useful.

[tszaboo]

A few example:
RF filter design, conducted emissions testing, tests with mmWave radar. Or design of tiny PCB motors (Carl Bugeja on Youtube) or PCB inductors.

[SiliconWizard]

Just define "research".
Some stuff will require only basic equipment, while others could require investments in tens of grands.
Also, some pieces of equipment can't be used without a proper certification, such as x-ray machines (depending probably on your country.)

You can design ICs at home if you have the cash, using MPW services. Or do some crowdfunding if you don't have the cash.

[CatalinaWOW]

Einsteins requirements were time, pencil and paper (plus access to the research journals of the day). 

Don't also forget he also had a burning passion for it and no one to tell him that what he was doing was bad.

Enthusiasm can get you through any roadblocks provided you have it in the first place and its difficult to keep ahold of it too.

While I generally agree, I have found that burning passion is far more common than inspiration or genius.  Over my life I have met people who passionately invested their savings into pneumatic cars (with tanks refilled at the "free" (at that time) tire filling pumps, and someone who was going to harness a hidden form of free energy called Coriolis force and other equally silly things.  There have been many others with less crazy dreams. 

But that is OK.  If it is your passion and you are satisfied pursuing it, it doesn't really matter whether it makes sense or not.  It may even be commercially successful.  People have made fair amount of money pushing solar roof tiles and solar pavement and special audiophile capacitors and cables.  And hardware stores and markets are full of better mousetraps.

[RoGeorge]

It wasn't exactly pencil and paper.  The Michelson–Morley experiment and its negative result played a very important role.

[MathWizard]

There's a lot of early experiment that would still be hard to do, without a lot of resources. Like the experiment where the guy figured out the charge on an electron, using basically dust grains in air, with static charge, vs gravity.

Someone could make a really cool museum with all the early science experiments. And add in the early technology too, like at the Museum of Computer History , iirc the name.

[tszaboo]

There's a lot of early experiment that would still be hard to do, without a lot of resources. Like the experiment where the guy figured out the charge on an electron, using basically dust grains in air, with static charge, vs gravity.

Someone could make a really cool museum with all the early science experiments. And add in the early technology too, like at the Museum of Computer History , iirc the name.

Those museums totally exist.


You just have to travel a bit, since most of the scientific research in electronics were done in France, UK or Austro-Hungary in the 18-19th century.

[Infraviolet]

Certainly in the electronic engineering field thesedays one can easily do at home things which only specialised companies could a few decades ago, but the really tricky part is knowing what to do which is new and can't just be done with an off-the-shelf "chip that does it all for you". In the physical electromagnetics field thesedays I guess that a major focus isn't on real experiments any more but on finding ways to better predict and simulate complex phenomena (so that designs for antennas and other EM devices can be tested more in software before fabricating a first prorotype, because that can be fully automated whereas physical fabrication and testing can't) , I suppose accessing a cloud supercomputer cluster to run sims could count as "done from home" too.

[TimFox]

There's a lot of early experiment that would still be hard to do, without a lot of resources. Like the experiment where the guy figured out the charge on an electron, using basically dust grains in air, with static charge, vs gravity.

Someone could make a really cool museum with all the early science experiments. And add in the early technology too, like at the Museum of Computer History , iirc the name.

The Millikan oil-drop experiment was used to determine the electron's charge, using droplets of watch oil and a reversible electric field.
His equipment was still at the University of Chicago when I started there, and I actually used one to repeat the experiment.
It required looking through a short telescope and a window with fiducial lines to see the drops go slowly up and down when the voltage on the two electrodes was reversed.
There was a small radioactive source that could be moved in place to increment the net charge on a drop to see the resulting change in behavior.
The big problem was keeping track of my drop while noting the time from a stopwatch in the lab notebook.
If I remember correctly, the old Amateur Scientist column in Scientific American (maybe around 1960?) had a detailed article about how to build your own unit.

[Infraviolet]

Just a thought actually, quite a bit of stuff that is, in practice, electronics is, in theory, physics. The book Horowitz and Hill is fileld with examples from the author's work where they built electronic devices to aid in physics research, so maybe that line of thought is worth some further consideration. The Oil Drop Experiment is just such an example, albeit from an earlier age of electronics.

[jonpaul]

Millikan oil dropper experiment determined the charges on a,single electron

The Wilson cloud chamber first visualizes the tracks of atomic particles, the Alpha.

Rontegen discovered X rays, he used a crookes tube and noticed flogging of wrapped photographie plates.

All Pioneering discoveries at the root of modern physics, all done with simple handmade equipment.

See Scientific American magazine amateur Scientist column 1928..2001 for DIY versions of these experiments.

Enjoy

Jon

[Canis Dirus Leidy]

Besides making free energy machines or free Britney machines !! What EE or electromagnetism research can be done at home any more, without being super rich?

Define "research" and "super rich": http://www.y1pwe.co.uk/RAProgs/index.html

[Infraviolet]

Just a thought, is there a list anywhere of "open problems" in electronics for today, like Hilbert's maths problems were in 1900? That wuld be the place to start, see what isn't known, then work out what is feasible to do at home, rather than trying to work out what is feasible to do then hoping your ideas of feasible things map to unanswered problems.

[CatalinaWOW]

Not really electronic or physics, but in Knuth's "Art of Computer Programming" he includes problems at the end of each chapter ranging from easy to research topics.  Although the texts are 50 years old now I am sure that many of the difficult ones remain unsolved.

[m98]

Power electronics is a field where, except designing the semiconductor devices, you can do cutting-edge stuff on a relatively reasonable budget.

[coppercone2]

this one always struck me as approachable
https://phys.org/news/2021-06-dynamics-contact-electrification.html

I remember those charged sphere problems in class. I guess they are a little more complicated then the exam lead you to believe. 

[NiHaoMike]

Power electronics is a field where, except designing the semiconductor devices, you can do cutting-edge stuff on a relatively reasonable budget.

Pretty sure embedded systems are cheaper, unless you're into really exotic stuff.