Principal of Embed Inc, a custom engineering and consulting company
specializing in embedded systems. Coordinated and worked on dozens
of projects, of which a few representative ones are:
-
Various digital closed loop control systems. These included
controlling a solenoid-driven valve to maintain a set pressure,
controlling fillament power and high voltage to get the desired output
from an xray tube, and phase control of a brushless DC motor to get
highly accurate rotation rate.
-
Created TCP/IP network stack in assembler on a PIC 18 which has been
used in several products since then.
-
Ongoing work part time for Radianse (see below) as a consultant thru
Embed. Includes production test station hardware and software
for the new model 360 tag, firmware updates to various parts of the
system, etc.
-
Ongoing work on the design of small wearable tags that receive data
from fixed stations via ultrasound. Designed ultrasound front
end receiver that draws only 35μA at 3V while having a gain of
several 1000 at 40 kHz.
-
Coordinated the electronics, firmware, and software of the follow on
product to an existing rotating LED
display. Developed the high level architecture and also
designed some of the electronics and firmware.
-
Developed a method for performing power factor correction in a power
supply without the need to measure the input current. This new
method has been awarded US patent 7,411,378. The method is
described in more detail in a separate
paper, and was also published in the January
2005 edition of Circuit Cellar magazine.
-
Flight Simulator. Despite being an
external consultant, once brought on board was the closest thing to a
chief engineer this project had. Designed the system for making
the thousands of individual inputs and outputs of the cockpit
available to the software via a procedural interface. This
envolved the design of a distributed embedded system, which included
an embedded Pentium and a number of smaller microcontrollers.
-
Created PIC development
environment for creating firmware for Microchip PIC
microcontrollers efficiently, more quickly, with higher reliability
and better re-use than the bare Microchip tools. Includes
extensive PIC
assembler preprocessor and macro library
that provide features not present in the native tools, such as
symbolic global 1-bit flags, symbolic handling of individual I/O pins,
floating point, and other features. The environment and a few
other tools are available via free download.
-
Created the physical products that Embed
sells. This included conception, hardware design, firmware, and
getting them produced.
The wide range of projects have led to experience in diverse areas:
- Working with a group of engineers with individual specialized areas
of expertise while maintaining progress towards a coordinated goal.
- Digitally controlled switching power supplies and DC to DC
converters.
- Transferring 10s of watts of power accross a rotating interface.
- Rechargeable battery management.
- Ultra low power microcontroller circuits.
- Signal processing, including noise reduction
algorithms on a PC and on dedicated digital signal processors (DSPs).
- Data loggers, including one that measured heart rate,
pedal cadence, pedal torque, and speed during a bicycle ride.
- High accuracy analog circuits for measuring micrometer deflections
of LVDT probes.
- Satellite based remote monitoring.
- Various device drivers and operating system internals.
