Resume

Senior Embedded Systems Engineer · Firmware Architecture · Board Bring-Up · Triple-Licensed P.E.

Dallas–Fort Worth, Texas · Contact me on LinkedIn

Summary

Embedded firmware engineer with nearly 30 years of experience taking products from prototype to release, writing bare-metal and RTOS firmware in C/C++ on ARM microcontrollers for medical, robotics, aerospace and wearable devices. I make architecture decisions with long-term maintainability in mind: I have architected bare-metal control platforms from scratch and restructured large, undocumented legacy codebases into ones a team can maintain. Equally at home on the bench, having brought up and debugged dozens of brand-new prototype boards with oscilloscopes and logic analyzers, and experienced in setting up the tools and processes an engineering team relies on. My timing, sensing and tracking work includes 1 ms data-acquisition synchronization, network time sync (IRIG, NTP), motion tracking on field robots, wireless wearable sensors and medical sensor integration. Triple-licensed Professional Engineer in Biomedical, Electrical and Control Systems engineering, with a B.S. in Biomedical Engineering.

Core competencies

• Firmware architecture: bare-metal C/C++, event-driven design and hierarchical state machines (Quantum Leaps QP), RTOS (FreeRTOS, Zephyr, VxWorks, Micrium), embedded Linux and Yocto, device drivers, real-time and motion control, DSP, PID control
• Precision timing: timer input capture and edge-timing decode, quadrature decoding, PWM generation and ramping, timer-triggered ADC with DMA for stimulus and response without the CPU in the loop, network time sync (IRIG, NTP), skew and jitter analysis, FPGA clock-domain crossing
• ARM and SoC platforms: Nordic nRF52/53/54, STM32 (incl. H7), TI C2000, Silicon Labs ARM radios, NXP LPC and i.MX, ESP32, FPGA and SoC FPGA (VHDL, Nios II)
• Board bring-up and hardware debug: first power-up and bring-up of new prototype PCBs, hardware verification and debug, production test fixtures, oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, spectrum analyzers, JTAG/SWD debuggers, protocol analysis (Wireshark), circuit-level debugging, Altium design reviews (firmware needs, design for test, front-end design inputs)
• Peripherals and wired interfaces: CAN and CANopen, SPI, I2C, UART, RS-232/485, USB, Ethernet and LwIP TCP/IP, Modbus RTU/TCP, MDIO
• Wireless: BLE, ANT+, Thread, LoRaWAN, Zigbee, Z-Wave, LTE, Wi-Fi, NFC and UHF RFID, software-defined radio (GNU Radio)
• Process and quality: Git, code review, Jira, Confluence, Azure DevOps, Agile, requirements, verification and validation documentation, risk management, FDA and ISO/IEC medical device standards, DO-178B/C
• Languages: C, C++, Python, C#, VHDL, Bash

Experience

Sparx Engineering — Feb 2010 to present

Partner, Senior Embedded Engineer · Dallas–Fort Worth, TX · Dec 2024 to present

• Hands-on firmware architect and developer: bare-metal C/C++ on Nordic nRF52/53/54, STM32H7, TI C2000 and Silicon Labs ARM radios; embedded Linux on ST, i.MX, BeagleBone and Raspberry Pi.
• Bring up and shake out new client prototype boards, and review schematics and layouts in Altium for firmware needs, design for test and front-end design inputs.
• Lead client evaluations of low-power and long-range wireless (BLE, Thread, LoRaWAN) for IoT products.
• Helped build the firm’s Dallas branch office: helped hire three engineers and built a local network of distributors, manufacturers’ representatives, FAEs and contract manufacturers.
• Brought in new business in medtech, aerospace, research and consumer products.

Partner, Senior Embedded Engineer · Houston, TX · Apr 2017 to Nov 2024

• Architected a bare-metal embedded control platform for a military aerospace cooling system, built on the QP event-driven state-machine framework with the LwIP TCP/IP stack and motion and power control over CAN.
• Took over about 30,000 lines of undocumented legacy C for an agricultural-robotics customer, then restructured and debugged it into a maintainable codebase that ran reliably in the field. Used timers, the ADC and DMA to stream a fixed waveform into a circuit and capture the synchronized response with no CPU in the loop.
• Developed RF angle-of-arrival IP with software-defined radios, finding a signal’s direction from the phase difference between antennas, using GNU Radio and custom Python blocks.
• Worked on new medical ventilation technology, including timer-driven PWM ramping for soft start and stop of a magnetic valve coil, and assessed medical-device IP for possible acquisition.
• Managed and mentored small engineering teams, ran several projects at once, and served as customer liaison on contracts across energy, defense, medical, fitness and agriculture.

Senior Embedded Engineer · Houston, TX · Jun 2013 to Apr 2017

• Wrote firmware for a fitness wearable, from prototype to shipping product, that used near-infrared spectroscopy on a dual-mode BLE/ANT+ ARM Cortex-M0, balancing power, performance and storage.
• Built FPGA-based production test fixture firmware that exercised every subsystem of that wearable and logged results to a database for statistical process control.
• Led a small team delivering an FDA-compliant rugged medical device for the military, owning systems engineering, documentation, risk management and project management.
• Developed the control system for an agricultural robot: a VxWorks-based Bachmann controller with dozens of I/O, CANopen, pneumatics, hydraulics, machine vision and motion tracking, all in a harsh field environment.
• Prototyped the integration of new medical sensors into a customer product (multitasking Micrium RTOS on ARM).
• Delivered FPGA HDMI capture with real-time video processing, a high-speed linear actuator system, a RoHS redesign of a 20-year-old FDA-cleared product, and an update to a microcontroller RF remote decoder (timer input capture of the pulse train) to replace an end-of-life part; mentored junior engineers.

Lead Embedded Software Engineer · Houston, TX · Feb 2010 to Jun 2013

• Developed firmware and FPGA logic for military life-support devices (including timer-based quadrature decoding for motion control in early ventilator development), commercial photography and video equipment, and oil and gas clients: VHDL logic and state machines, soft- and hard-processor integration, and system integration.
• Built Nios II systems, including Linux on Nios II and Ethernet inside the FPGA; handled timing closure (SDC, TimeQuest) and JTAG boundary-scan debugging.
• Developed a large C# application with unit tests, mocks, code-coverage analysis, TFS, and USB and serial I/O; built its WiX installers.
• Wrote CPLD firmware (I2C, SPI) and microcontroller firmware for NXP Jennic, LPC13xx and TI C2000; wrote and verified requirements.

Wyle Integrated Science and Engineering — Houston, TX

Senior Software Engineer · Jan 2007 to Jan 2010

• Lead software engineer for COLBERT, the second-generation treadmill on the International Space Station: chose the hardware platform, led the software team, and made sure the work met NASA testing and documentation standards.
• Chose and set up the configuration-management and collaboration tools for the flight hardware development group.
• Firmware engineer on the Lightweight Trauma Module, a portable military life-support system; continued that work after moving to Sparx.

Earlier experience

• Orbital Network Engineering, Member of Technical Staff (2005–2007): Linux and FPGA development for embedded telemetry and data acquisition, including network time synchronization (IRIG, NTP) and skew and jitter analysis; office manager for a small team.
• Frogpad, Engineering Consultant (2006–2007): hardware and software development, testing and troubleshooting.
• Wyle, Software Engineer (1997–2005): embedded C/C++ on Linux and VxWorks; data acquisition, device drivers and systems engineering. Moved from a documentation role into software by teaching myself to code; synchronized data acquisition across both arms of a NASA short-radius human centrifuge to within 1 ms.

Education and training

• B.S. Biomedical Engineering, cum laude — Texas A&M University, 1997
• U.S. Navy Nuclear Power Program (1989–1991): Nuclear Field “A” School, Nuclear Power School and prototype training

Licensure and honors

• Professional Engineer, licensed in three disciplines: Biomedical, Electrical and Control Systems — Texas Board of Professional Engineers, #110319 (2011)
• National Merit Scholar (1988) · National Defense Service Medal (1990)