ABOUT

Who I am

I am an electrical engineer by education and have a business development role in a Silicon Valley imaging company. Past roles ranged from hands-on engineering to VP Product Development, including product management, program management, and sales for companies ranging in size from startups to large multi-national companies. Technologies included low-light cameras, imagers, fiber optic sensors and systems, optical data transceivers, optical components for telecom, electronic locks, embedded control, and satellite earth stations.

Key personal passions include IoT, sensor systems, programming, RF communication, 3D printing and design, cycling, photography, videography, reading business books, dancing, exploring, and music. I am an Extra Class Amateur Radio Operator and have been licensed for 45 years.

Recent Technical Expertise

The following is a list of the hardware/software platforms, languages, and operating systems I have been using in the past few years.

Languages:

C
C#
Python
Swift
SwiftUI

Microcontroller / SBC platforms:

nRF52840
ESP32
ESP8266
Particle Boron, Argon, Xenon mesh
Raspberry Pi
NVIDIA Jetson Nano

Development and creative platforms:

Autodesk Fusion 360
Autodesk Eagle
Xcode
Visual Studio Code
Arduino
Particle Dev Environment
Final Cut Pro
Adobe Lightroom
Adobe Photoshop
Adobe InDesign
Prusa i3 MK3 3D Printer

Operating systems:

Linux
MacOS
Windows

My Story

Electronics and radio grabbed me at an early age. In third grade, I spotted an advertisement in the Sears & Roebuck catalog for a shortwave radio with claims that stations from 7,500 miles away could be heard. I asked for the radio on my birthday, but rather than purchasing that radio, my father suggested that there may be an even better shortwave radio that we could purchase used locally. Sure enough, we found an old tube-based Hallicrafters SX-28(A) radio that was probably 2' square and weighed 75 lbs! We strung a 100' wire out of my bedroom to the far tree in the yard, and before I knew it, I was listening to stations all over the world. I pretended to know something about antennas back then, making them with paper plates wrapped in aluminum foil, with one wire connected to the foil and the antenna terminal. I was amazed at what I could pick up with a "dish" of aluminum foil!

One of my favorite things to do with the radio was to receive the aviation weather conditions for all of the major U.S. cities from a station in New York. The conditions were verbally transmitted around the clock and included cloud types, winds, temperatures, RH, barometric pressure, and a whole host of other variables. I manually recorded them on a piece of paper and then plotted them on a U.S. map. The map was made by rubbing a pencil over a pencil box that had a relief map of the U.S on its top - effectively transferring that map to my piece of paper. I then tried to determine where the highs, lows, and fronts were located, and plotted those on the map. That evening, I compared my map with the local television station map to see how accurate I was.

Well, time passed and I was in 8th grade. The Hallicrafters radio had given up the ghost and I was looking for another radio. My parents had recently befriended a local ham radio operator, and when he heard of my plight, he offered to sell one of his receivers - a Hammerlund HQ-170A - and told me that instead of listening to shortwave stations, I could actually hear people talking to one another. After buying the radio, he offered to help me get my first amateur license. In those days, you not only had to pass a technical exam, but you had to send and receive morse code. I practiced reading morse code by recording conversations on a reel-to-reel tape recorder and playing it back at a slower speed. In my experience, this was a more interesting way to learn because I was able to transcribe a real conversation. Before I knew it, I was able to send and receive 13 wpm and passed my Novice exam in 8th grade. Passing that test defined my high school years - I was hooked and spent a lot of time on the radio! Talking with people all over the world really taught me U.S. and world geography, and made me curious about other cultures, sparking my interest in travel.

There was no doubt in my mind in high school that I wanted to get an Electrical Engineering degree. I hung out at the Virginia Tech student ham radio station and used to marvel at how the students could design and whip up a circuit in no time. So, I did get that degree and concentrated my studies on RF design. I was a co-op student working in the satellite industry, and my first job out of college was to design satellite earth stations and set them up in the field. This was really cool, but there was a new thing on the horizon - fiber optic data transmission. With the high data rates, fiber optics was very similar to the RF I had been working with. Soon after getting into fiber data and video transmission, I found myself designing Programmable Array Logic (PALs) and Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). I found the digital world to be fascinating, and in the 90's, pretty much converted over to digital design. I also learned the C language in my spare time, and used it countless times at work for many tasks.

One thing led to another and I found myself in management roles, getting further from the hands-on work, yet pursuing other challenges. Skipping way ahead, in 2015 I had the opportunity to move from Virginia, where I had spent the majority of my life, to California. I jumped at the chance to work in Silicon Valley and to be immersed in the technical hotbed of the world. I was able to commute by train and bicycle every day and saw the same people on the train every day. They were like family. One day, a friend on the train asked me if I had heard of the Raspberry Pi. I hadn't, but was eager to learn more. It's been a snowball of information since then as I learned Python, lots of the new microcontrollers, and started designing/building again in the evenings and weekends when I had time. It amazed me that I could bring up a technical topic on the train, and several people around me would jump in with deep knowledge of the topic. This never took place back in Virginia!

So, here I am today, acting like a sponge and soaking in all the knowledge I can muster. Now it's my turn to help others that have an interest, but don't hesitate for whatever reason to learn something new at a later age. I'm here to tell you that it's possible, and lots of fun once you dive in!