Consulting: IoT Design

My first full-time project was the design and deployment of a specialized transmitter for the US Navy.  The design was based on the Intel 8748 microcontroller.  My development tools were rudimentary even for the time.  I had to hand assemble my code and enter it by hand into a PROM programmer.  I can’t imagine a better first project.   It was a lot of fun and I learned more on that design than I had in the previous year or two at school (that’s not a knock on the school).  Since then I’ve been largely focused on Unix based systems and TCP/IP based networking which I was fortunate to be on the ground floor of with Silicon Valley startups in the later 1980’s.

I’ve returned to microcontroller based design in recent years.   I became involved with Arduino and other architectures targeting the maker markets during my initial foray into education.  The first designs were small remote controlled robotic cars able to do simple collision avoidance.  The sensor and motor design were simple enough and common across many public designs.  I was not happy with the lack of task management (there is none).   My solution was to build a simple multi-tasking kernel built into the application.  The resulting code worked well with multiple sensors concurrently working in parallel not having to worry about any ‘thread’ taking over.  It was not the best choice for an introductory course in microcontroller programming though.

Recent Projects

Recent work as been on personal projects using the Raspberry Pi Pico W and Raspberry Pi SBCs.  To support this work I built a small electronics lab to design and debug basic circuits including microcontroller and other SOC based designs such as the Raspberry Pi.  Wi-Fi and IoT (MQTT in my case) security has been an interesting way to merge my hardware microcontroller roots with my systems, networking and security background.   Tools such as Node-Red add to the fun and functionality of these projects.   

My current project is a Pico W based system for managing home water storage systems.  This project controls multiple pumps and storage systems autonomously communicating via Wi-Fi).  The code is written in C/C++ using the Arduino IDE.  My current IoT work has been for my own enjoyment.  I’m open to working with others on commercial projects where it makes sense.

For More Information

For more information or if you have any questions please feel free to reach out to me at any time.  I can be contacted by email, instant messaging or you can call me anytime.