About ME

Our first home computer was the ZX80, way back in 1981. A year later, my father bought the ZX Spectrum 48K. I learned a little BASIC programing but mainly used it for games such as Manic Miner, Dynamite Dan, Cyclone, Flight Simulator, and Tomahawk. During middle school we had an 8086 machine and quickly upgraded it to an 80386 machine with 4 MB RAM. I ran a local Bulletin Board System (BBS) for my friends, and like most geeks, I played a lot of DUNE-2, Comanche, Wolfenstein 3D, and Sierra-on-line quests.

During high school, I was fascinated by the Pentium-120Mhz performance. Especially in games such as DOOM, Duke3D, and Decent. At this point I started to focus on x86 assembly language. For many years, I wrote embedded code for the Z80, PIC, 8085, and x86 in pure assembly language. This gave me deep understanding into CPU and computer architecture. But most importantly, I learned the importance of high-level languages such as C and C++. For the last 5 years I mainly focus on C++ and Python but still maintain my legacy C code base.

My first experience designing and integrating hardware with a PC was when I built a COVOX, an 8-bit Digital-to-Analog Converter that connects to the Line Printer port (LPT). This was the cheapest way to play STMs and MODs music during the mid 80's when SoundBlaster cards were extremely expensive.

I also developed a DC Brushed Motor Electric-Speed-Control (ESC) for my Remote Controlled (RC) car. It was small, cute and I designed it over discrete CMOS logic gates and dual 555 timer IC (556).

After high school and before learning about PLDs and MCUs, I developed an irrigation controller that interfaced a PC. Like before, it was a pure hardware design built using discrete CMOS logic gates. The scheduler software was developed by my dear uncle Dan and ran over a PC server. This particular project motivated me to develop the generic Smart-Sampler compute module, Real-Time-Operating-System (RTOS), and Device-Control-Network (DCN) communication protocol. Versions of those are found in many of my projects over the years.

Like most young electrical engineers from that era, I also etched my own PCBs at home. I am so happy those services are accessible and inexpensive today, so I don't need to do that any more :-)

At 2012, I bought my first RepRapPro Huxle 3D printer KIT. This introduced me to a whole new field of mechanical design, solid design tools, and fabrication techniques that are most useful to me ever since.