How did you get into electronics/ engineering and when did you start?

I originally moved to the United States at the age of 5 when my Father was transferred to National Semiconductor. Since then I’ve been surrounded by technology even tracing back my first experiences with computers to the early age of 3. I’ve always been tinkering with both programming and hardware and when I got to college I really had the opportunity to really understand it at a lower level and to learn the skills required to start building interesting and complex systems.

What are your favorite hardware tools that you use?

While most people think that hardware should be about building things right away I think that software is the key to complex hardware systems. My philosophy orients itself around very low cost design and implementation. It’s much cheaper to implement a system once rather than multiple times. For my master’s thesis, which eventually was materialized on an FPGA, I first simulated the system using a polymorphic C++ design. The great thing about software is that you’re not limited, so as long as you design with hardware considerations the transfer between software to hardware is extremely easy.

With that said, I really enjoy developing on Atmel due to the simplicity but lately as we’ve moved to more complex ARM systems I really appreciate the capabilities of these new platforms. The tool chains are still pretty bad and on occasion prohibitively expensive. We work with Texas Instruments and I like them since they understand the latter and make it rather easy to obtain licenses for small bootstrapped start ups such as ourselves.

What are your favorite software tools that you use?

For specifically hardware design we utilize OrCad, which is a brilliant package. Also we have access to Solidworks for our solid parts, which is also an extremely amazing application for CAD design of solid parts. We are lucky that we have access to installs of these very expensive programs and as we expand will likely obtain licenses ourselves.

Visual Studio is a brilliant IDE that we use across the board, but as we got more into iOS development we’ve been using XCode more and more. I’d taken Microsoft tools over anything. While the market is dwindling for it, Microsoft really does tools very well. Unfortunately more and more people are viewing the browser as a development tool and Microsoft is not very good at adhering to standards so as we move more of our software development into the cloud we find ourselves using Visual Studio less and less.

What is the hardest/trickiest bug you have ever fixed?

While at my last job I had to debug an embedded MAC driver for Windows CE that was in the low-level platform code for Microsoft TV. In the end it was more of a real people problem than anything. I find that technology bugs are usually pretty easy to isolate, it’s when you get into communication bugs between people that things get hairy. The issue ended up being that one of the Motorola engineers incorrectly read a datasheet for a Marvel chip used in the design incorrectly and as such was setting the registers incorrectly thereby not setting the switch up correctly so packets were effectively not even being received or seen by the MAC driver.

This issue could have been resolved if Marvel let us see the datasheet. It was effectively the intersection of Broadcom, Microsoft, Motorola, and Marvel all trying to keep secrets from each other. I hope that in the future hardware becomes more transparent. I suppose in the space we were in (TV) people are very sensitive due to the operators, but that’s only resulted in content being easily available online so I’m not sure it’s going to benefit them in the long run. In my opinion, transparency on the hardware level will only lead to more amazing devices and technology available for the end user.

What is on your bookshelf?

I don’t read too many books anymore, usually when I need information I turn to Wikipedia. I do have a few texts from college I use as reference for analog circuit design and just whenever I forget those sticky equations you only need to remember when dealing with actual analog signals (which comes up but not too often). Also the internet is just full of tutorials for everything from the simple blinking an LED to routing PCBs with gigahertz signals. Also, YouTube is now plastered with lectures from MIT and other amazing schools. Information is extremely available now and I’m very excited to be able to look up anything while actually building it.

Do you have any tricks up your sleeve?

My motto is “if it breaks you might learn something”. I think a lot of engineers are afraid to hit the “on” button and spend ten times longer designing something when it could have been done in much less time. This does make sense when you’re designing RF circuits or VLSI designs, but now a days it’s easy to get a PCB design fabbed for $200. It takes some elbow grease and some solder, but it’s really easy to design the circuit, lay it out, get the design and assemble it in the span of a week or two. The costs are so low now, it’s better to just make mistakes, modularize the system so you can validate multiple components in parallel, and then put it all together and see what breaks and iterate from there.

I tend not to have to analyze circuits since I design them mostly, but when I do make mistakes and need to debug I effectively depend on my oscilloscope or logic analyzer as well as a reference circuit on a breadboard that I can fix before translating said fixes to green wire fixes. It’s never failed me yet!

What has been your favorite project?

I think my favorite project has been the autonomous helicopter project I did for a semester project in my ECE476 class at Cornell. I think I’ve worked on more challenging projects since then, but I’ve always had a fascination with flying and intend to revisit that project down the line as a tele-presence solution of some kind that’s affordable and easily to use (at least indoors).

Do you have any note-worthy engineering experiences?

When I was a kid I used to take apart old electronics like turntables or televisions. I didn’t really learn much, except how fascinated I was with everything in there. I was only 7, but it did give me some understanding of what resistors and capacitors were. Inductors required my physics honors class to really understand. Anyways, when I took these electronics parts I would pretty often get shocked with the still charged electrolytic capacitors. I remember it gave me a lot of respect for electronics as I knew if I did something stupid I could actually hurt others or myself. This was further ingrained into me in a high school electronics class where I accidentally had a power cable plugged into an outlet that was on with the leads exposed. When the leads touched paper it send sparks flying blowing a hole through the paper. After scaring my friends for a while my teacher yelled at me and I realized that this was extremely dangerous!

What are you currently working on?

I recently left Microsoft to pursue a new consumer electronics startup that I founded. We are building a new kind of consumer electronics device in the music/entertainment space that will allow users to play music and be a part of that process with no previous musical experience. It focuses on positive reaffirmation to really encourage users to enjoy the education process to the point that they don’t really know that’s they’re being educated at all. This is a bit of a trend in the entertainment sector and has yet really been applied to music. Also our device utilizes some exciting novel interfaces based on a technology that I had come up with as a hobby project while in college.

What direction do you see your business heading in the next few years?

We’re a pretty scrappy bootstrapped start up so it’s hard to look as far forward as the next few years. Right now we’re starting the process of mass manufacturing our product in preparation of an announcement and release in the summer of 2011. We’re very excited about releasing this exciting product to the world and expect that it will be extremely disruptive and a positive change in direction for the industry!

What challenges do you foresee in our industry?

I think the consumer electronics and embedded industry face two major obstacles. The biggest issue I see is the lack of tools or more the lack of availability of tools. While Atmel really encourages the hobbyist community and makes their tools easily accessible we’re not seeing too much of that coming from elsewhere. NXP and TI are making steps in that direction, but there’s no unified system or even effort in place to try to make it easy for a 12 year old to get going with embedded development, and more importantly an actual usable product, unless they end up using an Arduino.

I think Arduino really proves that there’s a demand for this out there. This is something that we’re paying active attention to. While starting a consumer electronics company in today’s environment we have the ability to really trace our steps so that potentially we can make things easier on people down the line. It’s a massive barrier to entry for most people, both financially and effort wise. I think if this was alleviated we’d see an influx of new amazing devices that take advantage of the cloud and this would very much positively affect our world. Cheap and easy to design medical devices, personal devices, or toys could be designed in an iterative cycle similar to how software is today and result with quick to market products.

Incident Technologies Inc. Website.