Frederic Vecoven – Electrical Engineer

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

When I was 14, I got the opportunity to type a BASIC program on a TRS-80, and I was immediately addicted. I started to learn English and read computer science books. I then went to college where I got a master in Computer Sciences. I continued to study while I was a teacher’s assistant, and got another master’s in electrical engineer. A few years later, I relocated to Silicon Valley where I design and write firmwares for high-end servers. Now I have moved back to Europe, but still work in my old position.

What made you want to start your website, vecoven.com?

The open source idea of sharing things is what made me want to start a website. If some projects are useful to me, they could probably be useful to other people, too. I also got a lot of feedback from students who use some of the projects as learning tools.

What are your favorite hardware tools?

A Tektronix digital scope and a Weller soldering iron!

What are your favorite software tools?

There are many, but I typically use low level tools, and build most of my tools myself, using gcc.

What is the hardest bug you have ever fixed?

The hardest bug I have faced was work related. An embedded computer was reported to not start once in a while. We spent hours –days– trying to reproduce it, but we failed. One evening, after a long debugging session, we went to a popular place in Palo Alto, and joked about some hardware bugs in our custom ASICs. That conversation rang a bell, and we realized we were actually using one of these chips (an ethernet controller), which had a bug in its PCI implementation. That was the problem that we had been chasing for days…

What is on your bookshelf?

Physics books.

What kinds of tricks do you keep up your sleeve?

My tricks include jumping between hardware and software solutions, or coming with hybrid approaches.

What has been your favorite project?

From a hobby perspective, reviving a TRS80 and building a hard-drive emulator for it (something I couldn’t afford when I was a kid…) has been my favorite project.

Do you have any note-worthy engineering experiences?

I have a few patents and shipped some great servers.

Do you have any experiential stories you would like to share?

I used to collect old video games (arcade PCB). I was excited when I got a Ghosts’n Goblins game, but I powered it in reverse, and killed it. I now play a lot more attention when I wire things up!

What are you currently working on?

I still work on high-end servers, but details are confidential. On the hobby side, I am rewriting the firmware of analog synthesizers. This is very exciting, since the code will bring new features.

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

I am not looking for a direction change at this point. I enjoy what I do, and I will enjoy it in the future !

What challenges do you foresee in our industry?

For the hobbyist, the challenge is that components are getting smaller and harder to solder, which makes me fear that doing hobbyist electronics will disappear. Another challenge is that we see more and more software vs hardware. Powerful microcontrollers are dirt cheap, and it is now common to use a 32bits CPU for simple things. In the past, people would have fought to write optimized software to spare a few cycles. Now many engineers don’t care and take everything for granted.