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Jeff McBride

Background​

I have a B.S. and M.S. in electrical engineering from Virginia Commonwealth University. In school, I built robots for competitions and built flight control systems for autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles -- some with jet engines!

  • I designed stabilized UAV camera systems at Aerovironment (FPGA, embedded control, optics, motor control, video processing pipelines)
  • I helped start a company to develop sensors for agricultural remote sensing with drones, and along the way got to dive into the world of cloud computing.
    • Hired an engineering team and helped navigate the company from a bedroom start-up to an industry recognized brand in agriculture remote sensing
    • Led the development of Zynq-based multispectral cameras for drones, downwelling light sensors, and radiometric calibration systems for agricrultural remote sensing
    • Led the development of the "Atlas" data processing and presentation service, a compex SaaS pipeline to intake, calibrate, register, orthomosaic, tile, and present data captured from farms to customers
  • I spent 3 years working with researchers at the UW Molecular Information Systems Lab on using biological molecules for data storage and computing.
  • Most recently, I have been offering freelance product development services
    • Helped to redesign flight and test-stand control software in Rust for space launch vehicle systems, and facilitated the team's transition to Rust
    • Developed marine embedded control systems, reverse engineering existing systems and developing algorithms for estimating ocean wave directional spectra estimation from vessel motion using inertial sensors
    • Built product prototype for underwater sensor with ultrasonic acoustic communication to surface

Skills / Experience​

I'm an embedded systems engineer who bridges hardware, software, and physics, with a broad range of design experience.

Software​

  • My goto embedded systems programming language these days is Rust. The ecosystem is quickly growing, and it provides a safety and feature set improvement over C++ while not compromising on run-time performance, so it is great for safety-critical embedded targets, and any applications where performance is important.
  • I write a lot of C/C++ because it's the traditional choice for embedded systems, when you need performance, or if you need a linux kernel driver for your custom FPGA peripheral.
  • Python is my goto for quick prototyping, test fixtures, image processing, or number crunching and data analysis: it's hard to beat the language with Jupyter, numpy, pandas, scipy, scikit, matplotlib...the list goes on.
  • I end up writing a lot of JavaScript because running in the browser and having a GUI is useful.
  • I've done some machine learning, using Matlab ages ago and Tensorflow more recently.
  • I mostly gravitate to low-level software on small bare-metal MCUs, or embedded linux systems, but have also done higher-level systems work, and regularly build UI software for the embedded devices I work on.
  • I am a strong advocate for robust automated hardware and/or software in-the-loop simulation combining physical models and the deployed software for control systems.
  • I build small, reliable, and OTA upgradable embedded linux systems with buildroot. One of these days I'm going to really dig into yocto.

Hardware​

  • I love FPGAs. I've built products with Cyclone Vs, Zynqs, ICE40, and the tiny Igloo
  • I am proficient in PCB design (Altium, Kicad), having designed high-density rigid-flex boards for systems with demanding size, weight, and performance constraints.
  • I'm a moderately proficient user of mechanical CAD (Solidworks, Fusion 360) and digital fabrication. I'm not your mechanical engineer, but I will readily take care of an enclosure, test jig, etc. when the situation asks for it.

Systems​

  • Cameras from the CMOS chips up.
  • Zynq SoC based multispectral cameras, and solar irradiance sensors for radiometric remote sensing
  • FPGA-based video pipelines for UAV payloads
  • Digital microfluidic control systems
  • Rocket engine controllers
  • Inertial stabilization gimbal systems
  • Marine control systems
  • Microphone array beamforming

Teams​

I've hired and led multi-disciplinary teams, and approach my work with the goal of optimizing for team proficiency. This means fostering clear communication, mentoring junior engineers, and ensuring knowledge and understanding of systems is spread broadly across the team. Projects go well when the team is cohered; and we all likely have a lot more fun that way too.