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The Hidden Costs of Using Zephyr (and How to Mitigate Them)
Over the past few years, I’ve been excited to watch Zephyr grow and evolve. It’s modern, actively maintained, vendor-neutral, and backed by a large community. It offers a consistent architecture across platforms, a robust RTOS kernel, a growing driver ecosystem, and tooling that feels far more structured than what many of us grew up with.…
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The Difference Between a Hobbyist and a Hirable Embedded Systems Engineer
If you spend enough time around makerspaces, hackathons, or online embedded communities (including my own courses), you’ll see a lot of impressive projects: custom keyboards, home automation systems, robot cars, sensor networks, and beautiful PCBs. That being said, when it comes time to hire for an embedded engineering role, companies still struggle to find candidates…
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Inside Sh!tty Hacks: An Anti-Hackathon at CU Boulder
As the summer waned in 2025, CU professor Zack Weaver and I brainstormed ideas over lunch in Longmont, Colorado. We were looking for ways to increase student engagement in the ATLAS BTU makerspace, and pretty quickly landed on the idea of hosting a hackathon…but not a typical one. To differentiate ourselves from the other hackathons…
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How I’d Teach Embedded AI Without Overwhelming Students
In December, I had an eye-opening conversation with Prof. Rahul Mangharam at the University of Pennsylvania about the challenges of teaching embedded AI to undergraduate students. That discussion prompted me to reflect on how we, as instructors, design curriculum that balances accessibility with depth. What follows is a set of thoughts on how embedded AI…
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How Long It Actually Takes to Become Productive with a New Microcontroller
Why This Question Keeps Coming Up One question I hear from firmware engineers (and one that I often ask myself) is: “How long should it take to get productive on a new microcontroller?” The frustration behind that question is usually familiar: you understand the basics of controlling GPIO, writing to registers, scheduling interrupts, DMA, RTOS,…
