Projects
Boards, firmware, and a few rooms full of projectors.
Client contracts are confidential by default, so what follows is what I can name: the engineering log on the left, and the film and live-production work I am free to talk about in full.
Engineering log
Hardware and firmware engagements, most recent first. Where the client is named, the contract allowed it.
| Year | Project | What it involved | Stack |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2022 | Capstone 35 kW generator control | Control system for Capstone turbine generators: remote start and stop, Modbus polling, and fault recording, driven from an iOS app. Delivered through Delta Positive Slope. | iOS · Modbus |
| 2017 | Hotel screen advertising system | Linux-based video system for managing advertising across hotel display screens. Delivered to working prototype. | Embedded Linux |
| 2016 | REMCOR vehicle access control | Bluetooth-controlled vehicle access for a subprime auto lender: CAN bus integration, 12 V relay control, and the board design behind it. | ARM · CAN · BLE 4.1 · Altium |
| 2015 | Helicopter flight simulator controls | Two control boards for a $90,000 simulator: 64 buttons with ADC, and 56 buttons with four quadrature encoders. Interrupt-driven bare-metal firmware over RS-485 at 20 mA. Replaced a $3,000 Xilinx board. | ARM · RS-485 · bare metal |
| 2014 | Red light camera litigation | Testifying expert witness in the case that overturned a run of red light camera citations. Frame-by-frame video analysis showed the yellow interval had been set to 3 seconds against a 4-second standard. | Video analysis · Expert testimony |
| 2010 | Quake Catcher Network | Development and rollout of an earthquake sensor network with Caltech and Stanford, including the Windows and Macintosh drivers and installers end users ran themselves. | Drivers · Win · macOS |
| 2008 | San Diego County precinct mapping | Database and GIS mapping system for county precinct operations, covering 1.4 million registered voters and generating reports running past 80,000 pages. | GIS · SQL |
| 1990s | Sony optical storage programme | Project manager for the introduction of six drives, from 2X CD-R to 2.6 GB magneto-optical. FCC and CE compliance, shock and vibration testing, bundled-software verification, production line test procedures, and the service manuals in four languages. | Program mgmt · C |
| 1990s | Price Club ID card system | Head of software development for the membership ID capture and print system. Wrote the serial strobe controller that timed the flash to a single video field, and integrated the whole thing with an AS/400. Ran chain-wide. | Borland C/C++ · MASM |
| 1990s | First colour video adapter for notebooks | For Phoenix Graphics: customised the video BIOS to pair the VideoPak-1024 with Toshiba notebooks, and wrote the auto-configuration utility, install drivers and test tooling around it. | Video BIOS · Assembly |
Film, video and live production
Cinema delivery and convention audio-visual work. This side of the practice is public, so here it is in full.
LA Polish Film Festival
Converted the festival's films to DCP — Digital Cinema Package — so they could run from the theatre's main projector. Getting a festival programme onto a cinema server means matching frame rates, colour space, audio channel mapping and subtitle timing to the DCI spec, then testing every reel on the actual hardware before an audience sits down in front of it.
San Diego Comic-Fest
I design the audio-visual setup, install it, and monitor every session for the run of the show. Multiple rooms, back-to-back panels, presenters arriving with whatever laptop and file format they happen to have. The measure of the job is that nobody in the audience ever thinks about it.
Jack Kirby: Architect of Science Fiction Land
Barry Ira Geller — Jack Kirby's co-designer on Science Fiction Land and Lord of Light — brought together a team of creative professionals to explore the visual language running through the architectural work Kirby created in 1978. I moderated the panel, designed its graphics, and edited the recording.
On the panel: colorist Wally Anne Wharton, who mapped Kirby's perspective-defying internalised 3-D architecture and walked through her coloring process; Mike Royer, Gold Key Comics writer, Disney Pooh master and Kirby's favourite inker; David Coons, developer of Disney's direct scanning system and an Academy Award winner for it; Tom Kraft, digital re-constructionist of the Lord of Light negatives and president of the Jack Kirby Museum; and Brian Chidester, art historian and documentarian.
As co-creator, Geller worked with Kirby as architect alongside Paolo Soleri, holographer Don E. Broadbent of Westech Inc., and Ray Bradbury and Buckminster Fuller as futurist consultants.
Got something like one of these?
Tell me the problem and the deadline. I'll say straight away whether I'm the right person for it.