Mavrx are a Silicon Valley tech start-up in Precision Agriculture, helping farmers do more with less and see what can't be seen with the naked eye, providing valuable timely analytics on crop performance.

I spent most of 2015 helping Ecoult get their product onto the market, primarily working on a PCB that integrates various subsystems, as well as performing DfM, DfT & design-review for most other PCBs in the system.

My first engagement with Ecoult, a leading energy storage company based in Sydney Australia, was in 2014 co-designing a central piece of the UltraBattery monitoring system based on an ARM Freescale K60 MCU.

I helped this client design the world's first battery-powered breath-controlled smoking hookah. What started out as a simple engagement progressed into a 2+ year odyssey assisting them with their product design, thermal considerations, user experience, and simulating in firmware one of the oldest technological developments of human civilisation - smouldering coal!

An almost-there product of which I can't disclose much detail, this simple application mushroomed in its hardware requirements so as to satisfy the client's desire for a firmware, Windows software, and web-app product activation ecosystem based on robust industry-standard encryption, proprietary USB protocol, & Windows-app to web-app to USB-comms. The firmware is based on the LUFA open-source USB framework.

Designing a product is a multi-disciplinary endeavour. You usually need to draw from the experience of many people. Many questions and myriad design options face the entrepreneur. I can bring 28 years of commercial and industrial experience to your project.

After the overall architecture of a system is decided, the schematic is where you flesh out all the detail. I design Schematics & PCBs primarily in Altium Designer, and simulate usually in LTspice, others if necessary. I maintain an active license of Altium Designer.

Maybe all you need is a quick-n-dirty prototype. Sometimes you need to know if a 'hunch' will really work before you commit to it, or if your intended solution has a hope of achieving your power budget or performance requirements. Breadboard, OEM dev-kits & Arduino/Raspberry Pi/et.al. to the rescue!

Many designers lack the stick-with-it-ness and attention to detail needed to do a good job at this stage of the design process, but it's an essential part of achieving a product whose components can be readily purchased at the intended manufacturing quantity, within the product's manufacturing budget, and be something that can actually be manufactured!

I consider myself first and foremost to be a developer of quality hardware, however firmware is often an integral part of that endeavour. My forté is in lower level firmware code, embedded software and device drivers.