Profile: John J. Smith

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I've always been an engineer who likes variety. This has resulted in my background of mixed disciplines. I have held Principal Engineer or higher positions in both hardware design and software design. Having worked professionally on both sides of the hardware-software fence gives me a unique perspective on how the two should be integrated.

Much of my technical diversity is a result of my engineering philosophy. I have always preferred designing hardware and software that were geared toward the solution of a customer's problem. I don't believe in designing systems that are geared toward impressing other engineering geeks.

I started my career at the technician level, where I quickly moved from prototyping other engineer's designs to creating my own. My early hardware designs included lots of microcontroller-based motion control systems. My early software designs were split between the low-level software embedded in my own hardware and more traditional real time and embedded solutions used in scientific instruments. From there, I moved on to develop software for satellite ground stations.

In the mid-90's, my career focus shifted away from the scientific community toward what is now referred to as homeland security. In this arena, I was able to develop a wide variety of devices including NIC's, MODEM's, embedded communications controllers, and video capture cards. I became very experienced with the various PC internal buses, developing designs for ISA, PCI, and PCCard32 (Cardbus) interfaces. Most of this was hardware design, but I was still able to squeeze in enough software development to keep my skills sharp. I was also named as an inventor on patent number 5,835,102, which is a video capture device used for backup purposes.

I also developed some project management skills at this time. This was primarily because I was given first chance at managing any project that I brought in based on a white paper or customer interaction. This is also where I developed a talent for listening to the needs of a customer. Though it may sound obvious, I find that a customer is far more eager to accept a proposal that demonstrates a real understanding of the problem than one filled with technical jargon. Essentially, the ages old cliche "give the customer what he wants" is true, though it is a lesson that many engineers never learn.

Toward the end of the dot-bomb era, I took my career in a completely new direction when I agreed to do audio processing and ad insertion software for a small startup. It was here that I sharpened my C++ skills and learned to write MS Windows device drivers. The high pressure environment and unreasonably short demo schedules taught me a lot about time management and self-discipline. They also taught me that I was much stronger than I thought, both as an engineer and as part of a design team.

My next big career move was into the military communications arena. For a few years I worked with a MODEM/router that is used primarily for military aviation. In addition to being responsible for the Windows device driver for the PCCard16 version of the card, I was also called upon to write and/or port military protocols for the embedded network stack.

For the past few years I have been back in the media sector working on a device designed to capture audio, video, and VGA in a university environment. As soon as I got on board, I realized that existing hardware didn't have a prayer of working as advertised. I took over the job of sole hardware engineer for the project and re-designed a majority of the circuits. In addition, I took on the job of writing all of the DSP (DM642) software necessary for VGA capture. The product was released in Q3 of 2008 and was an immediate success.

The main attraction of this position was the number of things that had to be invented. There was no example of how to use the DSP to capture full-motion VGA (As a matter of fact, one of the TI guys told me it wouldn't work). I couldn't find samples of how to automatically detectt VGA resolutions without the use of the DDC port. There was also no example of how to automatically crop the VGA image using a CPLD.

Lately I've been working on the top-level design and capture schematics for a professional version of the aforementioned capture device. Of course, the new device is being designed to capture as much as we can squeeze in, and, of course, it will be significantly better than the original. However, the specifications haven't been announced publicly at this point.

There are a few things that are not on my resume, but are worth mentioning. First of all, I have quite a bit of experience developing software for Linux. the previously mentioned military protocols were developed for Linux first, then ported to a Linux-like real-time OS. Using Linux as my OS of choice for development gave me access to a far richer variety of debugging tools than the limited ones supplied for the real-time OS. In the end, I was able to do 90+ percent of the debugging on a Linux workstation, saving months of development.

The second thing of note is that I've become a pretty fair web developer and system administrator. I have maintained the server that this web site runs on for nearly 4 years, as well as developing this site and several others.

I hope I've managed to get the point across that I'm an extremely versatile engineer. Though many engineers make the same claim, I believe that my past experiences prove the point quite well. Thanks for your time,

John J. Smith