Field notes
Notes from real engagements — embedded systems, integration, and modernisation work. Written from the field, not the marketing department.
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I built a LoRa analyser because I was sick of guessing
Friday, September 04, 2026 in Field notes
Debugging a LoRa link used to go like this. A node stops reporting. I swap the antenna. I move the gateway. I drop the spreading factor. Something improves, or it doesn’t, and I have no idea why. The band is invisible and every fix is a guess. …
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Zephyr is the DOS-to-Linux moment for embedded
Sunday, August 16, 2026 in Field notes
I’ve written embedded firmware for a long time — AVR, ESP32, nRF52, RP2040 — and mostly the default was bare metal or a tiny superloop. It worked. It was also, honestly, the DOS era of microcontrollers: you own the whole machine, you reinvent …
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We open-sourced our Antarctic wave buoys
Friday, July 03, 2026 in Field notes
For over a decade I built and maintained the firmware for the Waves In Ice buoys — instruments that get deployed onto Antarctic sea ice, freeze in, and keep reporting wave motion back over Iridium satellite for months at a time. The data from the …