Highlights
This project mattered because it was not neat.
Unlike a greenfield board where every assumption is yours, this work involved a pre-manufactured parent-daughter board and the reality that documentation, schematics, and live hardware do not always match. That is a very real embedded engineering problem, and I think it says a lot about a developer when they can stay effective there.
Where I contributed
I was responsible within the electrical sub-team for accumulator-related design thinking and the constraints around safe integration. At the same time, I worked through firmware bring-up on the inherited board setup, using the information we had, verifying what was actually true on hardware, and finding workarounds where the design did not line up with the schematic.
What it taught me
This was a useful reminder that bring-up is often less about elegant code and more about disciplined observation:
- what the board really does
- what the schematic claims it should do
- what assumptions need to be discarded quickly
That debugging posture carries directly into any hardware-first embedded role.