Aptinex: hardware that shipped

Five hardware and firmware modules taken to production-ready design, plus LED disk firmware and batch testing of hundreds of modules.

Aptinex designs and manufactures embedded modules for robotics and IoT. I worked on real products for real customers: schematic capture, PCB layout, firmware, bring-up, debugging and batch testing.

What I did

• Designed a P82B715 I2C bus extender as a matched transmitter and receiver board pair, from requirements through schematic capture, layout and routing to virtual testing, within the product's cost and board-space limits.
• Designed a compact SIM800 GSM module with on-board voltage regulation, after hands-on characterisation of the existing SIM800 hardware.
• Wrote ATtiny13 firmware for a 230 V AC dimmer using zero-cross detection and TRIAC firing control, accepting both potentiometer and PWM brightness input.
• Wrote an Arduino library for the AM1805/AM1815 ultra-low-power RTC straight from the datasheet: date and time, alarm interrupts and sleep/wake control, validated on ESP8266 hardware.
• Specified the hardware architecture of a customisable BLDC e-bike controller: microcontroller, gate driver, MOSFETs and regulation stage, against client and brake-system requirements.
• Wrote the firmware for “Aloka”, an addressable LED disk, prototyping the patterns on a 10-LED strip before the disk was ready.
• Hand-soldered a large batch of Reykha 8-channel IR line-sensor boards, tested 50 DAC modules and more than 200 RFID modules, sorted faults by type with the assembly team, and connected LoRa nodes to a Dragino gateway.