Embedded Systems Engineer

Tristan Alderson

Firmware. Avionics. Real-Time Control.

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Work

GPS antenna front
GPS RF PCB

SAM M10Q GPS Board

GPS-on-module daughter board for flight navigation and recovery, separated from the comms stack to keep RF clean.

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Power module render
Power DC-DC Safety

Power Module

ORed 24V power with buck conversion to 3.3V and 5V. Found a zener shunt bug during bring-up.

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Mixed module render
Control Sensors STM32

Control and Sensor Modules

ESP32 upper and STM32 lower control boards for valve actuation and pressure transducer reads, connected by a 6-pin Molex Nano-Fit cable.

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Ground station platform
Telemetry RF Systems

Ground Station

Greg: handheld ground station for live telemetry decode and GPS recovery tracking.

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Avionics stack
C/C++ CAN STM32

Avionics Firmware and Protocols

Shared firmware libraries (av-libraries) with locked-down CAN protocol, heartbeat monitoring, and telemetry forwarding.

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Tracking system
YOLOv8 OpenCV PID

Sunflower Tracking System

Camera tracker that locks onto a rocket using YOLOv8 and dual-axis PID. 2nd place at Launch Canada.

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Zynq UltraScale development board
Zynq AXI4 Linux

LiteLM: On-Device LLM Inference

GPT-2 inference on Kria KV260 with AXI4 DMA and custom kernel drivers. 3rd place at Queen's ECE Showcase.

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About

Portrait of Tristan Alderson

I write firmware for things that can't afford to crash. As avionics lead for QRET (Queen's Rocket Engineering Team), I've been designing the flight electronics for a hybrid rocket — everything from the CAN protocol and power distribution to the GPS recovery boards.

Most of what I build runs on STM32s or ESP32s, usually bare-metal or with a lightweight RTOS. My day-to-day is C, PCB bring-up, and a lot of time staring at logic analyzer traces.

What I can help with

  • Embedded Firmware — RTOS, bare-metal C/C++, STM32, ESP32
  • Hardware Design — PCB layout, KiCad, DC-DC power modules
  • FPGA Co-design — Zynq, Verilog, AXI4 interfaces
  • RF & Comms — CAN Bus, LoRa telemetry, impedance routing

Contact

Looking for full-time or contract work in embedded firmware, avionics, or anything where the hardware has to work the first time.

TALDERSON42@GMAIL.COM Resume PDF github.com/t-alderson linkedin.com/in/trist-alderson