Peter L. Skeggs

pls =at- noeticdesign -dot= com

Professional Objective

Utilize my experience in the consumer and hobby robotics; data storage; and EDA industries to develop leading edge software solutions for Noetic Design, Inc.'s clients.

Note to recruiters: this resume is posted on www.noeticdesign.com for use by Noetic Design, Inc.'s clients. I am not currently seeking employment, but instead am seeking interesting contract work for my company.

Work Experience

Chief Engineer, Noetic Design, Inc., Portland, OR, 1993-present

Ugobe Pleo
- designed electronics (power, servo control, audio playback, SD card, microcontroller, memory) and wrote all firmware for Atmel ATMEGA128-based prototype of Pleo ("Draco") for DEMO06: done in 3 weeks from start to finish; Pleo won DemoGod
- hand-built and maintained electronics for number of prototypes
- designed new electronics (audio, IR, and touch sensing; power control; accelerometer; servo control; audio playback; and SD card access) and ported/expanded firmware for Atmel AT91SAM7S256 ARM processor) for rev 2 Pleo prototype inside of limited physical envelope
- as member of small team, ported prototype firmware to production Pleo electronics
- with team, developed sensor processing firmware for NXP LPC2103 ARM processor
- managed low level production firmware development with off shore contractor
- specified and managed third party development of PID motion control firmware
- designed and implemented compressed motion control processing tools and playback firmware
- designed and implemented audio compression and processing tools and playback firmware
- designed and implemented a number of sensor algorithms, including sound direction and loudness determination, joint angle / velocity / acceleration, battery temperature / current / voltage / capacity, IR proximity detection, IR communications
- solved many complex issues involving hardware/firmware interaction
- helped trouble shoot offshore production issues
- designed and implemented factory calibration firmware
- Ugobe Inc., 2006-)
Nubotics Product Development
- designed electronics, mechanicals, optics, test fixtures, codewheels, and assembly fixtures and processes for:
  - WW-01 WheelWatcher Encoder for Servos
  - WW-02 WheelWatcher Encoder for Motors
  - WC-132 Differential Drive Controller
  - ME-110/ME-210 Unicoder Universal Rotary Encoder
- wrote user manuals and example programs
- designed advertisements for Servo Magazine, Robot Magazine, Circuit Cellar Magazine, and both Yahoo and Google ads
- established distribution deal with Acroname, Inc. and Jameco's Robot Store
- provided customer support
- Noetic Design, Inc. (2004-)
Box Office Tickets Remote Printing System "RoBOT"
- designed and implemented software for remote printing of event tickets
- developed Windows 2000/XP systems service that communicated with Apple WebObjects / Webservices front end using Apache Axis / gSOAP / SSL
- wrote printing interface to standard ticket printers
- Box Office Tickets Inc. (2004-)
Customized Mailman Email Delivery System
- modified Python-based Open Source Mailman email list server to handle needs of a school community by implementing methods for establishing a heirarchy of email lists, allowing members of subgroups (e.g., classrooms) to receive / read archives / post to higher level lists
- implemented and maintained on a volunteer basis
- Opal School (2003-)
ePortfolio Electronic Student Portfolio System
- as member of small volunteer team, designed and developed Apache Struts / JSP / PostgreSQL-based web application for storing, organizing, and retrieving electronic assets for Opal School
- designed and developed Windows-based rapid asset uploader application
- Opal School (2003-)
DLT Reader
- created very fast reader for DLT-8000 drives
- can create arbitrarily large (>4GB) dumps from normal or damaged tapes
- interactive visual tape explorer
- Computer Conversions, Inc. (El Cajon, CA, 2002-2003)
Maynard MaynStream Format Decoder
- reverse engineered old DOS tape format
- developed data recovery tools able to tolerate gaps and errors in data stream
- Computer Conversions, Inc. (El Cajon, CA, 2002)
Novastor Novadisk Support
- added ability to decode multi-CD Novadisk backups to existing QIC Recovery tool
- Computer Conversions, Inc. (El Cajon, CA, 2002)
E-Commerce Store Maintenance
- client had a bug in their online store that caused customer to be charged for giftwrapping of all gifts even if they were too big to be wrapped
- fixed by adding new flag in MySQL database with appropriate PHP changes
- found, fixed, tested and deployed in < 5 hours (first exposure to store's codebase)
- Neurosmith, LLC (Long Beach, CA, 2002)
Microsoft Tape Format Decoder
- created custom data recovery tool for MTF (used by Veritas Backup Exec, Microsoft Backup, and other backup programs)
- highly tolerant of errors and gaps in datastreams, and able to decompress software compressed archives
- Computer Conversions, Inc. (El Cajon, CA, 2002)
MIDI Validation Tools
- developed rules checker for MIDI files and transition table files used in Musini product
- resulted in very clean and consistent toy behavior under demanding conditions
- Neurosmith, LLC (Long Beach, CA, 2002)
Lil'PICcy Microsumo Robot Controller Board
- circuit design and PCB layout for world's first micro-class sumo robots (robots are under 5cm per side, less than 100 grams)
- includes external serial level shifter board
- Noetic Design, Inc, (2001)
Optical Sensor Simulators
- used by client to test and evaluate analog and digital image processing algorithms to be embedded in sophisticated optical sensors prior to first silicon (e.g., optical mice)
- written in C++, MFC
- EM Microelectronic-US Inc. (Colorado Springs, CO, 2001- )
Java Server Pages Web Application for eValab Demo
- converted ARM7TDMI demo to use Simutech's JSP-based eValab server software
- tools included Allaire JRun 3.0, Apache web server, and Borland JBuilder 4
- designed and implemented complex web application involving a dozen JSPs, three Java Applets, HTML, JavaScript, and Sun's Java Media Framework (JMF)
- Simutech, LLC (Portland, OR, 2000-2001)
ARM7TDMI Firmware Demo Application
- designed and implemented ARM7TDMI-based firmware for image processing demo
- wrote VC++ client application for image capture and transfer to RAVE server
- Simutech, LLC (Portland, OR, 2000)
"FlexDrive" Motor Controller Board
- designed and implemented compact but flexible dual DC motor controller board for robotics applications
- performed schematic capture and PCB layout
- coordinated PCB fabrication with Alberta Printed Circuits
- currently in beta testing
- Noetic Design, Inc. (2000)
BigFins.com Custom Story Database/Email System
- implemented on short deadline an online database system for storage and retrieval of custom stories
- stories can be emailed to others and retrieved online, at which time the data in the database is rendered on the fly into the custom story
- uses an Access database and Allaire's ColdFusion
- BigFins.com (San Diego, CA, 2000)
"CloverBot" Robotics Experimentation Platform
- designed and built autonomous test platform for experimentation with all aspects of robotics engineering, including motor control, optical shaft encoders, PID control systems, infrared proximity sensing, sonar distance measurement, pyroelectric human body sensing, subsumption architecture (behavior-based) robotic firmware development
- implementing Simple Real Time Java classes for robotics applications (future product)
- Noetic Design, Inc. (2000)
"RAVE Prototyper" Hardware/Software Integration
- wrote FPGA pinout, PCB board netlist, and JTAG pin data analysis, merging, and interactive query software in Java for use in debugging RAVE hardware
- played significant role in integration, testing, and debugging of the RAVE Prototyper's complex hardware and software
- Simutech, LLC (Portland, OR, 1999-2000)
"SimuPhone" Demonstration Program and Firmware
- developed interactive Cell Phone demonstration program to show off the RAVE Prototyper
- consists of a C++ GUI LCD/keypad program that runs on a Windows PC, which communicates via RS-232 to Cell Phone demo firmware running on an 8051 Microcontroller circuit prototyped via RAVE
- modified TASKING, Inc.'s Rom Monitor to perform source level debug of the firmware which was written with the TASKING 8051 Embedded Development Environment
- 8051 firmware was written in portable C, which permitted the creation of a standalone version of the Cell Phone that runs entirely on a PC, for training purposes; the 8051 firmware runs as a thread in a DLL
- Currently modifying firmware to run on an ARM 7DTMI processor and a PalmChip peripheral set for an updated version of this demo
- Simutech, LLC (Portland, OR, 1999-2000)
"OnStream EchoCanceller" Data Recovery Tool
- wrote SCSI data recovery program for OnStream SC-50 tape drives
- wrote 1Vision Echo Software tape format analysis and database repair programs
- wrote interactive file extractor that utilized all possible information from partially restored directory databases, recognizeable file formats, and embedded file information to recover all possible user files
- integrated PkZip decompression library for recovery of compressed files
- Computer Conversions, Inc. (San Diego, CA, 1999)
"RAVE Prototyper" Installation Software
- designed and implemented InstallShield-based installation program for RAVE system software
- designed and implemented InstallAnywhere-based installation program for RAVE Java client software
- Simutech, LLC (Portland, OR, 1999)
"Aiwa BoltWrench" Data Recovery Tool
- wrote data recovery utility for the AIWA Bolt QIC-157 (ATAPI) interface tape drive
- Computer Conversions, Inc. (San Diego, CA, 1999)
"RAVE Prototyper" System Software
- wrote Windows NT device driver for the RAVE Protyper PCI interface card using KRFTech's WinDriver for Windows NT
- driver handles a variety of hardware interfaces between the RAVE Prototyper PCI card and the RAVE CoreBoards:
  - PCI using PLX 9050 interface chip
  - i960 local bus
  - Altera 10K series FPGA loading
  - JTAG IDCODE retrieval
  - Time Multiplexed Bus
  - EEPROM reading and writing via I2C
- wrote C++ test software to fully exercise hardware and driver
- significantly expanded Java JNI interface between device driver and RAVE Prototyper Java software (JRave)
- Simutech, LLC (Portland, OR, 1998-2000)
"QIC Recovery" Data Recovery Tool
- developed data recovery tool for floppy interface tape drives under Windows NT:
- added support for new Iomega tape drives and 2 megabit floppy disk controllers to the native Windows NT qic117.sys device driver
- designed a multithreaded, mixed C and C++ MFC application
- supports QIC-40 through QIC-3020 drives, and Iomega 2GB and 10GB drives, in both QIC-80 and QIC-113 file formats
- automatically detects and works around bugs and nonstandard behavior of many backup software applications
- handles ECC and Stac data decompression
- provides interactive, visual, hierarchical view of data structures on tape
- provides raw hex/ascii editing of data on tape
- recovers user data from a variety of mishaps, including partial overwrites, lost volume table entries, scrambled bad sector maps, and unrecoverable read errors
- wrote user manual and technical manual for the product
- Computer Conversions, Inc. (San Diego, CA, 1996-1997)
DDS-2 SCSI Tape Drive Firmware
- designed and implemented DDS-2 (DAT) tape drive firmware, starting from the DDS-1 codebase I wrote for Iomega and Aiwa
- designed changes to DDS-1 drive's architecture to support DDS-2
- worked closely with Japanese engineers on drive design and implementation issues
- Aiwa Co. Ltd. (Utsunomiya, Japan, 1993-1994)
QNX Installation and Security Software
- wrote user-friendly Zip drive based installation program for the QNX operating system
- replaced the cumbersome multi-floppy, then multi-patch installation procedure that comes with the operating system
- wrote Rainbow security dongle driver for QNX
- developed tamper proofing technology to protect MDSI's product from hackers
- MDSI (Ann Arbor, MI, 1995-1996)
MFC Classes for SCSI
- created MFC classes to encapsulate SCSI device programming via ASPI
- supports Windows 95 and Windows NT
- Noetic Design, Inc. (1997)
Tape Drive Systems Analysis
- analyzed the systems design (firmware and hardware) of the RSP-2150i SCSI 0.5" tape drive
- evaluated and found workarounds for a number of customer issues
- MountainGate (Reno, NV, 1997)
New Tape Drive Technology Feasibility Study
- evaluated technical feasibility of new tape drive technology
- Iomega Corp. (Roy, UT, 1996)
Floppy Disk Controller Plug-n-Play Technology
- invented plug-and-play technology for locating all floppy disk controllers in a system
- automatically determines the port, IRQ, and DMA settings
- Noetic Design, Inc. (1995)
Technology Upgrade to Test Software
- stabilized and debugged tape drive engineering and manufacturing test software
- implemented support for 2 megabit floppy disk controllers, the parallel port interface, new QIC-80 format changes, and new Iomega tape drives
- Iomega Corp. (Roy, UT, 1995)
Multimedia Programming
- implemented sprite based interactive multimedia playback engine, visual authoring tool, and sprite cropping and alignment tool
- used for a children's CD-ROM game
- Potamus Productions (Ventura, CA, 1994-present)
Windows 95 Long File Name Decoder for DOS
- developed a DOS utility to decode Windows 95 long filenames
- Noetic Design, Inc. (1995)
Visual Basic Japanese Learning Program
- developed in Visual Basic a Japanese language learning program, KanaQuiz
- Noetic Design, Inc. (1993)
Incorporated Noetic Design, Inc.
- started company with one other founder (business software/database designer) (1993)

Advisory Engineer, Iomega Corporation, IOTAPE Division, San Diego, CA, 1990-93

sole developer of SCSI firmware for DDS-1 (DAT) SCSI tape drive, including all test applications (joint development with Aiwa Co. Ltd.)
assisted chip selection and design of DDS-1 drive electronics
coordinated Design Verification Testing for DDS-1 drive at Iomega headquarters
represented Iomega at DDS Standards Committee meetings
developed DOS tape backup application (including ECC and Data Compression) and tape drive manufacturing test software
part of team that developed a 1" high QIC tape drive
one of the six founding engineers of IOTAPE

SCSI Firmware Engineer, Cipher Data Products, San Diego, CA, 1989-90

as part of four man team, developed SCSI firmware for QIC-525 tape drive
helped design system level architecture and selected major chips for tape drive electronics

Lead Software Developer, ISi / Literal Corp., Colorado Springs, CO, 1985, 1986-89

invented WORMTOS, a revolutionary method of simulating erasable files on write once media (written up in PC Week)
developed SCSI firmware, test programs, end user utilities, and device drivers for 525 MB, 5¼" optical disk drive
helped specify and design SCSI electronics for optical disk drive
completed development of Replicator (optical disk formatter) firmware
handled technical customer service calls
wrote user manuals for drivers and software

Engineering Intern, Xanar Surgical Laser Systems, Colorado Springs, CO, 1982-1984 (summers)

wrote 8085 firmware and built circuitry for advanced Sharp plasma display demonstration prototype of a surgical laser user interface
designed test programs and firmware for CO₂ surgical laser systems

Skills

Java Server Pages, Java Applets, JavaScript, Torque, Struts
Python, Pawn, PHP
C++ and MFC (Microsoft Foundation Classes)
Java 2, JNI, Simple Real Time Java (SimpleRTJ)
HTML, CFML (ColdFusion Markup Language), CGI, some SQL
InstallShield / Nullsoft installation program design
good embedded systems experience (8051, 68HC11, 8085, 80188, ARM 7, AVR, PIC, SiLabs, Basic Stamp)
strong skills in C and 80x86 assembly language
tape drive formats and interfaces
drivers for hardware interfaces such as JTAG, I²C, SCSI, RS-232
DOS, Windows 3.1, Windows 95, and Windows NT/2000/XP, and QNX system and application programming
QNX and Linux system administration
Linux firewall implementation and administration
familiarity with Pascal and Visual Basic; exposure to Ada, Prolog, Snobol
digital design and system level specification experience
schematic capture and PCB layout
extensive digital electronics debugging and testing experience
can operate oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, and emulators

Education

Japanese Language I and II, University of California at San Diego, 1991-1992
BSCS and BSEE, Washington University in St. Louis, 1986
Valedictorian, Cheyenne Mountain High School, Colorado Springs, CO, 1982

Contact Information

Email	pls*at# noeticdesign (dot) com
Fax	(503) 223-9470
Phone	(503) 223-9239
Mail	25 NW 23rd PL STE 6 PMB 181 Portland, OR 97210

Last updated 15 November 2007.