Background
I have been building embedded products since 2017, most of them the kind that has to keep working with nobody watching: RF receivers, battery-powered sensor networks, safety systems and equipment that runs underground.
I started out by founding a small electronics company, where the same few people designed the boards, wrote the firmware and ran the test bench. Following a product all the way into manufacturing has stayed a habit since.
After engineering roles in Istanbul and consulting in Göteborg, I am now a senior engineer at TII in Abu Dhabi, building embedded systems for high-speed data acquisition and signal processing in RF and acoustics. Much of that job is architecture, requirements and the standards a team builds on; the rest is hands-on, in Zephyr firmware, FPGA soft-cores and the secure pipeline that gets them onto a device.
I also write about Zephyr, in English and Turkish, mostly about the parts that took me longest to understand.
Areas of experience
Most products need several of these at once. Working across all of them, from the register map to the release process, is where I am most useful.
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Embedded firmware and RTOS
C firmware on STM32, Nordic and ESP32 parts: board bring-up, drivers, power management and the application on top. Zephyr by preference, FreeRTOS or bare metal when the product calls for it.
- Zephyr
- FreeRTOS
- Bare metal
- STM32
- nRF52/53/54
- ESP32
- C
- Python
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RF, SDR and signal processing
Receive chains from the transceiver inward: high-speed data acquisition, digital down-conversion, decimation and filtering. Python and GNU Radio on the bench, C and HDL for what ships.
- AD9361
- ANTSDR
- BladeRF
- GNU Radio
- DDC
- CIC
- Data acquisition
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FPGA and soft-core SoCs
Where FPGA meets firmware: RISC-V soft cores that let a board run without a host, Zynq and Artix-7 designs, small iCE40 parts for front-end processing, and the software that runs on all of them.
- RISC-V
- LiteX
- Artix-7
- Zynq-7000
- iCE40
- Vivado
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Connectivity and protocols
Links that stay up in the field: short-range and long-range radio, Ethernet and TCP/IP with TLS, industrial field buses, and compact payloads for the systems on the other end.
- BLE
- LoRaWAN
- TCP/IP
- mbedTLS
- MQTT
- CAN
- Modbus RTU
- CBOR
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Secure firmware delivery
Getting code onto a device and keeping it trustworthy there: secure bootloaders, signed and encrypted images, over-the-air updates that roll back on failure, and challenge-response authentication.
- Secure boot
- Signed images
- FOTA
- Rollback
- HMAC
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Low power and harsh environments
Devices that run for years on a battery, or where nobody can easily reach them: tight power budgets, time synchronisation across wireless nodes, and hardware for explosive atmospheres.
- Low-power design
- Battery sensor nodes
- Time sync
- ATEX
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Hardware through to production
Following a product past the prototype: board design and bring-up, manufacturing test and traceability, and a release process that makes every build reproducible.
- Board design
- Manufacturing test
- Traceability
- Release engineering
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Architecture and engineering practice
Architecture, requirements and design reviews, and the standards a team builds on: CI on every change, unit and hardware-in-the-loop tests, static analysis, and simulation so work starts before the boards arrive.
- Architecture
- Design reviews
- CI/CD
- HIL testing
- Static analysis
- native_sim
Experience
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Sep 2024 – present
Senior Embedded Systems Engineer
TII Abu Dhabi
Building embedded software for high-speed data acquisition and signal processing in RF and acoustic systems, from concept to production, and owning its architecture, requirements and design reviews. Set the centre's standards for embedded software, manufacturing and release.
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Jun 2022 – Sep 2024
Embedded Systems Engineer
Qrtech AB Göteborg
Consultant in industrial and safety electronics: Zephyr-based sensor products, wired and wireless connectivity, embedded networking, and test setups that run long before the hardware does.
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May 2020 – Jun 2022
Embedded Systems Engineer
Cozum Makina Istanbul
Architecture, protocols, hardware and firmware for real-time locating in underground mining, where devices run on tight power budgets and have to be certified for explosive atmospheres.
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Jun 2017 – May 2020
Founder & Embedded Engineer
Fintek Elektronik Istanbul
Founded and ran an electronics company making motion-control products. Hardware, firmware, production and test, all in-house.
At a glance
- Now
- Senior embedded systems engineer, TII
- Education
- BSc Electrical Engineering, Okan University
- Languages
- Turkish (native), English (professional)
Contact
Want to talk about embedded systems, RF or firmware architecture? Send me an email, or find me on LinkedIn.