buelowp / ads1256

Peter Buelow

About this image

I can't take credit, this was randomly taken by my 6 year old daughter at her grandma's pool. I just love the color and lighting. It's a crop of a close up of what may be a 10 yeaar old bbeach ball. It was in the shed when my parents bought their house. My daughter was playing with our little water proof camera and captured this. She was copying her dad by just taking a lof pictures of little random stuff around the backyard.

About Me

I have been working with Linux and embedded electronics for nearly 25 years now. Starting in college, where I got my first pass at programming 8 bit micros and talking to them over slow UART on my super advanced Slackware 3.6 installation running on a Gateway2000 486 with 8MB of RAM (I upgraded). I remember how hard it was to get even simple things working, but what a learning experience. Fast forward to today, when I get to run an 8 core laptop with more RAM than my entire dorm had in all computers combined. Now Linux makes life easy, and I'm much better at using it.

Fast forward a few years, and I was a lucky young engineer at what used to be Motorola, working on learning how to integrate Linux into cellular network controllers. It was me and a few friends in suburban Chicago who got a first pass at brining MontaVista Linux into a Freescale PPC cage, and make it work. Then we got to integrate with WindRiver, making Linux and VxWorks function together in the same cage. Motorola also got me my first introduction to DD-WRT and consumer grade networking. I was priveledged to be a lead engineer helping on a project for what was a precursor to 4G. Motorola bet big on WiMAX, which was not smart in hindsight, but we created a really cool WiMAX home router which was deployed in Germany and Pakistan for a while.

I got to work at Continental AG, building their first Linux based products for a while. There is a lot of Linux in cars as it stands.

And most recently, I got to help create a Linux platform for Lifefitness. All of the consoles they build now are Linux and Android based. It was my team that dreamed up HOW to do that, and then work out the details. I loved that work, and being at the front line of doing something great for people, making it work for Lifefitness in a smart and cost effective way, was a dream come true.

I have a lot of projects here which let me keep track of a lot of things around my house. I can automatically refill my fishtank and monitor a lot of sensors related to keeping fish alive. I maintain a weather station in my backyard. I control a LOT of lights around the house (FastLED and Hue), and I dream big about what's next. Ideally, that would be a robot bartender, but honestly, I don't have the space right now. I need a new bar I guess!