//**"Programming right down to the bare metal since 1980."**//

My name is Jeffrey Nonken. I am an embedded systems software engineer from Chester County, Pennsylvania, about 30 miles west of Philadelphia. I am currently living in Davis, California, near Sacramento.

My current job is working for [[http://www.flypfc.com/|Precision Flight Controls]] in Mather, CA, developing firmware for flight simulator hardware. My next most recent job was for [[http://lsgc.com/|Lighting Science Group]], formerly LED Effects, Inc., developing firmware for LED-based lighting devices. Before that I worked as a contract engineer with [[http://www.schulmerichbells.com/|Schulmerich Carillons, Inc.]], where I was developing a [[http://www.schulmerich.com/products_mw_overview.php|radio remote hand chime]]. I have also worked for [[http://www.sea.siemens.com/us/products/process-instrumentation/support/Pages/moore-products-reference.aspx|Moore Products Co.]], now part of Siemens Energy & Automation, where I helped develop a variety of process control systems; for Analect Instruments division of Laser Precision Corp. developing infrared spectrometers; and for CA Electronics, an engineering consulting firm.

Among my greatest strengths are analysis, synthesis, and good general problem-solving skills. Some examples of where I have used these skills:

  * During my first month at Analect while waiting for an assignment I noticed that the EPROM programmer's software was very primitive and nearly unusable. Using the time on my hands I created my own project; I used the debugger to grab the basic hardware drivers, converted them to assembly, and incorporated them into a simple but much friendlier application. The result of a few hours' work was an increase in productivity -- and the gratitude of my co-workers.
  * When a co-worker was having trouble fitting a text-intensive project into its available ROM space, I was able to create a DOS utility to compress the text using Huffman-type coding and an embedded function to expand it real-time in the device. The result was enough usable ROM space for the remaining life of the product, with no noticeable change in performance.
  * Because our proprietary small instrument link and the HART protocol were so different, sending information from one to the other was a multi-part process. I designed a buffering scheme and a state-machine-driven interpreter that assembled HART messages from a combination of buffered and incoming data, in a primitive bank-switched memory space, and made it efficient enough not to seriously impact the instrument's main function as a single-loop digital controller. Adding new commands was simple; the interpreter was expandable and well-documented. 

My goal is to work as an embedded systems software or firmware developer for a small-to-medium-sized company.


Find out more:

  * Click here to get my {{nonken_jeffrey.doc|downloadable resume}} in Word format.
  * You can also [[Online resume|view my resume online]]. This includes more of my job history and links to other pages that describe my experiences.
  * View my [[http://baremetalblog.nonken.net|weblog]].
  * See my [[http://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffreynonken|LinkedIn profile]].
  * See my [[http://www.facebook.com/people/Jeffrey-Nonken/100000212655986|FaceBook page]].