Wouter de Waal, Embedded Systems Electronics Engineer, Cape Town

Welcome to my online sort-of-CV. I'm an Electronics Engineer (M. Eng, Stellenbosch, 1993) with a strong background in Embedded Systems, both hardware and software.

I started my professional career at The EFT Company where we build point-of-sale card readers based on the Intel 8031 and the Dallas DS5002 Secure Microprocessor.

From there I moved to CCII Systems where I worked for close to 25 years. I started off writing Man-Machine Interfaces (what one would call a GUI these days I guess) using C++,and then the first of a number of network device drivers for VxWorks and Linux. We developed various bits of hardware based on the Motorola / Freescale / NXP PowerQUICC and PowerQUICC II processors, with the companion embedded software and device drivers, all in C. Target operating systems are predominantly VxWorks and Linux, but I have some experience with QNX as well.

In my private (hobby) life, I started with machine code on a SC/MP II back in 1979, moved on to the Motorola 6800/6809/68000 and an Apple ][, BASIC and Turbo Pascal and a brief detour through the lands of Forth, LISP, Prolog and Modula 2 (on the IBM PC architecture by now) on to C and C++. Thinking of looking at Go next.

I'm a tinkerer at heart, and I like reverse engineering things -- for example I recently reverse-engineered the LCD display on a VHF radio (yes, I am also a Radio Amateur) using a Microchip PIC to drive a replacement LCD. I'm also using Arduinos and BeagleBones for various little embedded tasks.

I have maintained the CCII Systems webserver, a co-located Linux (LAMP) box, since 2001. While not solely responsible for the content of that website, I hand-write HTML for that site and a few others on the side. The hardware and the versions of Linux and Apache and the rest have obviously changed over the years -- my longest uptime was over 1 200 days (It's a custom non-distribution that can only get updates from me, also I don't believe in messing with something that works).

I'm currently working in the IoT arena. Currently open projects include:

If you have an application and a need for getting real-world data into the cloud, I might just be your man.

(Googlebait: skfp sk98lin ccfddi ccge hss hss8)