Richard Aplin Email & Phone Number

Palo Alto, CA, US

Embedded linux tweaking, wifi mesh networking, Hardware In Loop automation, factory test fixtures, OTA deployment, debugging tools, ARM firmware, schematic design, board bringup, one of those fun places where you can have a hand/hat in lots of challenges, something new every day. Really enjoying the flexibility and ability to invent tools to help people do.

Bellevue, WA, US

It would not be appropriate for me to talk about the lickable wallpaper, infinite gobstoppers, or fizzy lifting juice that Valve create behind firmly closed doors. An incredibly interesting gig diving very deep into a specific technology, and I had a lot of fun with it.

San Carlos, CA, US

Company is literally something out of Sci-Fi, they grow tasty gourmet veg with robots; goal is automation of the whole deal. Most trippy is that even though they're early stage, they right now grow + sell produce (grown by actual robots) to actual stores and it may already have been been part of your actual dinner. Not easy; many interesting things to make.

Quick gig helping out with the firmware for a sweet Bike alarm product. Has GPS, Nordic BLE (52832), Cat-M1 LTE modem, and a distressingly loud piezo beeper - driven by a 120v boost converter (from a 1S lipo!). Holy moley it's loud when it triggers; it's like World War III is kicking off and it's your fault. If you see one of these mounted on a bike I.

Palo Alto, CA, US

EV Charging. One of those jobs where Crocs are not mocked, but prized for their exceptionally high flashover voltage. Where 'letting the smoke out' is more like 4th July, a 1950's Weller soldering gun is a handy 100Amp test power supply, and where kitty is NOT permitted to find his own warm place to sleep. Underwriter's Lab (UL) safety certification.

San Francisco, California, US

It's amazing how many details there to get right with Scooter/eBike sharing; Scoot is a riot of skilled engineering folks; mechanical, electrical, software, you name it... I'm contracting to help with whatever needs it; firmware (vehicle 'brain' and bus-connected accessories such as this lock https://bit.ly/2SFuydW ), networked production test fixtures and.

NYC, New York, US

Friend from decades ago pinged me on FB and said "Hey Rich, you fancy doing some Bluetooth stuff?", and sure, I'm always partial to a bit of 2.4Ghz RF, whether it's megabits, kilobits, or warming up yesterday's leftovers... So I got on Skype and talked to the CEO of Playfusion (Mark) and was thoroughly impressed by him and his "Toys-to-life" / AR product..

Condition One make immersive Virtual Reality movies (and are working on many of the tools one needs to make VR movies). Their shit is DOPE; when they first gave me a demo I spent the next month ranting at everyone I met about how ridiculously good it was. I went from being pretty "meh"​ about the whole VR thing (after seeing it go nowhere for the last.

San Francisco, CA, US

Having had a cosy christmas period making a popular-ish sculpture with a couple of thousand RGB LEDs, my friends at Astro pinged me asking for help implementing an audio peripheral that's compatible with XBox One, PC, PS3, PS4, OSX, you name it. Microsoft charmingly invented their own XBox USB protocols and security protocols (where 'security' is a MS.

So I'm doing... whatever I was doing and the phone rings and it's some recruiter, checking out my friend's job reference. In the middle of the conversation she says "oh you're a Firmware Dude, I know some folks.." and before you know it I've got a desk covered in CSR Bluetooth hardware and wires up the wazoo. One thing rarely appreciated about Bluetooth is.

This was a personal crusade:In 2014 kickstarter project was launched called "iFind":https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/yuansong84/ifind-the-worlds-first-battery-free-item-locating/description...which claimed to be a small (dogtag-size) cheap ($14) Bluetooth Low Energy locator tag that you stick on to valuable items and use your phone to activate when you.

So I'm hanging out, keeping it real, and yet another old friend (Noah Hurwitz, who is practically Captain Awesome) calls me up and says "Hey Rich, I'm doing this thing with teh computers and interwebs and phones without wires, and I have some typing and stuff. - You Dig?"Well as it happens, I dig, so I'm doing some typing and stuff, with these other cats.

San Francisco, CA, US

So I've just put a couple of projects to bed, and then my mate rings me up and.. yes it's another one of those. Soupe de Jour is a 2.4 / 5.8Ghz wireless audio consumer product; infinitely beyond crappy Bluetooth A2DP, this baby does 4 bidirectional stereo 48k/16 channels -and- Dolby-digital and Dolby headphone 5.1 surround. There's some USB, some battery.

San Francisco, California, US

Was minding my own business and an old friend calls up "Hey Rich, our iPhone game is about to launch, can you give us a hand with keeping our servers sweet?"A week or so later "Archetype" for iPhone hit #1 App By Revenue in the US app store, and I've been having a lot of fun optimizing their EC2-based cloud farm.Server performance is >10x quicker so far.

Basking Ridge, NJ, US

Came back to help move some items of data (that were waaaay too big for a key vendor's product to cope with) onto two cloud storage providers (one as failover; VZ really like reliability) which coped with them just fine for a tiny fraction of the cost. Much amusement at discovering the root cause of vendor's problems.Ok, having ridden again, I'm definitely.

Basking Ridge, NJ, US

Verizon Wireless Tech Development / Product Realization. Worked on a variety of projects over the years; VCast Store, app license management, mobile OS and VM work, mobile web, etc. One time I flew to Basking Ridge to demo very early Android SDK running on a Beagleboard dev kit, compared it to J2ME, talked fast and waved my arms around a lot. Who knows if.

US

Lots of fun developing a bunch of very pretty mobile applications on Brew and J2ME. I wrote a Brew client/server engine (which could play preprocessed Flash files) and we really cranked the handle on it, doing dozens of movie-branded ringtone and wallpaper portals.This is where I had a long tryst with PHP; you love it or hate it and over three years I did.

San Francisco video games company, a bunch of really fun creative people in a big old house in the city (..situated above a bar with a permanent company tab open for employees. How civilized) A variety of projects (PSX, Flash, Web, early WAP and J2ME) but eventually we just got squeezed out of business between generations of consoles (PS1->PS2) as the.

Great bunch of ex-Argonaut people in West London; we put out a really fun 50's Sci-fi themed 3d first-person shooter on PSX & PC. I did the PSX port of Attack Of The Saucerman. Top team; smart coders, skilled artists, wonderful musician (Joris de Man). By a fortuitous sequence of having friends in various places, I got an offer to go work for Sony.

Southam, Warwickshire, GB

This was F.U.N. I spent several years pulling games consoles apart and examining their innards while working on the Game Genie cheat devices, reverse engineering, building development systems. Mmmm circuit boards and logic analysers and FPGA programmers and wires and splashes of solder all over my jeans. All done in a farmhouse out in the middle of the.

This company was a revamped version of Binary Design with many of the same staff. I did a couple more ST/Amiga conversions here, "Final Fight" was probably the prettiest and cleverest if not the funnest.For fun I built a hardware disk copier ("Cyclone") which saw some popularity on the 'dark side' as part of the X-Copy package.Also I put together a.

Binary Design did a lot of work for Mastertronic, including the "GET IT DONE BY CHRISTMAS OR DIE" Double Dragon arcade conversions. Development of these titles was not trouble-free, meaning I camped out in Manchester for a couple of months as the publisher's Enforcer. The project got done and Binary Design decided to hire me to manage their new development.

Crazy time, crazy introduction to The Biz. Frank Herman, a legendary and perceptive businessman with a background in erm 'movies for grown ups', started Mastertronic invented the concept of 'budget games' - pile 'em high and sell 'em cheap. Roaring success. I moved to London as youth and worked on a torrent of titles, mastering all their titles and other.