Hardware • Embedded • R&D • Production
I BUILD
HARDWARE
THAT SHIPS.
I build electronic products end to end: idea, system architecture, boards, RF, acoustics, mechanics, firmware, factories and engineering teams. Yandex → Mail.ru/VK → MTS.
01 — SELECTED WORK
Products, systems and boards in the real world.
01
Capsula
Hardware technical lead: architecture, electronics, audio, acoustics, RF, mechanics, DfM, Buildroot, production and test infrastructure. Took the device from early prototypes through EVT/DVT/PVT to mass production in Shenzhen.
Rockchip RK3388STM32RF / AudioChina NPI350k units
02
Capsula Mini
Continued technical leadership: tiny enclosure, CPU, radio, amplifier and a bright LED clock — a pretty good recipe for a heater. I reviewed the mechanics, designed the antenna module, touch panel and LED board, tuned sound and thermals, and owned half of the manufacturing work.
RFTouchThermalsAcoustics850k units
Self-driving Camera Hub
Built the main camera aggregation board for Yandex self-driving cars in about two weeks: 18 Gbps aggregate GMSL input bandwidth, camera power and control, video into Nvidia Jetson TX2, then out to 10GbE. It then spent a long time running in actual self-driving cars and even made it into a magazine.
GMSLMIPI / LVDSJetson TX2~2 weeks to working hardwarePopular Mechanics
+5dB
RTK-GNSS
The off-the-shelf board was not good enough on signal level, data quality or cost, so I built our own. Careful RF layout, matching and filtering added +5 dB of received signal while making the module smaller and cheaper.
GNSSRF layoutFilteringUSB3 noise mitigation
PVT
MTS Smart Speaker
Technically responsible for the whole product as CTO: team, product decisions, system architecture, electronics, embedded software, acoustics, RF, mechanics, device-to-server integration and manufacturing in China. Brought the device to PVT and a pilot factory run.
System architectureEmbeddedAudio / RFDevice ↔ serverChina NPI
ACE RFID Readers
Schematics, PCB, STM32 firmware, CR95HF RF path, RGB indication and remote firmware updates. Hundreds of devices made.
STM32F100CR95HFRFIDOTARGB
← это яMAIL.RU · 2019
Ordinary day in hardware development
The curly-haired guy in front is me. Behind me is Dmitry Medvedev; on the table is the first Capsula dev board. I was seated right at the front, so when he had questions about the speaker, he asked me. He asked, I answered. Ordinary day in hardware development.
NFC Sticker
Designed an ultra-thin compact flexible card, did the RF calculations and debugging, validated an original resonance-tuning idea and worked through a pile of banking and physical constraints for an NFC card/sticker. After passing internal bank tests, filed a patent and brought it to pilot production.
NFCRFFlexible PCBPatent work
≤0.1%
Amper Energy Meter
Resurrected a large batch of electricity meters after some corporate turmoil. Rebuilt the firmware around the metering IC, archive storage in FRAM, display UI and LiSOCl₂ battery training. Then tuned the measurement chain to ≤0.1% error across the range — verified by an external laboratory.
Energy metering≤0.1%FRAMLiSOCl₂Embedded FW
02 — R&D / PROTOTYPES
R&D, prototypes and a bit of engineering mischief.
The projects where I could test an idea quickly in real hardware: controls, video, servers, sensor fusion and audio.
MTS Spotter
A tiny battery-powered satellite microphone for the smart home: on-device neural wake-word detection, LED feedback, a speaker, Wi-Fi and BLE, with about a week of battery life. After wake-up it sent audio to the server for ASR/TTS; the original low-power architecture could relay audio over BLE to the main smart speaker.
Wake wordWi‑Fi / BLE1 week batteryASR / TTS
Haptic Access-Control Controller
A mode controller for an access-control system: BLDC knob, precision magnetic angle encoder, ESP32, DRV8331, RGB ring and internal light guide. I also worked through the product and industrial design: the feel, geometry, light guide and physical interaction. Configurable detents, virtual walls and USB/RS485.
BLDCESP32HapticsRS485
10×10 mm IMU Tracker
A 10×10 mm drone tracker and a very compact playground for sensor fusion: STM32, IMU, barometer and Kalman filtering on a board barely larger than the chips themselves.
10×10 mmSTM32IMUKalman
Professional Video Streamer
A box for serious streaming setups: HDMI or digital coax in, RK3588 video compression, then uplink to our backend for transcoding and delivery. I worked on product decisions, industrial design, enclosure and electronics.
RK3588HDMIVideo encodeNetworking
Karaoke Microphone
Mechanical construction, enclosure and audio signal path for a karaoke microphone. A nice multidisciplinary mess of mechanics, acoustics and analog electronics.
MechanicsAudioAnalog
EDIGE.XYZ
KNOW
LEDGE
SPINE engineering news that remembers
LEDGE
SPINE engineering news that remembers
EdigE
An engineering news system with memory: automatic discovery, source verification, a durable archive and a Knowledge Spine that connects stories to their history and neighboring technologies. Thousands of discoveries, semantic cards, embeddings and graph edges behind a deliberately simple reading interface.
DiscoverySourcesEmbeddingsKnowledge graphLLM pipeline
edige.xyz ↗
μVR
MicroVR — Full-body Tracker
Full-body tracking for VRChat: eight compact trackers built around nRF52833 + LSM6DSV16X, a custom 2.4 GHz radio dongle, centralized sensor fusion / constraints / IK, and a controlled low-frequency magnetic channel against inertial drift. The field hardware uses my own Class-E transmitter.
nRF52833LSM6DSV16X2.4 GHzClass-EVRChat
microvr.xyz ↗
03 — SHENZHEN
A working PCB is not a product yet.
Shenzhen trips were part of engineering: DfM, suppliers, pilot runs, test software, production fixtures and bugs that only surface after hundreds of devices have gone down the line.
04 — PERSONAL R&D
UNIVELIS
Where work ends and another kind of engineering begins: resonance, timing, home networking, power electronics, measurements and component deep-dives.
Резонанс и беспроводная энергия
Class‑E, связанные контуры, самодельный литцендрат, моделирование катушек и поля, борьба за КПД и нагрев. От странных резонансных эффектов до реальной передачи энергии через стеклопакет.
Class‑ELCWPTLTspice550 kHz
Precision timing
Домашний GNSS‑disciplined timing box: ZED‑F9T, OCXO, AD9546, 1PPS, 10 MHz, holdover, измерение задержек и попытка сделать настольный прибор, которому можно верить.
GNSSOCXOAD95461PPS10 MHz
Домашняя сеть и лаборатория
25‑гигабитная домашняя сеть, собственная автоматизация, мониторинг, измерительные стенды, серверы и инфраструктура, на которой удобно превращать идеи в работающие прототипы.
25GbELinuxMonitoringAutomationLab
Инженерный канал
Практические разборы электроники, RF, силовой части, STM32/ESP32, измерений, новых компонентов и собственных экспериментов. Обычно с графиками, схемами, осциллограммами и вопросом «а что будет, если?..».
ElectronicsRFPowerMCUMeasurements
@univelis ↗
05 — TALKS / CONFERENCES
I speak at hacker and engineering conferences.
Usually about things I first built, measured and understood myself — so the talk starts at the workbench, not in PowerPoint.
06 — COMMUNITY
Catethysis
3000Built Catethysis into a 3000-person Russian-speaking electronics community: offline meetups, talks, mentoring and years of practical engineering discussion.
My favorite place is where product, electronics, embedded software, RF, mechanics and manufacturing all collide. That is usually where the interesting problems live.