2023 Updates: PhD; Pi Pico

It's 2023 and I'm back to keep the blog going! Lots have changed in my life in the past 6 years since I last posted on the blog.

PhD

After a six-year stint working as a hardware engineer at Apple, I am excited to now be pursuing my PhD in Electrical Engineering, focused on Power Electronics, at UC Berkeley. I start working with Professor Robert Pilawa-Podgurski this week! I anticipate more posts centered around power electronics in the future.

Why did I want to go back to school in a PhD program? There are 3 key aspects to this:

1. Technical depth. With the recent rapid advances enabled by wide bandgap semiconductors, the recent explosion in adoption of EVs and an expansion in the number of research labs in academia, now is an exciting time for power electronics.
2. Positive contributions to climate crisis solutions. Growing up in Bangladesh, I witnessed firsthand the devastating impact of natural disasters that continue to be exacerbated by the climate crisis. Direct impacts of this are witnessed every year half-way across the world in California where I now live. I envision pursuing research opportunities to significantly reduce emissions in the transportation and energy sectors: the largest contributors to the climate crisis and fields that can be directly improved through power electronics.
3. Education. This blog has been an early testament to my interest in sharing engineering information and knowledge. I would like to continue to do so, but also engage in a more formal manner through educational institutions, particularly with typically underserved institutions.

Pi Pico

In the short term, I am exploring the Raspberry Pi Pico (based on the RP2040 MCU) using MicroPython. Having the resources to support running MicroPython, in a super-cheap part, is an exciting opportunity for me to explore. The idea here is to use Python (very simple software bringup time) to do the software heavy lifting and leveraging on-board hardware for timing-sensitive/hardware applications.

Here is a great relevant podcast episode: The Amp Hour #529 – Embedded Hardware with the Raspberry Pi Team. 

Why Micropython? Listen to 11:30-12:30 in the linked podcast episode where the below qutoes are taken from.

Computing is just so cheap compared to what it has been historically. That then enables things that are maybe not super efficient, not super tight timing like Micropython but who cares at that point? A lot of people will come in and say things like 'in this benchmark, I found that MicroPython is 100x slower than C' but if your C code is 100x faster than you need, then it doesn't matter. You just write the code you need and you focus on the parts that add value to your project and then you move on to your next project.