PixelClock

Welcome to my blog. Here you will find some information about me and my work as well as some of my personal and professional projects.

A bit about me:

I’m Miguel Ángel Expósito, a senior engineer and tech lead working at the intersection of embedded systems, high-performance software, and product development.

I’ve spent fifteen-plus years across industries that share a deeper skill base than they show on the surface: real-time C/C++, performance under hard constraints, the boundary between hardware and software, low-level debugging, Python as the connective tissue. The application layer changes: a BLE packet from a smart toy, a sensor read from a flight controller, a multi-clock-domain audio pipeline in an FPGA, a frame in a simulation engine…  but the underlying engineering discipline is the same.

What I’ve worked on:

Real-time, high-performance distributed systems: Game, simulation, low-level development and porting (Junior to Technical Director, 10+ years). I spent a part of my career in the simulation and games industry at different companies, including Super Evil Megacorp at Silicon Valley, California. Writing performant C++ across ambitious titles. Real-time rendering, distributed simulation, audio engines, build pipelines, and internal tooling in Python: the kind of work where a 16-millisecond frame budget keeps you honest. By the end I was Technical Director, setting technical direction across the team.

Consumer electronics: Tech Lead at Melbot Studios (2017–2020).
I led the embedded side of the Melbits POD, a buttonless BLE smart toy that shipped in 2020. Firmware on the Nordic nRF52810, secure DFU bootloader, a custom encrypted application protocol, fixed-point DSP for an optical pairing channel I designed (Magic Link), and the cross-platform Unity / C# library that drove it from the iOS and Android companion app. RF certification (FCC / CE), factory-floor provisioning tooling, and the full device-to-tablet contract were under my responsibility, reporting directly to the CEO. During this period I also programmed and optimized other titles the studio shipped.

Aerospace: R&D Director at General Drones (2020–2023). Where I have the immense pleasure of participating in the design of the world’s first drone specifically tailored for search and rescue operations in maritime environments, the Auxdron. I owned R&D end-to-end as the sole engineer in the department: STM32 and AVR firmware for our drone platforms, a fork of the ArduPilot autopilot stack with custom modifications for the flight controller, many accessories for UAVs, and an Android ground station app where I built the real-time video pipeline from scratch. A mix of bare-metal embedded and RTOS work, with hard real-time constraints across the whole stack.

Personal / hobby: I’ve been building on the side since long before any of the above paid the bills. The oldest piece I’ve made public is an FPGA guitar looper pedal in VHDL
I built in 2008 on an Altera Cyclone II — recently recovered from a NAS, cleaned up, and published with everything I’d do differently if I rebuilt it today.

What I’m good at

• Diving deep into complex codebases and transforming ambiguous requirements into efficient, maintainable, and functional software. Strong root-cause analysis and debugging capabilities, as well as a resourceful mindset that thrives on engineering creative solutions within highly constrained environments.
• Tying hardware and software together so the result actually ships. I work best when a project spans multiple stacks (embedded firmware on one end, mobile or desktop app, or backend on the other, a protocol or pipeline in between) and someone has to own the contract between them. C, C++, VHDL, Python, C# are my daily tools; BLE, DSP, video pipelines, fixed-point arithmetic, manufacturing test workflows, and RF certification are the domains I keep returning to.

I care about my craft as much as shipping. My public repositories include candid “What I’d do differently in 2026” sections where I call out design decisions that haven’t aged well.

Languages

• Spanish (native)
• English (C1, working professionally with Silicon Valley teams)

Find me

– GitHub: [mikedottech](https://github.com/mikedottech)
– LinkedIn: [Miguel Angel Exposito](https://www.linkedin.com/in/miguel-angel-exposito)