TL;DR — I’m back in the consulting biz.
If you’ve got a design to review or a weird bug to untangle, book a chat with me or use the contact form on my About page!
Hey Internet. Remember me? It’s Jay — the guy who posts on this blog once every presidential administration or so (though don’t get me started on this latest one…).
Yes, I’m still here. Still a nerd. Still accidentally typing ifdown into remote SSH windows and cursing Altium bugs. Since 2020, I’ve been full time at Virtual Incision — deep inside the world of surgical robotics, leading electronics development for the MIRA surgical robotic platform, which was FDA cleared in February 2024.
And let me tell you, it’s been a wild ride! FCC testing, IEC60601 compliance, tens of thousands of pages of documentation (built from what feels like tens of thousands of late nights of debugging), an FDA IDE clinical study, and ultimately a De Novo classification and full clearance.
It wasn’t all stress and documentation, though — we had some fun too. We launched a lightly-modified version of MIRA to the International Space Station (yes, really), and had a blast demoing our FDA-approved system on the expo floor at GTC 2024 while Jensen Huang, Gavin Newsome, and Bill Whitaker all converged on our booth at once.
After the FDA process was full-bore, I transitioned into a heavier R&D role at the company — still a Staff Engineer, but functioning as more of a Technical Lead Manager, working with a dozen amazing engineers and interns on crazy new tech.
Web built crazy new robots (like this robot to hold our robot), explored remote surgery, and built a brand new surgical vision pipeline.
With some help from our friends at NVIDIA and Lattice, Evan and I built several camera prototypes around Holoscan Sensor Bridge, which replaces legacy serializers and ISPs with an Ethernet-connected software-defined imaging pipeline powered by Holoscan. It was an awesome experience to present at GTC this year about our work with this technology.
Behind the scenes, we built a brand new NVIDIA IGX-powered robot control platform, with a Rust-based backend (hats off to kinematics/systems genius Taylor) and a React- and Three.js-powered UI (beautiful design work from Noah). We used the platform internally to quickly mock-up next-generation surgical robotics technology like remote surgery and AI task automation (led up by Gauthier and Nixon, and then by Ryan). Meanwhile, Fabrice built a giant Timescale-powered data platform, Lukas and Jake took over much of our PCB design work, Carl proved that FreeRTOS can absorb literally any TCP/IP stack, and Ben, our first-ever ME intern, decided to learn everyone’s job while he was at it. It was a phenomenal team. I just wish we lived in a world without NDAs so I could share more!
But alas — and you probably saw this coming — it’s time for something new. I recently wrapped up at Virtual Incision and have been enjoying a bit of a breather: gardening (I just finished renovating the backyard last fall), catching up with old friends, and finally tinkering in my lab on the kind of ridiculous side projects that never fit between my full-time milestones.
I’ve got a few exciting possibilities on the horizon, but I’m also keeping the aperture wide for other full-time opportunities. But while I recharge a bit, I’m starting some limited contract work — mostly high-leverage technical consulting, architecture reviews, and embedded problem-solving.
If you’ve read this blog before, you already know the kind of stuff I like to nerd out on — and the kinds of problems I like helping other people solve.
So if you’re building something embedded, robotic, camera-flavored, or medicinal, I might be your guy.
Things I can help with:
Architecture guidance for embedded, vision, or robotic systems
Lower-level support with MIPI interfaces, ISP tuning, or smart camera SoCs
- Network protocol selection and implementation for resource-constrained systems
Embedded Linux bring-up on resource-constrained platforms
Holoscan, Sensor Bridge, Jetson, CUDA, IGX — I speak fluent Nvidian
Navigating MOOPs/MOPPs and IEC60601 constraints
BOM/space/power/heat minimization or last-minute design sanity checks
Or just answering the classic: “Are we about to make a huge mistake?”
If that sounds like something you need — or might need soon — book a time here, or use the contact form on my About page and we’ll go from there. I’m excited to dive into new ideas and meet the people building them. Glad to finally have the time again to do it!
