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Welcome Andrea Longobardi of AL2tech!
- Andrea is a consultant in the HW / FW space, based out of Italy.
- Chris met Andrea when he was transitioning to consulting and he joined the consulting forum.
- Andrea comes from a family of engineerhing, His father is an EE who made PCBs at home but kept it from the kids
- He worked at ST Micro designing drivers for server disk drives
- If you lose power, the arm will crash into the platen. So when power fails, you use the energy in the motor to backpower the arm.
- Didn’t like being pigeonholed and he wanted to get into apps engineering
- Moved to Maxim, which he knew about because of their sample program
- Working in automotive space: harsh environment and dealing with things like:
- Load dump
- Cold crank
- Low power during shutdown
- Dealing with customers on last minute basis
- Went abroad to the UK and worked for ARM/PA Consulting
- Chris asked about the engineering culture in Italy/UK
- Lot of focus on theory
- “With the internet you can become an expert very quickly”
- AL2Tech is Andrea, his brother Allessandro and a lab assistant
- Had been back at Maxim focused on low power, connected devices
- What’s it like working with a sibling?
- Finding first client as a consultant:
- Networking with people on linkedin
- Looking at job openings and offering part time work
- Did it while building up the company
- Showing side projects (air quality sensor + BLE) since he couldn’t talk about his work at chip companies
- It worked when a small company took a chance on him
- FAEs were big companies, didn’t get access to the smaller company engs
- Building test boards to learn new things (for the Joulescope), like a custom front panel
- Gas monitoring is an area of focus for AL2tech
- The device is battery powered, sitting on the meter.
- Certification is critical: the certifying body is looking at schematic / layout and making sure nothing heats past the point of igniting gas.
- Zone 0, 1, 2
- Conformal coating
- Why not put everything in Resin? Cost
- Volume correctors for gas monitoring
- For billing, they lean on PV=nRT
- Internal product at AL2Tech is the Elektra
- There is a CO sensor that caches data and sends over NFC and BLE
- It detaches from a shirt with battery, but a reed switch disables power when not connected (so it can be washed)
- Using the shirt to attract people and talk about capabilities
- Embedded World helped expand outside of Italy
- Other proejcts
- Find Andrea on LinkedIn
- Check out al2tech.com to learn more about the company