About me

I'm an embedded software and tooling specialist with a lot of experience in AVR and ARM Cortex-M devices and their related libraries. I love all kinds of engineering and technology, especially aviation, railways and robotics.

I studied computer science at the RWTH Aachen University with a major in communication systems and an application subject in railway safety engineering. I wrote my master's thesis on extracting data from technical documentation using table processing. In my free time, I programmed autonomous robots for the Eurobot competition as a member of the RoboterClub Aachen e.V..

For work, I created electronics at The Media Computing Group and helped hang a 60×7m large display on the building's façade. I later rebuild the railway lab electronics of the Institute of Transport Science, which included the design and manufacture of a modular 1:32 scale signal system made of PCBs and 3D prints.

During my 2+ years at Arm, I worked as an Embedded Software Engineer on mbed OS core and HAL, as well as uVisor, a device security layer for Cortex-M microcontrollers, and the arm-none-eabi-gcc toolchain, and co-authored three patents. I have expert knowledge on and experience with all ARM Cortex-M architectures: v6-M, v7-M, and v8-M.

I'm currently working on embedded software and tooling at Auterion in Zurich.

Code

modm: Project lead and co-maintainer of a C++20 barebone embedded library generator, which generates custom HALs for thousands of different AVRs and Cortex-M devices.

modm-devices: Creator and maintainer of a Python3 data pipeline that provides a database of detailed hardware descriptions for modm.

lbuild: Maintainer of a Python3 modular code generator used by modm.

My other projects are hosted on GitHub too.

Talks

At emBO++18 I held a lightning talk on ARMv8-M and TrustZone-M.

At emBO++19 I gave a short talk about Modular Code Generation with lbuild.

Communication

You can reach me via electronic mail at niklas@salkinium.com.
Follow my Mastodon stream for my brain dump. (Twitter)
For more structured thoughts refer to my blog.