About
Who is behind this site: 11+ years designing electronics that run 24/7 in the field, from circuit and firmware to compliance and manufacturing. How I work, and why there's no phone number.
Patrick Emil — senior electronics engineer, Melbourne.
For more than eleven years I’ve designed the electronics inside products that have to run around the clock without anyone watching them: building-automation controllers, energy meters and I/O modules, sensor networks installed across commercial buildings by the thousand, and, on the side, the winch and motor controllers that live on boats. I do the circuit design (analog, digital, power), the PCB layout, the firmware, the bring-up and the debugging myself, and I’ve carried products through design verification, EMC pre-compliance, pilot production runs and the yield problems that follow.
I’ve also run the other side of the table: led a development team as head of development, and now lead hardware for a product platform, responsible for what goes to the contract manufacturer and what comes back. That’s why every package here has a written scope, a test list and a price — it’s how I’d want to buy it.
What I actually do
- Circuits and power: analog, digital and mixed-signal design; switching supplies and DC-DC; industrial 24 V AC/DC inputs with proper protection and brown-out handling; battery management and low-power design.
- Boards: schematic and layout in Altium and KiCad, multi-layer and controlled-impedance, high-speed (DDR, PCIe, USB 3, MIPI), designed for EMC and for the factory.
- Firmware and embedded Linux: C on STM32 and Nordic nRF52 (nRF Connect SDK / Zephyr), NXP and TI; CAN, RS-485/Modbus, USB, BLE, Wi-Fi, LoRa; embedded Linux on Buildroot and Yocto (kernel, root filesystem, boot time, remote update).
- Field networks: RS-485 multi-drop design and troubleshooting — termination, biasing, isolation, surge, cable length — and integrating meters and sensors from vendors who each read the Modbus spec differently.
- Verification and manufacturing: design verification plans, EMC pre-compliance, thermal and soak testing, production test fixtures with automated pass/fail, BOM and assembly data, and contract-manufacturer support through pilot runs.
- Not mechanical design. Enclosures come off the shelf wherever they can; for a custom moulded enclosure I bring in a mechanical designer and manage them. I’d rather say that here than at tooling time.
MSc Power Electronics (University of Greenwich). BEng Electronics Engineering (University of Warwick).
How I work
- Everything is written down before it starts. Scope, deliverables, acceptance tests, price, turnaround. No surprises on either side.
- Fixed prices where the work is bounded; a paid diagnostic first where it isn’t. I don’t quote what I haven’t looked inside.
- In writing, within one business day. Enquiries come through the intake form; replies come by email. Repairs are mail-in only. There’s no phone number on this site on purpose: it keeps my time on your problem.
- A small queue, on purpose. I take a limited number of jobs at a time so each one gets proper attention. What I’m currently booking is in the footer of every page.
- Registered. Registered Professional Engineer under Victoria’s Professional Engineers Registration Act, and on Engineers Australia’s National Engineering Register. Numbers at the bottom of this page.
- Availability. I do this evenings and weekends alongside a full-time engineering role. A diagnostic week is about four bench days spread over 10 business days, which is why that’s the turnaround rather than five days straight.
Pratheepan Emil Patrick, ABN 24 788 487 921. Registered Professional Engineer, Victoria (electrical engineering), registration no. PE0011615. National Engineering Register (Engineers Australia), NER 4260598.