KiCon North America

Amit Bahl, widely recognized as the PCB Guy, currently serves as the Chief Revenue Officer at Sierra Circuits. He earned his Bachelor of Science in Engineering from UCLA in 1997, launching his career in Silicon Valley's tech industry. In 2009, he assumed the role of Director of Sales and Marketing at Sierra Circuits, with a dedicated focus on democratizing design for manufacturing best practices and guidelines for PCB designers and engineers. Assuming the position of Chief Revenue Officer since 2022, Amit's mission persists: to simplify the PCB design journey for all stakeholders. His unwavering dedication continues to drive Sierra Circuits as a trusted resource for the PCB design community.

Andrew Greenberg received his BS in Electrical Engineering (1997), BA in Physics (1997), and MS in Electrical Engineering (2005) from Portland State University. He spent over 20 years in the medical device, embedded systems, and aerospace engineering fields before becoming a senior instructor at Portland State University in Electrical Engineering in 2022. He teaches undergraduate project-based classes, including cornerstone and capstone courses, and advises interdisciplinary student groups. His research interests include engineering education through hands-on, interdisciplinary open source aerospace projects such as amateur rockets and CubeSats.

Chris has over a decade of experience designing low-power embedded systems for the Internet of Things, and four years of product management experience in PCB assembly manufacturing.

He’s taken IoT hardware products from prototype to production at companies ranging from early-stage startups to Fortune 100 companies.

If you bump into him at the water cooler, ask him about the first IoT hardware he worked on that was donated to the Smithsonian by Vint Cerf.

Colin Zyskowski is a maker at heart. His interests include PCB design, woodworking, programming, and 3D/digital design. Though not formally trained as an engineer, Colin has spent the past almost 20 years learning by doing. His background and education are in music and media art, where he focused on interactive applications and hardware design. Colin has worked at EnVision Maker Studio for the past seven years.

Eli Hughes is the principal of Wavenumber LLC which delivers positive outcomes in the areas of embedded systems, software, IOT, audio, acoustics, industrial design, and content creation. In addition to his current role at Wavenumber, he works with NXP semiconductors producing engaging technical content and supporting customers with new silicon. His past experiences include working at the Penn State Applied Research Lab performing research in the areas of physics, sensors, conditioned based maintenance, robotics, undersea vehicles, and space science. His skill set includes high-speed PCB design, embedded systems engineering with modern FPGAs and microcontrollers, high-performance analog mixed-signal circuitry, digital signal processing and deeply embedded software. Eli also taught courses in embedded systems, FPGAs and circuit theory at Penn State University. In his spare time, he plays the guitar and keyboard in addition to enjoying woodworking.

I am Physicts, Computer Scientist and Electrical Engineer without over 40 years of experince in computing. I have designed many dozens of circuit boards using nearly every CAD tool in the marketplace. I have designed telecommunications supercomputers, innovative touch sensors (including the machine vision system for the original Microsoft Surface), 3D TV's that don't require glasses, displays for virtual and augmented reality headsets, and a device that let's you drive a wheelchair with your eyes. These days I design custom hardware and software to manufacturure and control carbon nanotube based x-ray emitters. NCX's emitters are the first major enhancement to x-ray tubes in many decades.

A longtime entrepreneur, Jeremy has founded and operated five companies, three of which were acquired by SEGA, Twitter, and Medium Corporation, respectively. Passionate about technology and software development, Jeremy has found ways to continue writing code in various capacities, despite holding a variety of business and technology executive leadership roles. Circuitly is the result of a lifelong passion for electronics and a career in consumer software development, including nearly two decades in console video game development spanning the Super Nintendo to the PlayStation 3.

Morris joined UC San Diego’s Electrical and Computer Engineering Department within the Jacobs School of Engineering as an Assistant Teaching Professor in 2020. He earned his Ph.D. and M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from UCSD working with the Talke Lab for Biomedical Devices and focused on design, numerical methods and control theory. Morris received B.S. degrees in Aerospace Engineering and Management Science (Quantitative Economics) also from UC San Diego.

Mike Engelhardt

Mike has been writing physical simulators since 1975. His first simulators were written for high energy physics labs, instrumentation companies working in charged-particle optics, and hydrocarbon location for oil exploration. He was Director of Simulation Development at Linear Technology Corporation (now ADI) for 22 years.

His educational background is physics from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; University of Mainz, Germany; and University of California, Berkeley where he was awarded the Lenzen fellowship for theoretical physics. He holds eight patents in simulation and switch mode power supply design. Mike has delivered seminars on SPICE simulation in 48 countries.

Self proclaimed computer nerd. Born with computers overflowing from the garage, the shed, the basement and from under my bed, now spending my time working on ways to make what I had more accessible to the rest of the world so all can figure out how computers work without having hundreds of them piled around, or breaking their parents brand new laptop.
I love spending time with my wife and kids taking walks to the park, reading, and learning new things together.

i am me

Walter began his circuitous and curious career as software sort. A dedicated dilettante, somewhere between Shenzhen and Sydney he somehow wound up married to mechatronics.

I have 32 years of experience designing, testing, and manufacturing of electronics in many industries including industrial, automotive, aerospace, and medical. I joined the KiCad project in 2007 to help improve the state of EDA tools for open source users. I became the KiCad project leader in 2011. I am currently employed by KiCad Services Corporation which provides support for commercial KiCad users.