Eli Hughes
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.
Sessions
Wavenumber LLC is a 'full stack' product design firm providing design services as well as working on internal products. In the Fall of 2024, we made a deliberate decision to begin integrating KiCad into our technology tool stack and workflow. Tooling is rarely dictated by our customers as we deliver on final product outcomes. We've found that business profitability and productivity for our use case often hinge on tooling features that major vendors aren't prioritizing. This session details our ongoing journey toward incorporating KiCad into our development pipeline, with a particular focus on HTTP libraries and the kicad-cli as key enablers.
We'll share real-world experiences of how open formats and customizable tooling have improved our processes, especially with library management and metadata handling, and how we've successfully migrated approximately 10,000 parts from our existing database to KiCad 9. This presentation will be valuable for hardware professionals considering similar transitions or looking at options for a mixed-tooling environment.