Firmware & Embedded Engineer

Alejandro
Garcia Baltazar

CS graduate building from the silicon up. Direct register manipulation, peripheral driver development, and real hardware — no abstractions.

About

Firmware and embedded systems engineer in training with a Bachelor's in Computer Science. I work directly at the register level — configuring RCC, GPIO, and peripherals from the reference manual without HAL abstractions. My goal is to build reliable, efficient firmware on constrained hardware.

I come from a software background and chose to pivot into embedded because I wanted to understand the full stack — not just what software does, but what the hardware underneath it is actually doing.

01 Read the datasheet before writing a line of code
02 Understand the register before setting the bit
03 If it broke, document why

Technical Skills

Architecture
ARM Cortex-M0+ Memory-mapped I/O Vector tables NVIC
Peripherals
GPIO RCC EXTI SPI I2C ··· USART ···
Toolchain
Baremetal C STM32CubeIDE ARM Assembly
Hardware
Breadboard prototyping MOSFET switching Inductive load control Datasheet navigation

··· = in progress

Projects

Embedded / Firmware Active

STM32 Self-Watering Planter

Baremetal pump driver on the STM32 Nucleo G0B1CE. Button-controlled MOSFET switching configured entirely through direct register access — MODER, OTYPER, PUPDR, BSRR — without HAL. Includes pull-down network, gate resistor, and inductive load handling.

// Lesson learned: inductive loads require a flyback diode.
// Omitting one killed the board. Now it's in every schematic.
Baremetal C ARM Cortex-M0+ STM32 G0B1CE MOSFET drive Register-level GPIO
Previous Work — Mobile / Full Stack Completed

Eatscape — Food Truck Management App

Cross-platform mobile app with real-time location tracking via Google Maps API, Firebase Auth, Firestore, and an admin dashboard for menu and location management. Tiered subscription visibility for food truck operators.

Flutter Dart Firebase Google Maps API Cloud Functions

Education

University of Arkansas, Grantham
B.S. Computer Science — Aug. 2024

DEAC-accredited program covering data structures, networking, OOP, operating systems, databases, cybersecurity, and software engineering. Languages: JavaScript, C++, C#, SQL.

FastBit Embedded Brain Academy
Mastering Microcontroller & Peripheral Driver Development (MCU1) — Completed/div>

Peripheral driver development from scratch on STM32: GPIO, SPI, I2C, USART. Emphasis on register-level understanding and reading ARM reference manuals.

Boot.dev
Backend & Systems — Completed

Go, Python, OOP, Git, HTTP, Linux. Structured backend fundamentals to complement embedded systems work.

Contact