Simon Maddison · UAS Systems Engineer

CMOS Foundry

// embedded · avionics · keyboards that clack in minor keys

A barely-contained psychic meltdown from an eccentric introvert who hoards half-finished projects like a digital dragon on a mountain of cursed repositories, breathes compiler errors instead of fire, guards the sacred stash of TODO comments with autistic fury, and is secretly breeding an army of sentient keyboards that clack in minor keys and plot the violent overthrow of the cloud.

Portfolio

• kicad-druid NEW

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  KiCad design rules generated from JLCPCB and PCBWay capabilities, plus a Generic set for either fab. Every variant checked by KiCad DRC in CI.

• Etchy NEW

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  A fast, trustworthy PCB diff tool built in Rust. Point it at two revisions of a board's fab output — Gerber, drill, pick-and-place — and it shows and measures every change, with a pass/fail gate for CI. CLI, desktop viewer, and a tiny container. Open source, v0.1 out now.

• Mad_RP2040

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  4×4 backlit "anything keypad" built around the RP2040, with a full KiBot CI pipeline. Started as a 2-key controller test board.

• kitium

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  CI/CD gate that converts Altium PCB projects to KiCad and validates the output.

• KiCad DRU — VS Code Extension

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  Syntax highlighting and snippets for KiCad's `.kicad_dru` custom design rule files.

• eV+ for VS Code NEW

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  Language support for Omron Adept eV+ / V+ robot programs in VS Code. Highlighting, hover help, completion, diagnostics and navigation.

• kibot-config

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  Reusable KiBot configs that generate fabrication datapacks from KiCad projects.

• Altium → DigiKey

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  Pushes an Altium BOM to a DigiKey cart through their public API.

• iBOM for Altium

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  Generates an interactive HTML BOM from Altium Designer projects.

• Corne Split Keyboard

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  My journey into the world of custom mechanical keyboards.

Blog

• 2026-10-03 eV+ in VS Code: Language Support for Omron Robot Programs vscodeomron
• 2026-10-03 kicad-druid: Fab House Design Rules, Generated and Tested kicadkicad-dru
• 2026-10-03 etchy: A PCB Diff You Can Trust pcbgerber
• 2026-07-01 kitium: An Altium-to-KiCad Validation Gate for CI altiumkicad
• 2026-07-01 KiCad Design Rules That Match Your Fab House kicadkicad-dru
• 2026-07-01 kibot-config: One Push, a Full Fabrication Datapack kicadkibot
• 2026-07-01 An Interactive HTML BOM for Altium Designer altiumbom
• 2026-07-01 Altium → DigiKey: BOM to Cart in One Command altiumdigikey
• 2026-05-10 A Tiny VS Code Extension for KiCad Custom Design Rules kicadvscode
• 2026-05-10 MadRP2040: From a 2-Key Test Board to a 4×4 Anything Keypad rp2040kicad
• 2025-12-04 Having Computer Problems pcdesktop
• 2025-11-30 Building My First Split Keyboard: The Corne (CRKBD) rp2040nice_nano
• 2025-11-30 Adding More Content projectsmeta
• 2025-11-27 Starting A Webpage the-beginningmoonwalk
• 2018-10-08 Dynamic Room Audio Correction (DRAC) — My Final-Year Capstone dspsharc
• 2017-10-15 Mic Phantom Power Supply audiophantom-power

Archive

• KiCad Custom Design Rules

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  The original hand-written JLCPCB and PCBWay design rules for KiCad 8. Superseded by kicad-druid.

• Dynamic Room Audio Correction (DRAC)

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  My 2018 final-year capstone — a real-time Kirkeby room-correction system on the ADSP-SC589 SHARC, with a Qt control app.

• Mic Phantom Power Supply

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  A standalone 48 V phantom power supply for condenser microphones. From the archives — 2017 vintage.