Michael Brennan

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Welcome to my website!

I'm a 4th year at Northeastern University studying computer engineering. Recently, I finished up being the Lead Electrical & Embedded Engineer for Matcha Flow, a Generate Hardware project. Since July, I've been an electrical engineering co-op at WHOOP.

My main interest is in the full-stack of embedded systems design, from hardware and PCB design to application software.

Blog Posts

Experience

WHOOP

Electrical Engineering Intern, July 2026 - Dec 2026

I'll be on co-op for 6 months at WHOOP on their electrical engineering team. Projects and results coming soon!

Website

Robotics & AI Institute

Electrical Engineering Intern, July 2025 - Dec 2025

I co-oped for 6 months at Robotics & AI Institute on their electrical engineering team. I worked on a wide range of projects, spanning electrical and firmware domains, to support the cutting-edge robotics hardware used at the institute.

Ultra Wideband: My primary project was building a general-purpose wireless sensing solution for future robotics projects, which I led end-to-end. After evaluating several wireless protocols against the team's needs, we settled on Ultra Wideband (UWB). In Altium Designer, I designed a development board around an STM32 microcontroller and Qorvo DW3110 UWB transceiver, then wrote a firmware suite in Rust and RTIC to characterize UWB's latency, throughput, and reliability, along with a Python desktop app to automate large batches of tests. Finally, I validated the solution across a range of configurations and environments, and documented the results for future use.

Interposers: I developed multiple flex PCB interposers to transmit Single-Pair Ethernet and high-voltage power throughout a key robotics platform. This project proved an excellent opportunity for learning more about mechanical co-design and integration, high-voltage and flexible PCB design, and designing boards to work in EMI-heavy environments.

Motor drivers: I designed a 150V, 200A, 3-phase brush-less motor driver for high-performance robotics actuation. Part of a family of in-house motor drivers, a unique feature to this one was the addition of an EMI filter on its phase output stages. For this filter, I conducted extensive simulation work in LTSpice, and designed a test board to verify my work in the lab, using an oscilloscope, high-voltage power supply, and other tools.

Technologies & Skills: Altium Designer, STM32, Rust, RTIC, Python, LTSpice, Git, Ultra Wideband, Single-Pair Ethernet, Flex PCB Design, EMI Filtering, High-Voltage Design, PCB Design, Robotics Hardware

Website

Matcha Flow

Lead Electrical & Embedded Engineer, Jan 2026 -

This semester, I'm the lead electrical engineer for Matcha Flow: A household device that makes high quality matcha tea at the press of a button. As a lead, I'm responsible for mentoring 6 hardware engineers through weekly action items, PCB and firmware reviews, and establishing technical requirements and deliverables. I'm also architecting the electrical and firmware systems of the device: we're building an STM32-based PCB using Altium Designer for robust electrical integration, and firmware with Zephyr and C for system operation.

Technologies & Skills: Altium Designer, STM32, Zephyr RTOS, C, PCB Design, Firmware Development, Electrical System Architecture, Technical Leadership

GreenTower

Electrical & Embedded Engineer, Jul 2025 - Dec 2025

GreenTower is an automated hydroponics solution that aims to enable easily growing plants in your own home. I owned the design and development of this project's firmware, building a solution with ESP-IDF and C. I wrote drivers for multiple external sensors, an ADC, and brushed motor drivers, constructed a finite-state machine to automate nutrient mixing and water pumping for the plants, and used LVGL for an intuitive user interface. I also specced and did the PCB design for our microcontroller, using an ESP32 and CP2102N USB-to-UART bridge.

Technologies & Skills: ESP-IDF, C, ESP32, LVGL, CP2102N, PCB Design, Firmware Development, Embedded C, Sensor Drivers, Motor Control, Finite-State Machines, UI Development

Repository

Arcade

Electrical & Embedded Engineer, Jan 2025 - Jun 2025

Arcade is a portable, easy-to-assemble arcade cabinet to help game design students professionally showcase their work. My main responsibility was designing the lighting subsystem for this project, to give the machine a fun retro flair. I did extensive brainstorming and testing for multiple LED strips, ultimately settling on WS2812B LEDs. Using Altium Designer, I designed the logic interfacing and 20A+ power distribution for multiple LED strips. Lastly, I wrote firmware that synced the LED colors to the cabinet's computer screen, using Rust and USB serial communication, for an immersive visual effect.

Technologies: Altium Designer, WS2812B LEDs, Rust, USB Communication, PCB Design, Firmware Development, Power Distribution

Repository

3 Stones

Lead Software Engineer, Jul 2024 - Dec 2024

3 Stones is an app for accessible real estate investing, allowing individuals to invest directly in development projects with minimal capital. I was one of the tech leads for this project - I led a team of 6 engineers, ensuring effective communication and coordination with leadership and design teams. In addition, I architected our backend and database schema, and developed our project details and project investment screens.

Technologies: Go, Supabase, PostgreSQL, Plaid, TypeScript, React Native

Repository

CherryVale

Personal Project, May 2026 -

CherryVale is a RISC-V system-on-chip I'm building from scratch in Chisel HDL to teach myself FPGA development, digital design, and RTL/SoC design. At its heart is a 5-stage pipelined RISC-V core (fetch, decode, read operands, execute/memory, writeback) with full RV32I support, connected to memory and peripherals over a custom Wishbone-inspired bus protocol. I target a Digilent Basys3 dev-board, and built a UART debug master, along with a host-side serial driver, for communicating with the SoC at runtime. To validate the design, I'm developing a testing and formal-verification harness in ChiselSim and Yosys. Ongoing work includes CSR and M-mode support, caches, multiply/divide units, a C/newlib toolchain, and Basys3 peripherals like VGA and SPI.

Technologies & Skills: Chisel, Scala, RISC-V, SystemVerilog, Vivado, Yosys, Basys3 FPGA, Wishbone, UART, Digital Design, RTL Design, SoC Design, Formal Verification

Repository

Rita

Personal Project, Jul 2024 - Aug 2024

Rita is an audio graph editor built using Rust, Tauri, and CPAL. I implemented nodes for audio I/O, processing, and synthesis; and a sound compiler and playback system for performant and smooth audio playback.

Technologies: Rust, Tauri, CPAL

Oceanman

Personal Project, Jun 2023 - Aug 2023

Oceanman is a 3D renderer I built from scratch to learn graphics programming. Using WebGPU and Rust, I implemented physically-based rendering, image-based lighting, a glTF scene loader, HDR texture support, and post-processing effects (tonemapping and FXAA).

Technologies: Rust, WebGPU