I tried different angles to approach this log, and writing about us from a third person's point of view simply wouldn't work. It was too detached for my taste and it felt hypocritical writing things about myself as another's POV. Instead I chose the 1st person narrative to talk about our team, "I" meaning "Vincent" in this case. It feels more genuine, and I get to really "tell" our story this way.

FunKey's project is currently composed of three people which, by order or arrival in the team, are: Vincent (myself) Michel and David. Since we are a small team, the best way to present all of us is simply through FunKey's story, so here it goes:



Vincent

As some of you may know Funkey started out as a project submitted during the 2017 Hackaday Prize called Keymu. Before explaining why I undertook such a project, let me quickly go over some of my background.

Originally, I studied telecommunications during my master's in France. Telecommunications is a vast topic that encompasses many areas such as informatics, electronics, networking, signal processing... I specialized in the latter, and during my last year abroad, I quickly drifted towards computer vision, a topic that never ceases to amaze me. After the master's, I actually continued in this branch during my PhD.

So, yeah, I was a research scholar, in Computer Vision and Machine Learning at the time, pretty far from electronics...

Something always felt missing though, all this high-level knowledge felt shallow without the low-level one. Computer vision is often used on embedded products, allowing them to "see" the world and understand it for us, faster than us. I simply felt the need to know how to build the machines for which we developed these algorithms, in order to understand the whole chain. After my PhD then, I started working as an embedded engineer for a company in France. This is where I met Michel and David for the first time.

When, a few months later, Hackaday published an article about SpriteTM's tiny console, it was love at first sight. I wanted very badly to build one, not just to own it but because it called to my inner retro-gamer instincts and it was a great way to learn about electronics and embedded software. At the time SpriteTM did not release yet any of the code or designs, hence Keymu was born.

I quickly realized, I undertook something way bigger than expected for a first "side project". It was completely different than SpriteTM's design: it was based on a computer module, I needed to develop a custom linux distribution (very different code than for microprocessors, especially the drivers), the mechanical hinge was harder than expected...This is when Michel entered into play.

Michel

It is safe to say that Keymu might have never hatched without him. Apart from helping me with the electronical design, every roadblock I met seemed only small bumps before his incredible experience. He followed the design and all the new ideas from the start, started himself installing the environment for developing the Linux distribution with Yocto, proposed solutions to many encountered problems... All in all, he was already part of the team from the start, he apeared only "officially" in the team during our next project: FunKey Zero but it is simply formalities.

For the purpose of this log, I have asked my partners to present themselves through small bios. Since I started this first narrative point of view, it feels only logical to keep it throughout the log, that is why I prefer to restranscribe their bios as they've been provided.

Here is Michel's:

I started my engineering experience at age 2 (back in 1968) by inserting...