Anthony Merlino
Chief Executive Officer at Verge Aero
Durham, North Carolina, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolAnthony Merlino is a seasoned embedded systems engineer and technology executive with a decade of hands-on experience building IoT and real-time embedded software. As Founder/CEO of Verge Aero after a decade as CTO, he blends product leadership with deep low-level expertise in RTOS platforms like NuttX and RIOT. His open-source contributions include refactoring IEEE 802.15.4 character drivers and adding radio device APIs, SD card logging, and race-condition fixes in widely used projects such as Apache NuttX and PX4/NuttX. Based in Durham, NC, he pairs an Electrical and Computer Engineering background with practical hardware knowledge—Arduino board bring-up, pin mappings, and toolchain integration—to ship reliable avionics and IoT systems. Colleagues rely on him to translate complex hardware constraints into maintainable software architecture while keeping a pragmatic focus on deployable, safety-conscious products.
10 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (B.S.), Electrical and Computer Engineering, Bachelor of Science (B.S.), Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rowan University
Github Skills (23)
nuttx10
spi10
c1110
microcontroller10
ieee10
i2c10
c1710
system10
avr10
iot10
rtos10
device-driver10
driver10
sys10
rt10
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
PX4/NuttX
Mar 2017 - Mar 2022
Standard NuttX (http://nuttx.org) with current PX4 WIP patches
Role in this project:
Embedded Systems Engineer / IoT Developer
Embedded Systems Engineer / IoT DeveloperContributions:332 commits in 5 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Anthony refactored the IEEE 802.15.4 character driver to radio802154dev, modifying related files such as the fs/ioctl.h. They added and configured various aspects related to the XBee radio module, including support for uSD click boards, automount support and also added file syslog support for logging to a file on an SD card. They also addressed an issue with a race condition in the event wait logic of the SDMMC driver.
wiplinuxrtosmicrocontrollerpatches
apache/nuttx
Dec 2019 - Mar 2024
Apache NuttX is a mature, real-time embedded operating system (RTOS)
Role in this project:Embedded Systems Engineer / IoT Developer
Embedded Systems Engineer / IoT DeveloperContributions:64 reviews, 38 PRs, 7 pushes in 4 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Anthony refactored and implemented several character drivers, specifically focusing on the IEEE802.15.4 standard for the Apache NuttX real-time operating system. Their contributions involved refactoring existing character drivers to conform to a radio device API, and the addition of IOCTL support. Their work indicates a deep familiarity with the intricacies of the IEEE 802.15.4 stack and hardware abstraction layer of the operating system.
operating-systemapachemicrocontrollerrtosoperating
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