Dan Halbert
Engineer at Adafruit Industries
Newton, Massachusetts, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDan Halbert is a veteran engineer with over four decades of software and systems experience, now focused on CircuitPython and embedded tooling at Adafruit. He blends deep research roots (PhD work at Xerox PARC and MIT education) with hands-on firmware, bootloader and full‑stack web work, having contributed to widely used projects like CircuitPython and UF2 bootloaders. Dan’s expertise spans embedded systems, speech and face recognition, information retrieval, databases, and developer tooling, and he repeatedly bridges low-level hardware timing with user-facing software. Known for improving build and release automation as well as device integration (e.g., Mu editor and Blinka), he quietly shapes the developer experience for microcontroller programmers. Based in Newton, MA, he brings a rare combination of research rigor and pragmatic engineering that surfaces in both production firmware fixes and documentation improvements.
10 years of coding experience
33 years of employment as a software developer
Ph.D., Computer Science, Ph.D., Computer Science at University of California, BerkeleyS.B., Computer Science, S.B., Computer Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
French
Stackoverflow
2,826reputation
234kreached
14answers
17questions
ctypes
top-5%
eclipse
top-5%
Github Skills (67)
website-development10
python10
firmware10
abstraction10
c1110
c1710
system10
automation10
device-driver10
micropython10
boot10
embedded10
bootloader10
editor10
u-boot10
Programming languages (16)
Github contributions (5)
adafruit/circuitpython
Aug 2019 - Aug 2022
CircuitPython - a Python implementation for teaching coding with microcontrollers
Role in this project:
Embedded Systems Engineer / IoT Developer
Embedded Systems Engineer / IoT DeveloperContributions:148 releases, 2550 reviews, 54 commits in 3 years
Contributions summary:Dan contributed to the development of the CircuitPython environment for the Adafruit Feather ESP32-S2 TFT by adding features to support a wide variety of hardware. Their work included adding support for more boards and handling diverse display specifications, as well as creating a system to accommodate different physical and low-level timing configurations for displays. The user implemented new functionalities, like automatic clock management, power control, and display driver support for a board specific to the project.
pythonpython-implementationteachingmicrocontrollerpython3
adafruit/uf2-samdx1
Sep 2019 - Sep 2022
MSC bootloader (based on UF2) for SAMD21
Role in this project:Embedded Systems Engineer / IoT Developer
Embedded Systems Engineer / IoT DeveloperContributions:26 releases, 35 reviews, 52 commits in 3 years
Contributions summary:Dan primarily worked on the `uf2-samdx1` repository, which is a bootloader for SAMD21 microcontrollers. Their contributions focused on improving code compilation, fixing potential write issues, and enhancing delay calibration within the bootloader code. They also updated build configurations and modified the code to avoid .ino file generation for SAMD51, indicating a focus on build process and platform-specific implementations. The user was responsible for updating the system initialization, and adjusting core clock frequencies as well.
samd21bootloaderuf2microchipmsc
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