Jacob Dahl
Director Of Software Engineering at ARK Electronics
Salt Lake City Metropolitan Area United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJacob Dahl is an embedded software engineer with eight years of experience building and maintaining flight-control and sensor integration software for drones and robotics. A long-term open-source maintainer on the widely used PX4 Autopilot project, he specializes in low-level drivers, sensor fusion plumbing, and hardware bring-up across STM32 and Jetson platforms. His work spans both firmware and user-facing tools—contributing hardware drivers and battery/IMU support in PX4 and Betaflight, while improving UX and pre-flight logic in QGroundControl. Based in Salt Lake City, he combines contractor agility with in-house engineering at ARK Electronics and a background in electrical design and PCB bring-up, enabling end-to-end debugging from schematics to system-level flight testing. Notably, he often bridges the boundary between embedded C/C++ device drivers and higher-level UAV ground station features, making him effective at resolving issues that cross software/hardware domains.
8 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor's degree, Electrical Engineering, Bachelor's degree, Electrical Engineering at University of Alaska Anchorage
Github Skills (28)
c-language10
px410
autopilot10
qt10
controller10
hardware-interface10
firmware10
drones10
user-interface10
spi10
ui-design10
c1110
c1710
i2c10
driver10
Programming languages (18)
Github contributions (5)
PX4/PX4-Autopilot
May 2018 - May 2022
PX4 Autopilot Software
Role in this project:
Embedded Systems Engineer / IoT Developer
Embedded Systems Engineer / IoT DeveloperContributions:564 reviews, 88 commits, 473 PRs in 4 years
Contributions summary:Jacob primarily focused on driver development and low-level hardware interactions within the PX4 Autopilot codebase. Their contributions included modifying and refactoring existing magnetometer drivers, specifically the LIS3MDL driver, and adding support for a new distance sensor, the TI PGA460. They also made changes related to battery monitoring, including modifications to the SMBus driver for the BQ40Z50. These updates demonstrate a focus on sensor integration and hardware-level modifications within an embedded systems context.
px4pixhawkuavuasdronecode
mavlink/qgroundcontrol
Feb 2020 - Sep 2022
Cross-platform ground control station for drones (Android, iOS, Mac OS, Linux, Windows)
Role in this project:Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:29 reviews, 32 commits, 68 PRs in 2 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Jacob primarily focused on enhancing the user interface and functionality of the QGroundControl application, a cross-platform ground control station for drones. Their contributions included adding features like customizable colors for checklist headers based on status, enforcing checklist order, and fixing display logic. They also addressed issues related to pre-flight checks and the display of battery percentages, improving the overall user experience and accuracy of the application's pre-flight procedures.
androidioslinuxmacoswindows
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