Kevin Bretney
Robotics Electrical Engineer at Meta
Seattle, Washington, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolKevin Bretney is a robotics electrical engineer with 11 years of cross-domain hardware leadership, currently developing electrical systems for Meta Robotics Studio in Seattle. He has led hardware architecture and platform development for consumer wearables at Fitbit (including the Ionic smartwatch) and managed multi-site engineering teams and supplier strategy. As VP and CTO-level engineer at startups and scale-ups, he has driven end-to-end product delivery from PCB and firmware to system integration and battery/BMS and motor control systems. His open-source embedded work includes meaningful contributions to the PX4 bootloader for STM32 microcontrollers, adding USB bootloader support and refactoring USB CDC initialization. Known for blending hands-on circuit and firmware design with strategic product and process development, he thrives on turning ambitious robotics concepts into reliable, manufacturable systems. Based in Seattle, he brings rare breadth across battery systems, motor controllers, CAN networks, and embedded bootloader internals.
11 years of coding experience
18 years of employment as a software developer
BS Electrical and Computer Engineering, BS Electrical and Computer Engineering at Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering
Github Skills (9)
c1710
bootloader10
embedded10
usb10
stm10
c1110
sys10
libopencm39
px48
Programming languages (2)
Github contributions (5)
PX4/PX4-Bootloader
Sep 2014 - Feb 2015
PX4 Bootloader for PX4FMU, PX4IO and PX4FLOW
Role in this project:
Embedded Systems Engineer / IoT Developer
Embedded Systems Engineer / IoT DeveloperContributions:16 commits, 2 PRs in 4 months
Contributions summary:Kevin primarily worked on the PX4 bootloader, specifically for STM32F1 series microcontrollers. Their contributions involved adding support for a USB bootloader on a specific board (mavstation), including related code modifications. The user also addressed flash memory sizes and configurations, and fixed force bootload pin settings. Furthermore, the user refactored USB CDC initialization code.
bootloaderpx4
kbrtny/PX4Firmware
Jan 2015 - Feb 2015
Contributions:28 pushes, 2 branches in 1 month
firmwarefailsafeautopilotpx4servo
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