Rick Lesniak
Consultant at Embedded Designs LLC
Buffalo, New York, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolRick Lesniak is a seasoned consultant and embedded systems engineer with over 20 years designing and delivering complex software—from low-level device drivers and assembly projects to system engineering for multi-million-dollar systems like the FBI AFIS and USPS ARU. He blends deep C/C++ and C# expertise with a pragmatic object-oriented mindset applied even in non-OOP contexts, and has spent decades shipping contract software to spec, on time, and on budget. As an active contributor to prominent Adafruit Arduino libraries, he has a strong IoT and maker-community presence, improving cross-platform compatibility (Arduino Due, ESP8266) and fixing tricky hardware integration bugs. He runs his own embedded-software practices and consults for clients such as Adafruit and Emotiva, building everything from networked audio processors to on-screen displays and mobile remotes. Based in Buffalo, NY, he couples formal computer science training with hands-on firmware and systems work, and is comfortable moving between low-level firmware and high-level system architecture. A less obvious strength is his habit of applying rigorous design and reuse principles across decades of embedded projects, enabling long-lived, portable codebases.
14 years of coding experience
16 years of employment as a software developer
Calasanctius Preparatory SchoolMS, Computer Science, MS, Computer Science at University at Buffalo
Stackoverflow
1reputation
77reached
0answers
1question
Github Skills (28)
c-language10
hardware-interface10
abstraction-layer10
spi10
driver10
sys10
arduino-library10
embedded10
serial-communication10
cprogramming-language10
sensor10
arduino10
softwareserial10
microcontroller9
sms9
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
adafruit/Adafruit_GPS
Feb 2013 - Aug 2017
An interrupt-based GPS Arduino library for no-parsing-required use
Role in this project:
Embedded Systems Engineer / IoT Developer
Embedded Systems Engineer / IoT DeveloperContributions:1 release, 16 commits, 3 pushes in 4 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Rick primarily contributed to example sketches within the Adafruit GPS library. They added support for the Arduino Leonardo and Due platforms by modifying existing example files (e.g., parsing, echo, and SD logging) to work with different hardware serial ports. Additional work involved fixing checksum issues and adding interrupt support for the SD logging example, showcasing a focus on integrating the library with different Arduino boards. They also added hardware serial examples.
arduino-librarygpsparsing
adafruit/Adafruit_FONA
Feb 2015 - Aug 2017
Arduino library for the Adafruit FONA
Role in this project:Embedded Systems Engineer / IoT Developer
Embedded Systems Engineer / IoT DeveloperContributions:1 release, 10 commits, 9 pushes in 2 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Rick primarily contributed to the Adafruit FONA library by addressing bugs, enhancing compatibility, and adding example code. They fixed an issue in the `flushInput` function to ensure complete data flushing and made the library compatible with the Arduino Due by removing `SoftwareSerial` and adjusting PWM usage. The user also added a new example for SMS responses and fixed SMS storage issues for 3G modules.
adafruitarduino-library
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