Ryan Johnston
CEO at Dronecode Foundation
Austin, Texas, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolRyan Johnston is a CEO and founder with eight years of hands-on experience scaling aerospace and natural resources ventures from startup to commercial production. Based in Austin, he led Applied Aeronautics through product introduction, overseas manufacturing expansion, and distribution while championing quality-driven, cost-effective UAV design. He pairs financial and analytics expertise from a King's College London business and finance background with practical engineering chops, contributing firmware and hardware integration fixes to the widely used PX4 Autopilot project. His background spans executive roles in mining and energy M&A as well as operational leadership at Hancock Prospecting, giving him uncommon cross-industry deal and operational fluency. A current board member of Dronecode Foundation, he combines open-source collaboration with entrepreneurial execution to bridge R&D and market-ready aerospace systems. Known for solving board-level strategy and low-level hardware-software issues alike, he thrives where finance, manufacturing, and embedded systems intersect.
8 years of coding experience
5 years of employment as a software developer
Institut Le RoseyBachelor of Science (B.Sc.) Business Management and Finance, Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.) Business Management and Finance at King's College London
Github Skills (16)
i2c10
gpio10
iot10
embedded10
azure-boards10
blackboard10
px410
whiteboard10
stm10
autopilot10
sys10
nuttx9
can-bus9
drones8
mavlink8
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
PX4/PX4-Autopilot
Jan 2021 - Apr 2022
PX4 Autopilot Software
Role in this project:
Embedded Systems Engineer / IoT Developer
Embedded Systems Engineer / IoT DeveloperContributions:9 reviews, 20 commits, 28 PRs in 1 year 2 months
Contributions summary:Ryan primarily contributed to the MRO Control Zero F7 and H7 autopilot boards within the PX4 Autopilot project. Their work involved modifying board-specific configurations, including I2C and CAN bus mappings, GPIO definitions, and clock configurations. They addressed hardware-related issues, fixed RSSI functionality, and updated configurations to support OEM board variants. These changes focused on integrating and improving the firmware's compatibility with various hardware components.
multicopteravoidancedroneuasraspberry-pi
ryanjAA/PX4-Autopilot
Jan 2021 - Apr 2025
Contributions:5 PRs, 91 pushes, 40 branches in 4 years 3 months
autopilotpx4raspberry-pipx4-autopilot
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