Tim Canham
Principal Software Engineer at Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Santa Clarita, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolTim Canham is a Principal Software Engineer with over three decades of hands-on experience building real-time embedded and avionics software for high-profile NASA missions. Based at JPL, he architected the F Prime flight software framework used on platforms like the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter and has contributed to missions including Curiosity, Cassini, and sample return efforts. He blends deep low-level hardware experience—device drivers, GPIO/SPI work on Linux and Raspberry Pi—with rigorous testing and simulation practices, evidenced by sustained contributions to the nasa/fprime open-source project. Tim is equally comfortable designing communications hardware for the Deep Space Network and leading flight software architecture, making him a rare engineer who spans electrical design through production flight code. Known for practical problem-solving under mission constraints, he brings steady leadership and a focus on reliable, testable embedded systems.
10 years of coding experience
1 year of employment as a software developer
BSEE Electrical/Computer Engineering, BSEE Electrical/Computer Engineering at Clarkson University
Github Skills (9)
gpio10
embedded10
c-language10
raspberry-pi10
cprogramming-language10
sys10
testing10
spi9
oft9
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
nasa/fprime
Jun 2017 - Nov 2022
F´ - A flight software and embedded systems framework
Role in this project:
Embedded Systems Engineer / IoT Developer
Embedded Systems Engineer / IoT DeveloperContributions:193 reviews, 326 commits, 70 PRs in 5 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Tim's contributions primarily involve modifying and adding test files for the flight software framework. They implemented and modified components related to telemetry storage and data product generation, demonstrating experience with embedded systems. They added new test cases and worked with device drivers, including Linux-based GPIO and SPI drivers for Raspberry Pi, indicating a focus on hardware interaction and testing.
flightfprimeraspberry-picppreal-time
timcanham/fprime
Mar 2018 - Feb 2025
Contributions:10 reviews, 12 PRs, 352 pushes in 7 years 1 month
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