Pascal Fina

Description

I like designing complete systems end to end: from PCB layout and hardware bring-up to firmware, tooling, and the final interface around it. Most of my work sits close to the hardware, whether that means FPGA design, low-level MCU programming, analog debugging and measurements, or building the software needed to test and use the system properly. I studied Information & Computer Engineering at TU Graz, worked at Infineon on ToF sensing systems and the software around them, spent an exchange semester at Seoul National University, and I'm currently doing an MSc in Electrical Engineering & Information Technology at ETH Zurich.

Current project

Right now I'm building a custom FPGA camera PCB as a networked vision sensor. An OV5640 camera feeds an 8-bit DVP stream into a GW1NR-9 FPGA, where the image is preprocessed in real time with grayscale extraction, frame differencing, motion detection, blob detection, bounding boxes, and crop generation before being handed off over SPI to an ESP32-S3. The goal is to turn it into a real hardware vision accelerator that sends motion metadata and compact image crops instead of a full video stream, so lightweight face detection or classification can run on the ESP32 and forward results to the server over MQTT or HTTP.

Additional resources

This site also gives an overview of the applications and services currently running on my home server.