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Matej Gomboc
embedded engineer · physicist · amateur science fiction writer
Base Maribor, Slovenia 46.55° N · 15.65° E
01 Personnel file
About me
- Name
- Matej Gomboc
- Based in
- Maribor, Slovenia
- Day job
- Embedded systems for safety-critical aerospace, at SkyLabs
- Trained at
- BSc Physics (University of Ljubljana), MSc Electrical Engineering (University of Maribor)
- Writes in
- C++ · C · Rust · Verilog · Python
- Speaks
- Slovenian · English · German · conversational Swedish and Croatian
- Also
- Science fiction writing · sci-fi-ish projects together with AI · obsessing over rock music
I build things that sit close to the hardware: a soft-core processor and its peripherals in Verilog, firmware in C, the PC-side tools that talk to them, and the circuit boards they run on. Since 2017 I have been at SkyLabs, where I help design PicoSky, an 8/16-bit radiation-hardened soft-core microprocessor that flies on nanosatellites, and do black-box firmware testing in C++17 and Qt 6.
My first space project was as a student on TRISAT, the University of Maribor's nanosatellite mission. Before SkyLabs I designed circuit boards and open hardware at IRNAS, including work on the KORUZA free-space optical link.
Beyond the day job, I am drawn to the places where embedded systems meet AI, to AI-augmented development, and to graphics programming in Vulkan. I am curious at heart, which makes me an amateur astronomer, a radio amateur, and someone who keeps writing simulations of galaxies and pendulums just to watch them move.
02 Subsystems
Organisations I run
AiQuokkaWannabe
Picture the Tron Grid fully lit: one persistent world of glass and neon on infinite black, where AI creatures live out their lives and human Users enter with avatars to meet them. Something MMORPG-like, on a multi-year arc. What already runs: a Vulkan ray tracer that needs no ray-tracing hardware, the Master Control world server in Rust, and the first inhabitant, a remote-controlled mecha-worm.
Embedded Society
Tools for embedded engineers: an MCP server that lets an AI assistant manage Altium component libraries, header-only C++20 libraries for the ARM Cortex-M0 to M4 cores and their intrinsics, and CMake toolchains.
Setonix OS
An original capability-based microkernel, written from scratch in Rust: mechanism, never policy. Setonix is the quokka’s genus, so it greets you with “Kaya!”
03 Selected projects
Projects
- MCP altium-designer-mcp An MCP server that lets AI assistants manage Altium Designer component libraries.
- GFX tron-grid-lite A deliberately simple Vulkan ray tracer for AI creature agents: neon on infinite black, no ray-tracing hardware required.
- FPGA Verilog-I2S-Transciever An I2S transceiver in Verilog HDL.
- RF ELF-Schumann-Resonance-Receiver A receiver for the Schumann resonances, the Earth’s own 7.83 Hz heartbeat.
- HW usb2can A USB-to-CAN converter dongle.
- HW motor-driver A brushed DC motor driver with a CAN interface.
- HW Small-Impedance-Meter An instrument that measures both the magnitude and the phase of small impedances.
- MCP git-proxy-mcp A Rust MCP server that lets cloud AI assistants work with private Git repositories, without your credentials ever leaving your machine.
- SW claude-chats-browser A Qt desktop app for browsing claude.ai chat exports.
- SIM StringWiggler A cross-platform simulator of a wiggling string.
- SIM Galaxy-Simulator An N-body simulation of a galaxy in OpenCL.
- SIM NBody An N-body simulation in Qt C++, with OpenCL doing the physics and OpenGL drawing it.
- SIM Evolution-Simulation An evolution simulator in C++ whose organisms are programs written in a small virtual instruction set.
- SW OpenCL-source-to-C-string-converter A tool that embeds OpenCL kernels in C and C++ source code.
04 Off duty
Beyond the day job
Science fiction
I write science fiction as an amateur author.
Projects with AI
Sci-fi-ish, long-arc projects built together with AI: AI creatures, operating systems, a ray-traced world.
Rock music
Obsessing over it, loudly.
Amateur astronomy
Clear nights, cold hands, distant photons.
Amateur radio
Antennas, receivers and the odd signal from very far away.
Languages
Learning them for the fun of it; more of them are coming to this page soon.
05 Mission log
Experience
- 2017 – present
- 2015 – 2017
- 2015
Electronics developer, internship
Avionics for gliders: an improved digital filter for variometers, on STM32 in C++.
- 2014
- 2013
Electronics developer, internship
A C# test program for the embedded system inside DVB-T television transmitters, talking to it over UART.
- 2012 – 2015
MSc Electrical Engineering, Electronics
Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Contributed to the TRISAT space mission.
- 2008 – 2012
06 Comms