Chris Nelson

Embedded Software Engineer · Rhombus

Rhombus makes cloud-managed security cameras and NVRs.

• Brought up the R600 camera and the N100 and N500 NVRs, from first boot to production firmware.
• Rewrote the firmware’s existing AI pipeline, improving its performance, modularity and reliability, and making it faster to develop on.
• Built RTSP-to-DASH live streaming in C++ on GStreamer: fragmented MP4 muxing, dynamic pad linking into dashsink, and PTS/DTS sync across the decode and storage branches.
• Moved internal tooling toward AI-friendly designs, including a CLI for our admin interface that now handles much of our troubleshooting and device management.
• Wrote a FUSE filesystem that serves journald logs at legacy file paths, so a logging migration could ship without changing anything downstream.
• Tracked down a CI race that occasionally dropped an Ethernet kernel module from OTA images. It only showed up on the hardware revisions that needed that driver.
• Found memory and concurrency bugs with ASan and TSan, including ODR violations and data races in OpenCV’s parallel code.

Embedded Software Engineer · Amazon Devices

Firmware for the Echo Frames smart glasses.

• A main contributor to the Echo Frames over-the-air update path, which gets new firmware onto glasses in the field.
• Wrote Bluetooth LE changes used by both Echo Frames and Echo Buds.
• Ran the recurring merges of vendor SDK and third-party code into large embedded codebases.

Lead Project Engineer · WECO

WECO builds optical sorters and inspection equipment for food and agriculture.

• Led a team spanning optics, mechanical, electrical and software on a high-resolution camera system for blueberry sorting. I owned the image-processing software, which moved about 3 GB/s through color and shape defect detection.
• Led an infrared foreign-material camera for tree nuts, owning the optics, mechanical design and microcontroller image processing.
• Designed an imager that grades walnut kernels, and a handheld moisture meter for walnuts, pecans, hops and seed drying.
• Added a Wi-Fi barcode scanner to the food-safety software product, then took over managing that software project.
• Took more than a dozen PCBs into production.

Electrical Engineer · WECO

• Redesigned an industrial automation product around a modern microcontroller. Installs went from 2–3 a year to 40+, and the design is still in production, nearly unchanged, more than ten years on.
• Analog and digital design in Eagle (schematic, layout, bring-up and debug), plus firmware and sensor interfaces for production sorters.
• Field-tested experimental hardware at customer sites in the US and abroad.

Systems and methods of computer vision-based tamper detection of camera systems

Sole inventor · assigned to Rhombus · granted August 2025

Pairs a brief infrared LED on/off image comparison with edge-detection tamper checks, so real tampering is caught and fast lighting changes are not mistaken for it.

BS Electrical Engineering

California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo

Deep Learning Specialization

Coursera