Engineering intelligence
where silicon meets the real world.
I'm trentenwen. I build at the boundary where machine learning meets real hardware — quantized models on microcontrollers, ML-driven robotics, and the tools that make them usable. Sometimes firmware. Sometimes Python. Always close to the metal.
Most of my work lives between PyTorch notebooks and bare-metal C — pushing models down to kilobytes and microseconds, then wiring them to motors, microphones, and sensors that have to survive in the real world.
I prefer small, sharp tools over big frameworks. A 200-line runtime will outlive a 2 MB dependency every time. Most of what I publish here is in that spirit: notes from the trenches of putting intelligence on devices that don't have much.
NowWorking on tinymlr v0.3 — adding quantization-aware training and INT4 kernels for ARM Cortex-M0+. Aiming to fit a useful keyword-spotting model in < 8 KB.
Writing
A series on real-time audio inference on STM32H7 — covering DMA pipelines, ring buffers, and why your model isn't the slow part.
ReadingTinyML by Pete Warden & Daniel Situnayake (again), Computer Organization and Design by Patterson & Henne (always), and anything Pete Cadigan posts.
A tiny, dependency-free ML runtime for ARM Cortex-M. Runs int8 and int4 models with zero allocations on devices as small as a $4 MCU.
rustccortex-mno-std
wavetable-ml
Neural audio synthesis firmware for STM32H7. A 70 KB GRU generates wavetables in real time at 48 kHz. No malloc, no FPU.
cpppythondspstm32
edge-trace
SWO-based profiler for embedded ML workloads. Captures per-layer latency, memory, and cache misses on bare-metal targets. Streams to a Python notebook.
cpythonprofiling
mqtt-bridge
A 12 KB MQTT-to-HTTP gateway for low-power sensor networks. Runs on an ESP32-C3 with TLS, runs for weeks on a coin cell.
cluamqttesp32
04Stack
Languages
Rust
C / C++
Python
TypeScript
Lua
ML / Data
PyTorch
ONNX
TFLite Micro
llama.cpp
numpy / scipy
Hardware
STM32 (H7, F4, G0)
ESP32 / ESP32-C3
RP2040
Arduino
Raspberry Pi
Silicon Tools
KiCad
LTspice
Sigrok / PulseView
PlatformIO
probe-rs
Daily
neovim
tmux
uv
git / jj
Linux
Currently learning
Verilog
ESP-IDF (deeply)
JAX
Zephyr RTOS
05Contact
Have a hard problem where software and hardware need to meet?
I take on a few projects each year. Reach out with the rough shape of the problem, and I'll let you know if I'm the right person.
trentenwen
