Baseline Sensing

I make sensor hardware produce data you can trust, then write down what it proved.

Ethan Ross. Sensor and test engineering out of Ottawa, for teams building things that measure the physical world.

Vertical section drawing of the Skryer acoustic node: foam parasol windscreen over a ported microphone lid, a clear body holding a lift-out electronics tray, and a wide ballasted base on four feet — The node in section. A foam parasol doing four jobs at once, the microphone lid beneath it, the electronics on a lift-out tray, and the battery low in a ballasted base to keep the centre of gravity down. Dimensions are provisional. Open it full size.

Product concept render of the Skryer acoustic node: a domed grey foam windscreen on a printed strut cage, above a clear cylindrical body showing a green circuit board, on a dark ballasted base with four rubber feet — The same design rendered. This is a concept image, not a photograph: the enclosure is drawn and not yet built.

Skryer operator console showing three tracked drone contacts over a satellite map, with bearing, range and confidence for each — What it feeds. On real hardware the bearings come in at about 3.4 degrees mean error, across the test positions that were well conditioned. The multi-node fusion shown here, and the camera cue, are demonstrated in simulation and not yet flown.

Skryer, a drone-detection system I designed and built.

What I do

Validation campaignsYou have a product and you need evidence it works. I write the test plan against your specification, set up the instrumentation, run the campaign, and hand you a report someone outside your team can act on.

Sensor bring-upGetting a sensor onto a platform and making it produce data that holds up. Radar, lidar, thermal, hyperspectral, RTK GPS, IMU, cameras.

Technical writingGrant reporting, test reports, and explaining hard engineering to people who were not in the room. Engineers who write are rarer than they should be.

Test engineering, part timeFor hardware teams that need test discipline and cannot yet justify a full-time hire.

Clearance

Government of Canada Enhanced Reliability and Secret (Level 2), held independently of any employer and transferable to a new sponsor. Canadian citizen, eligible for NATO Secret and Controlled Goods.

Selected work

Transport Canada connected-vehicle safety program. Ran on-track testing across eighteen scenarios and four V2X safety applications, then wrote and assembled the reporting. The proposals behind two competitively awarded rounds of that funding were mine.
Edge-computer detection tuning. Took a partner's on-vehicle detection confidence from 50-60% to 80-90%, the figure they were marketing.
QNX Sensor Framework driver. Wrote an external sensor driver in C++ on real hardware, and found three defects in the framework doing it.

The bench rig. A Teensy emulates the sensor over I²C so the driver can be exercised against known values.

The same driver feeding a live in-vehicle display, running on QNX.
Air-quality signals in the COVESA Vehicle Signal Specification. Proposed and merged into the standard, August 2026.
Automated pre-run and post-run gates for autonomous test campaigns, which stopped bad runs while the crew was still on track rather than in analysis days later.

Projects

SkryerAcoustic drone detection. A microphone array gives a bearing, and on real hardware that runs at about 3.4 degrees mean error. Fusing several nodes into a track, and cueing a camera onto it, are demonstrated in simulation. Live demo of the operator console.

Arctic coverageSatellite coverage planning for sensor nodes deployed in the high Arctic. A MapLibre globe over a Python back end, answering when a node on the ice can actually reach a satellite. Live demo.

QNX air-quality sensorThe sensor driver above, as source. C++ against the QNX Sensor Framework, cross-compiled and running on a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4.

Contact

ethan.rossautonomous@gmail.com

Based in Ottawa. Remote by default, on site when the work needs hands.