Note : pour les francophones déçus de ne rien trouver de lisible sur mes pages, j'ai placé de petits drapeaux () là où ils sont susceptibles de trouver quelque chose à se mettre sous la dent...

Short bio

I was born in 1972 in Locarno (Tessin/Switzerland) and grew up in the Cantons of Tessin, Bern and Vaud. Thanks to that, I speak fluently in Swiss German dialect and understand Italian well enough to get along in a pizzeria. My mother tongue is French, as my name suggests...

I worked at the former LAMI / Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne/Switzerland from 1995 to 1998, after gradutating in micro-engineering (Ingénieur diplômé EPFL en microtechnique). I obtained a Ph.D. in computer science in May 1999 - my research topic focused on collective robotics, working with teams of autonomous miniature mobile robots. By the way, I have published a book () on the topic : Des moutons et des robots (click here to order at Amazon France).

I spend most of my time working for EPSITEC SA as a senior software developer (after having designed the last real Smaky computer). I also work as an independent contractor under the OPaC bright ideas label (as a Microsoft Certified Partner, ISV Solutions). I love developing software (drivers, real-time kernels, GUIs and applications to name a few domains I tackle) and digital hardware.

Current software projects

• Crésus Réseau, a new version of EPSITEC's Crésus software line (in development since June 2003).
• A spin-off of Crésus Réseau is Creative Docs .NET, a rich vector-based graphic design application. I am mainly involved with the lower level details of the application, whereas my colleague Daniel Roux is working on the application logic itself.

Past  hardware projects

• A Motorola 68060-based computer, based on a PCI bus, enhanced DRAM and an MC68360 communication processor. This was my diploma work and it earned me the AT&T Award back in 1995.
• A Motorola 68040-based PCI daughter board, the Smaky 400, developed to fit into a Windows NT machine's PCI slot in order to run Smaky software natively (EPSITEC/1996-1997).
• An in-system PCI analyser board, used to measure real PCI performance and acquire up to 128K samples from the bus; sampling can be triggered through a predefined bus condition (OPaC/1996).
• A sound acquisition system for the miniature mobile robot Khepera based on the DSP56302. This was used for my Ph.D. work (LAMI/1998).
• A USB interface for the Kameleon board (K-Team/1999).
• A very simple USB-based Flash programmer for the Kameleon board (K-Team/2000).
• A new miniature mobile robot controller (a cousin of the Khepera robot) based on a low voltage MC68332, combo-Flash/SRAM memory, USB interface and simple IR sensors (K-Team/2000).
• An advanced microcontroller system based on the MC68336 used for real-time data acquisition and control (OPaC/2000-2001).
• A home automation system based on Ethernet, TINI and an 8-bit AVR for the low-level TRIAC driving.

Past  software projects

• OPaC class library. This was a very ambitious project which has roots going back to 1991. It has been shut down in 2002, with the advent of Microsoft .NET.
• Smaky 400 system software (Win32 application), including a Windows NT kernel driver used to talk to the Smaky 400 hardware and a filter driver used to remap special keys (for NT 4 and for W2k with PnP support).
• Smaky Infini (), a Smaky emulator based on Bernd Schmidt great UAE engine.
• Ghostscript mswinpr2 device maintainance; this is the output device used by GS to render to the Windows printers.
• Windows Display Ghostscript (wdgs) engine, used as an asynchronous PostScript rendering engine for graphical applications (it is one of the foundations of the VP project, see below).
• WDM drivers for USB devices (used with K-Team's Kameleon board).
• Supervisor software for mobile robots involved in a theater performance (have a look at Kleine Kinder, Lust und Last).
• Virtual Pen, or whatever VP stands for... A next generation desktop publishing, drawing and word processing tool. More info on its evolution can be found here. This project was frozen in 2003. Its successor is available as Creative Docs .NET.

Other interests, links, friends...

• I have collected a few pictures and slides shot in Yverdon, a small town of about 25,000 inhabitants.
• Don't miss Prof. Jean-Daniel Nicoud's home page (former director of the LAMI), to whom I owe much. He is very well known in the academic milieu for his scientific work, engagement and wealth of ideas, and he is also an excellent modelist... Have a look at his robot collection (amongst them a 1x1x1 cm miniature robot). He is now promoting his ideas through Didel.
• Amongst my friend's home pages, I recommend Erik's and Jean-Marc's (hey, I know, Jean-Marc's has a strange design...)
• EPSITEC SA line of Crésus products may also be of interest ( Crésus - Logiciel de comptabilité suisse, Crésus - Logiciel de facturation, Crésus - Logiciel de salaires, Crésus PE - Logiciel de gestion pour petites entreprises).
• Last but not least, I want to mention the AntiGrain Geometry software library, also known as AGG, developed by Maxim Shemanarev. This is a great replacement for GDI+. It produces very high quality anti-aliased graphic output with a quite good performance.
  

My wife Sylvie is also contributing to the web by putting some of her teaching on-line ().