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*"I act as the bridge between TG0's London HQ and our manufacturers and clients in Mainland China and Hong Kong."*
From battling -40°C weather in Canada, to engineering a system to measure energy usage for athletes, TG0's electrical engineer discusses his education, love of gaming and how he navigates the complex world of design for manufacture.
**Where are you originally from?**
I'm originally from Jiangmen in China, a small city in the Pearl River Delta with a great environment and a much slower pace of life. My time at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou really built my engineering foundation, but that semester at the University of Saskatchewan was the real culture shock. It was crucial, though — it helped me understand Western culture, which has been invaluable for my current role at TG0. My strongest memory of Saskatoon is the cold. I distinctly remember walking to my final exam in -40°C weather. Definitely not my favourite memory, but it builds character.
**You've got a mix of experience in analogue chip design and embedded software. Does knowing the hardware details make writing firmware easier?**
They are definitely connected. Analogue design was a huge focus during my time in Canada, and it helps immensely now. Embedded code isn't like high-level software development — it's much "lower" and lives right next to the hardware. Because I understand the circuit design, how the voltage moves and how components actually behave, I can write better, more efficient code. It's especially helpful during debugging. When something goes wrong, I don't just look for a syntax error — I know when to check if the hardware is acting up.
**What is usually the trickiest part of getting software to play nice with hardware in robotics work?**
While memory and power are always concerns, the real headache is usually timing and communication reliability. When you have multiple sensors trying to talk over I2C or SPI at the same time, managing those interrupts without crashing the system is an art form. The hardware doesn't always behave exactly like the datasheet says it will. The trickiest part is writing driver code that is robust enough to handle those "real world" glitches without freezing the whole robot.
**What was the biggest challenge with wireless systems for cleaning robots?**
The biggest headache is connectivity stability. Cleaning robots have a habit of wandering into the furthest corner of a house or under a sofa where the Wi-Fi signal is terrible. For OTA updates, the nightmare scenario is a device losing connection halfway through an update and "bricking" itself. So we had to design very defensive systems to ensure that if a download failed, the robot could recover gracefully rather than becoming a very expensive doorstop.
**You built a system to measure energy usage for athletes using muscle sensors. How hard was it to get clean data from sensors while people were actually moving?**
It is incredibly difficult. The human body is basically a giant bag of electrical noise. When an athlete is moving, the sensors shift slightly against the skin, creating what we call "motion artifacts." The signal you actually want from the muscle is tiny, and the noise from the movement is huge. We had to do a lot of signal processing and filtering to separate the actual muscle data from the noise of them running or jumping. It taught me that in hardware engineering, "clean data" is a luxury you rarely get for free — you have to work hard for it.
**You speak Mandarin, Cantonese, and English. How helpful is that in your role?**
It's absolutely essential. I act as the bridge between TG0's London HQ and our manufacturers and clients in Mainland China and Hong Kong. Since many of our products are designed in the UK but mass-produced in China, things can easily get lost in translation. Being trilingual means I can quality-check the production files and specifications, and ensure that when an English engineering requirement is translated for the factory floor, it's accurate. It prevents expensive mistakes before they happen.
**What do you do outside of engineering?**
I'm actually a big gamer — I play a lot of Apex Legends and Overwatch. Fun fact: I actually met my wife while playing Apex Legends. We went from gaming buddies to a couple, and eventually got married. I do like running as well. When I was studying at Zhejiang University, I used to love running around West Lake. Starting from the Yuquan Campus and doing a full loop is exactly 15.16km. I ran quite a few half-marathons back then and am planning to pick it back up.
