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Hi, I'm John Gentile!

Welcome to my personal blog and technical notes! I'm passionate about solving interesting engineering problems. I like to be the "geek that can speak", so this site is mainly just for fun, but also acts as a continuous culmination of notes and thoughts that I'm learning (publicly) along the way. I'm a hacker (in the old-school, curiousity sense) and enjoy all things digital electronics, FPGAs, SDRs, DSP, embedded/low-level software, applied math and Machine Learning (ML), etc. See what I'm reading on goodreads.

Unknown Chirp Message Decode

Another unknown signal challenge from DrSDR, the Chip-Text-Message- here a series of linear frequency modulated (LFM) chirps are representing bits, and we need to find the underlying text message in the waveform. An “upchirp” (where frequency is increasing as ejωte^{j \omega t}) represents a bit 1, where as an opposite “downchirp” (where frequency decreases as e−jωte^{-j \omega t}) represents a bit 0.

Posted by John Gentile on September 30, 2025

Unknown BPSK Decode

I saw an interesting DSP challenge come up in r/DSP, DrSDR/BPSK-Decode, in which a .wav file is given and we are looking to demodulate and decode the signal to get an “Amazon gift card claim code”.

Posted by John Gentile on September 29, 2025

Machine Learning Blog/Website Design

Building a technical blog or website of any kind poses many unique challenges, but there’s nearly infinite ways to design a site; you can choose from many different content management frameworks and site generator tools. For me, I decided to use Jekyll static website generator because of the many FOSS extensions and development flexibility, as well as the low-cost (often free, like GitHub Pages) hosting ability of static websites. With this base framework, I found a couple great add-ons and tools that help to make a great blog for technical notes, especially when working with Machine Learning notebooks.

Posted by John Gentile on January 16, 2021

Agile for FW & FPGA Development

Agile development processes have been the popular trend in Software Development for quite awhile now. However Agile is now bleeding into other engineering areas, especially hardware, firmware and FPGA development. While there are general “best practices” in Agile methodology that can apply to virtually any development or decision process, the tooling and day-to-day project management with Agile has several caveats that need to be addressed when applied to hardware and firmware design.

Posted by John Gentile on December 05, 2020




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