That’s impressive!
Nowadays I stick mostly to embedded work but back in the day I churned out some interesting software tools.. small compilers, program generators, parsing tools, web spiders... and various odd things. And if a problem involved pattern recognition then I was there...
We used to use small 286 mobos with modified bios chipsets as custom PLCs
I love this stuff :-)
The cars have accelerometers that support +/- 80g at up to 100 KSPS on the bearing adapters to perform spectral analysis of the cup/cone/cage/roller vibration. PIC18F6680 MCUs provided the CAN interface and a German supplier provided the CANopen embedded libraries. I designed and programmed devices to service a tri-axial accelerometer on each bolster for ride quality assessment, temperature sensors, a handbrake controller, an anglecock controller and a brake piston position sensor. Wilcoxon Research provided the accelerometers and did the CAD, fab and packaging of each controller. A dedicated PIC16F device monitored the 12 pole tachometer output of the Timken generator to determine car speed over the track and the threshold speed for making net charge to the system battery vs load. The 16F "pushed" the "power on" button and reported battery voltage.
I published a paper at the 10th Annual CANOpen Conference in Rome describing the Onboard Continuous Monitoring System. A related paper was published for the ASME/IEEE in Pueblo, CO a couple months later. More details than are suitable here. I love embedded and kernel work, but it is hit and miss on opportunities. Customers want systems moved "to the cloud". Lots of Java, Docker, kubernetes, Kafka, helm, keycloak and whatever UI framework is popular when the proposal is being written.
One of my co-workers was doing custom Xilinx devices to do DSP with sample rates in the 400 MSPS range. My tasking on that project was real-time stream compression. Never a dull moment :-)