Personal website of Nicholas (Nick) Merryman

I'm a Computer Engineer living and working in North Carolina. I have a lot of hobbies; someday, there might be more here about them.

(Very) Brief Bio:

• Born (Illinois)
  
• Grew up (Virginia, back to Illinois, Missouri, North Carolina)
  
• Graduated with a BS in Computer Engineering from Georgia Tech in 2006
  
• Did a semester of graduate work at GaTech, then decided I wanted a fresh perspective and transferred to NC State where I graduated with my Master's in Computer Engineering in 2008
  
• At various times during my college education, I've interned/co-op'd/worked while attending grad school with IBM, NVIDIA, AMD, and Signalscape, totaling about two years of full-time work at a bunch of pretty cool places
  
• Professionally, have worked doing ASIC/RTL design for both Juniper Networks, designing hardware chips that go into routers that cost more than my house; and NVIDIA, where I work on chip design for GPUs which are so popular you currently can't buy them
  
• Married my wife Kristen (nee Lipetzky) in 2009, with whom I have two wonderful daughters
  
• I enjoy specialty coffee/home espresso, gardening, homebrewing, tinkering with electronics, puns, real estate investing, doing-it-myself, the Oxford comma, and — the em dash
  

Projects
Once upon a time, I made some things that are both neat and can be relatively easily shown off. Here are a few of them:

• GRASPR -- a HID-compliant "computer mouse" using an accelerometer that we designed, built, and programmed from scratch. We were inspired by the "futuristic" computer interface in the movie Minority Report and wanted to make something similar that was actually real - you strap on the glove and move tilt [gyroscope sensor chips were too pricey for us poor students] your hand to move the cursor, just like Tom Cruise! Though you might look a little less cool and a little more like a cyborg...
  Videos: Initial prototype, Browsing our project website with the GRASPR. Very meta., Completed Demo
• Embedded webserver -- created a simple HTTP web server running on an embedded microcontroller which interfaced to a standalone ethernet module, back before *everything* came with a webserver in it anyway LED-toggling video
• MadProfile.com (see snapshot via archive.org, which messes up the formatting a bit - but check out that vintage web ad!) -- developed circa 2002-2003; profitable for a time; now defunct. In retrospect, I supposed you'd call this an "early social networking site/startup". At one point, I had something in the neighborhood of 1 million registered users!

My preferred method of contact is via e-mail at:

I can also be found on a variety of social networking sites:
Facebook: Nick Merryman
LinkedIn: Nick Merryman
Twitter: Nick Merryman
Google+: Nick Merryman