N.LYAKOV
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Embedded systems · Linux · Software architecture · Data acquisition

Nikolay Lyakov

I can design and build complete software systems from scratch: firmware, Linux services, communication protocols, licensing and desktop tools for data analysis. 21+ years of experience, most of it with automotive data loggers.

Get in touch Experience Projects
21+ years Influx Technology, 2005–2026
C · C#/.NET · Delphi embedded, Linux, desktop
Remote open to work, fully remote
can0 · 500 kbit/s sample trace

Experience

21 years of software for CAN data loggers

Influx Technology (UK) makes CAN data loggers for automotive R&D, proving grounds and heavy machinery. Its entire software range was developed by the engineering team in Bulgaria (2005–2026, continuously): three generations of CAN data loggers (REBEL, REXGEN, REXGEN Pro) and the K-series measurement modules (K-TC, K-BOX). The stack over those years: from Delphi 7 and .NET to embedded Linux and the cloud. Experience with technical ownership of whole components and subsystems, from design to delivery.

Embedded C and firmware

Embedded code in C for data loggers.

Example: design and implementation of a lightweight AWS S3 client in plain C for the logger's microcontroller (NXP LPC54628, Arm Cortex-M4), with no existing embedded library to build on.

Licensing and software protection

End-to-end development of the entire licensing layer: a licence server and its admin panel written from scratch, and a direct connection to it from every product of the company, desktop applications in both Delphi and C#/.NET.

In production across 16 products, with thousands of customer accounts, most of them with several products activated. Software protection and data encryption are built into the same system.

architecture · client–server communication · licence management · admin panel · integration in every product · encryption and protection

USB communication

In-depth knowledge of USB pipes: multithreaded TX/RX over several pipes at once between the Linux services and the data logger.

Linux systems programming

System services, data exchange between processes over named pipes, UART, sockets (remote control of the loggers), a GNSS dashboard over Wi-Fi, LAN and LTE.

SocketCAN virtualization: the CAN channels of the logger board, reached over an internal USB link, exposed as virtual SocketCAN interfaces on the Linux board by a user-space daemon, without a dedicated kernel driver.

Yocto · ARM cross-compiling · Device Tree · NTP · mDNS · LTE (AT) · Tailscale

Multithreading

Concurrent code under Linux, .NET and Delphi.

Example: real-time market data in C#: live order books from 11 cryptocurrency exchanges over WebSocket and REST, with concurrent queues, reconnects and authenticated channels; price differences between exchanges calculated after maker and taker fees. Rewritten for the browser with the same logic: every spot market on 14 exchanges, compared live. Live demo.

Vehicle buses, formats and measurement data

Reading, writing and converting automotive and measurement formats. In DIALOG: the oscilloscope view, the synchronised GPS map, batch processing and export.

Scale: single logs of 200–500 MB hold tens of millions of CAN messages; with a DBC attached, each message decodes into many signals. Batch export runs overnight over a whole day's downloads, terabytes of data.

Buses: CAN · CAN FD · LIN · FlexRay · GNSS (NMEA)

Formats: DBC · LDF · ARXML · FIBEX · ODX · A2L · MF4 · BLF · ASC · MATLAB · nCode S3 · Intel HEX · Motorola S-record

Familiar with: XCP · CCP

Desktop applications

Delphi (VCL) and C# (WinForms).

DIALOG · REXDESK · REXLIBRARY · Open API · SavvyCAN plugin

AI integration and AI-assisted development

AI built into products: MCP servers, Claude, tools for legal research and document work.

Development with AI coding agents: running several agents in parallel, breaking a system down into tasks, code review, testing and integration. Pandect, PDF Lab and the asset-declarations system below were built this way.

Cryptography and security

Encryption and decryption logic, digital signatures and certificates, applied in licensing and software protection. Information Security studies (master's programme), Veliko Tarnovo University.

Also: data compression, including a custom archiver based on Huffman coding.

RSA · AES · digital signatures · SSL/TLS certificates

Languages and web

Core: C · C#/.NET · Delphi · SQL

Also: C++ · Java · JavaScript · PHP · MATLAB

HTML · CSS · XML · XSL/XSLT · websites for clients

WordPress: complete sites, custom PHP code snippets, forms with verification and moderation, integration with public registers

Example: an in-house email campaign system in PHP and MySQL (about 12,000 lines): contact base with tags, categories and segmentation; multilingual templates and sender profiles; a queue worker with retries, an hourly sending limit, round-robin across jobs and a database lock; bounces processed automatically through its own POP3 client and fed into the exclusion list; REST API with API keys. Over 24,000 emails delivered.

Databases

SQL: MS SQL, Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL

data access via ADO

Approach

How I work

The problem first

What the system has to do comes first; the technology is chosen after that.

The whole path

Systems, not isolated features: the data is followed from the device to the person who reads it. When a needed library does not exist, it gets written.

Built to last

Customers run this software for years, so simple, maintainable solutions win over clever ones.

AI as a multiplier

AI coding agents speed up the implementation; the architecture, the decisions and the final check stay with the engineer.

Projects

Independent projects

Products designed and run end to end: architecture, technical decisions, hosting and operation.

pandect.bg · live product

Pandect

A twofold product: a legal information platform and software for law firms, connected to each other.

my.pandect.bg · the law in context

  • 3,700+ legal acts article by article, with every amendment
  • 4.8M+ court decisions, from the district courts to the supreme courts, the Constitutional Court, the CJEU and the ECHR
  • 5.6M+ court cases with statistics and judge profiles
  • Atlas: an institutional map of the legal system, links and analyses, Radar

Pandect Case · software for law firms

  • new court acts and hearings from the e-justice portal arrive at the case by themselves
  • deadlines proposed with their legal basis, straight into the calendar
  • secure electronic mail with institutions, documents from templates, fees, costs and invoices
  • conveniences no other law-firm software in Bulgaria offers

PostgreSQL · pgvector · OCR · MCP · browser extension · Docker · Raspberry Pi 5 · Cloudflare Tunnel

Role: concept, architecture and data model; development management, integration and validation.

Open Pandect ↗
Pandect · Base · Practice · Atlas Pandect Case: cases, deadlines, documents

pdf.lyakov.bg · public release

PDF Lab

Turns photos of documents into scan-quality PDFs: finds the page, corrects the perspective and cleans the background. All processing runs in the browser.

OpenCV.js (WebAssembly) · Canny / Hough · contour-based page detection · perspective warp · Otsu and adaptive thresholding · Web Workers, one per CPU core · PWA

Role: idea, design and product decisions; development management and validation.

Open PDF Lab ↗
Photo of a page at an angle The same page as a clean PDF

fathers.bg · civic project, public data

Asset declarations of the judiciary

A complete system that turns the public asset declarations of judges, prosecutors and investigators into structured, searchable data with analyses.

  • 39,045 declarations of 5,286 people, 2017–2025, automatically extracted from the original PDFs
  • properties, vehicles, investments, pension funds and income normalised into one database, in BGN and EUR
  • statistical analysis: histograms, mean and median, standard deviation, percentiles, Gini coefficient of concentration
  • entity resolution: one profile per person across all years, with a year-by-year breakdown of every asset; family ties between magistrates detected automatically (182 links in 36 cities); companies linked to their company profiles
  • rankings by net worth, growth over 1, 2 and 5 years and the whole period, institutions on a map, vehicles, properties, investments, pension funds, gender
  • results presented on national television

PDF data extraction · data normalisation · entity resolution · SQL · descriptive statistics · Leaflet · OpenStreetMap

Role: co-founder of the association; concept, system design and data model; data processing and analysis.

Open the analysis ↗
Asset declarations of the judiciary: institutions by city on a map

Open to work

What I'm looking for

A full-time or long-term engineering role, fully remote, in one of three directions:

  • Embedded and systems engineering firmware, Linux, communication protocols
  • Software architecture and data systems data acquisition and processing, desktop applications, backend services
  • AI-driven product development AI integration, MCP

Bulgarian (native) · English (professional written, conversational spoken)

LinkedIn ↗

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