Ralph Hempel is a Staff Engineer at Edwards Safety, where he works with his team to deliver firmware for world-class Fire Alarm Systems. Previously, he was a Senior Manager and Senior Architect of Firmware Development at the LEGO Group in Denmark. There, he and his team were responsible for the PoweredUp LEGO elements found in Technic, CITY Train, and MINDSTORMS sets.

With 40 years of experience, Ralph has been involved in deep embedded systems development since the 68xx class of devices, all the way up to modern Cortex M0-4 devices. He believes that firmware development has made significant strides in the last decade, with low-cost or free tools now available that engineers could only have dreamed of when he was starting out.

Always willing to experiment and share knowledge with other developers, Ralph is a strong advocate for continuous learning as a key to career progression. He holds a BASc in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada.