Touching Base with Alan (Yingfa) Liang: TG0 China Tech Lead
"I act as the bridge between TG0’s London HQ and our manufacturers and clients in Mainland China and Hong Kong."
Where are you originally from? I know you studied in Hangzhou and spent time in Saskatchewan, that's quite a change in scenery! How did you find the transition between those two environments?
I’m originally from Jiangmen in China, a small city in the Pearl River Delta with a great environment and a much slower pace of life. My time at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou really built my engineering foundation, but that semester at the University of Saskatchewan was the real culture shock.
It was crucial, though. It helped me understand Western culture, which has been invaluable for my current role at TG0. It prepared me for the language and the work culture. That said, my strongest memory of Saskatoon is the cold. I distinctly remember walking to my final exam in -40°C weather. Definitely not my favorite memory, but it builds character.
You’ve got a really interesting mix of experience in both analogue chip design and embedded software. Do you find that knowing the deep hardware details makes it easier when you're writing firmware, or is it a totally different mindset?
They are definitely connected. Analogue design was a huge focus for me during my time in Canada, and it helps immensely now. Embedded code isn't like high-level software development; it’s much "lower" and lives right next to the hardware.
Because I understand the circuit design, how the voltage moves and how the components actually behave, I can write better, more efficient code. It’s especially helpful during debugging. When something goes wrong, I don't just look for a syntax error; I know when to check if the hardware is acting up.
In your current work with robotics, specifically dealing with drivers and MCUs, what is usually the trickiest part of getting the software to play nice with the hardware? Is it usually struggling with memory limits or power constraints?
To be honest, while memory and power are always concerns, the real headache is usually timing and communication reliability. When you have multiple sensors trying to talk over I2C or SPI at the same time, managing those interrupts without crashing the system is an art form.
The hardware doesn't always behave exactly like the datasheet says it will. You might send a command, and the sensor is busy or asleep, or there's noise on the line. The trickiest part is writing driver code that is robust enough to handle those "real world" glitches without freezing the whole robot.
When you were working on the wireless systems for cleaning robots, you dealt with things like OTA (over-the-air) updates and remote monitoring. What was the biggest headache when trying to keep track of those devices in real-time?
The biggest headache is connectivity stability. Cleaning robots have a habit of wandering into the furthest corner of a house or under a sofa where the Wi-Fi signal is terrible. For OTA updates, the nightmare scenario is a device losing connection halfway through an update and "bricking" itself. So, we had to design very defensive systems to ensure that if a download failed, the robot could recover gracefully rather than becoming a very expensive doorstop. Real-time monitoring is similar—you have to assume the data will arrive late or out of order and build the system to handle that chaos.
I heard you also built a system to measure energy usage for athletes using muscle sensors. How hard was it to get clean data from the sensors when people are actually moving around?
It is incredibly difficult. The human body is basically a giant bag of electrical noise. When an athlete is moving, the sensors shift slightly against the skin, creating what we call "motion artifacts." The signal you actually want from the muscle is tiny, and the noise from the movement is huge. We had to do a lot of signal processing and filtering to separate the actual muscle data from the noise of them running or jumping. It taught me that in hardware engineering, "clean data" is a luxury you rarely get for free; you have to work hard for it.
You speak Mandarin, Cantonese, and English, have you found that helpful when digging into technical docs or talking to clients?
It’s absolutely essential for my role as China Tech Lead. I act as the bridge between TG0’s London HQ and our manufacturers and clients in Mainland China and Hong Kong. Since many of our products are designed in the UK but mass-produced in China, things can easily get lost in translation. Being trilingual means I can quality-check the production files and specifications. I ensure that when an English engineering requirement is translated for the factory floor, it’s accurate. It prevents expensive mistakes before they happen.
Outside of engineering, what keeps you busy? Since you worked with athletes on that previous project, are you into sports yourself, or do you have other hobbies?
I’m actually a big gamer. I play a lot of Apex Legends and Overwatch. Fun fact: I actually met my wife while playing Apex Legends! We went from gaming buddies to a couple, and eventually got married. It’s a pretty incredible story.
I do like running as well. When I was studying at Zhejiang University, I used to love running around West Lake. I can still tell you the exact distance: starting from the Yuquan Campus and doing a full loop of the lake is exactly 15.16km. I ran quite a few half-marathons back then. I’m running a bit less these days, but I’m definitely planning to pick it back up.
