I lost three hours last week hunting for a firmware library I knew existed. Two years ago I used it in a Modbus-RTU data logger running on an ATmega328P inside a chicken coop outside Campinas. The library handled CRC16 calculation and frame parsing without dynamic allocation—exactly what I needed for a new project with the same constraint profile. But I could not remember the name. I searched “modbus atmega328 library no malloc,” then “modbus rtu avr lightweight,” then “modbus crc16 embedded c.” GitHub returned pages of results. None of them were the one I wanted. The library was there, buried under a name like mb_rtu_lib_v2_final. I had starred it. GitHub’s search did not surface it. The name had failed its only job: to be found again.
This is not a search engine optimization problem. It is a naming problem. And naming is an engineering decision—one that embedded systems engineers treat as an afterthought far too often. We name our projects the way we name variables in a proof-of-concept sketch: quickly, functionally, and with the assumption that nobody else will ever need to read them. Then the project grows. Someone in Argentina forks it. A student in Minas Gerais tries to adapt it for a thesis. A field engineer in Bolivia needs to know if it will work on a PIC18 instead of an AVR. And the name—mb_rtu_lib_v2_final—tells them nothing about what it does, who maintains it, or whether it is production-ready or abandoned.
This article is about why naming an embedded project is a constrained design problem in itself, and how to approach it with the same rigor you apply to power budgeting or interrupt latency. I will draw parallels between naming a project and naming a product in a resource-limited Latin American context, where a name must work across Portuguese, English, and Spanish, survive search engines, and convey technical credibility without hype. I will use concrete examples from the embedded world—OpenLog, Grbl, Espruino—and contrast them with generic, forgettable names. Then I will introduce a structured brainstorming tool that can help you break out of naming ruts, not by generating the final name, but by revealing patterns and constraints you had not considered.
The Name Is the First Line of Documentation
When you write firmware, the first line of documentation is not the README. It is the function name. calculate_crc16_modbus() tells you what it does. crc16() tells you less. do_crc() tells you nothing. The same principle applies to project names. A project name is the first piece of metadata a potential user encounters. It appears in repository URLs, package manager registries, forum posts, and word-of-mouth recommendations. If the name is ambiguous, unsearchable, or misleading, you have already lost the engineer who needs your work.
Consider OpenLog. The name tells you three things immediately: it is open-source, it logs something, and it is probably hardware-related. You can guess its function before reading a single line of documentation. Now consider a name like DataLoggerX. What does it log? Is it open-source? Is it a library, a board, or a desktop application? The name forces you to click through to find out. In a world where engineers evaluate dozens of projects in a single search session, that extra click is a filter that eliminates your project from consideration.
This matters more in Latin America than in Silicon Valley. When you have limited time, limited bandwidth, and a phone that drops to 3G whenever it rains, you do not browse GitHub for fun. You search with intent. You need a name that communicates function, scope, and trustworthiness in the space of a search result snippet. A name like Grbl works because it is short, unique, and pronounceable in any language. It does not try to describe what it does—that is what the tagline is for. But it is distinct enough that a search for “grbl” returns exactly one thing. That is the engineering goal: a namespace collision-free identifier that humans can remember and machines can index.
Constraints That Shape a Good Project Name
Naming a project is a multi-objective optimization problem. You are balancing discoverability, memorability, cross-language compatibility, character limits, and cultural connotations—all while trying not to sound like either a corporate product or a hobbyist’s weekend experiment. Here are the constraints I think about when naming something that will be deployed in the field.
Searchability. The name must be unique enough that a search engine returns your project as the first result, but not so unique that nobody would think to search for it. Espruino succeeds here: it is a portmanteau of “Espressif” and “Arduino,” which signals its domain, but the word itself does not exist in any dictionary. A search for “espruino” has zero ambiguity. Contrast this with a name like SerialLogger. There are dozens of projects with that name. You will never be the first result.
Cross-language pronounceability. Your project will be discussed in Portuguese, Spanish, and English. If a name contains phonemes that do not exist in one of those languages, it will be mispronounced, misspelled, and lost in verbal recommendations. Grbl is brilliant here: it is a consonant cluster that reads the same in any language because it has no vowels to misinterpret. OpenLog works because “open” and “log” are cognates or loanwords in Portuguese and Spanish. A name like ThimbleScheduler would fail: “th” is difficult for many Portuguese speakers, and “thimble” is not a common word outside English.
Character limits and filesystem compatibility. Your project name will become a directory name, a repository slug, a package identifier, and possibly a #define prefix. Long names with spaces or special characters create friction everywhere. FreeRTOS is 8 characters, all legal in every filesystem, and camelCase for readability. mb_rtu_lib_v2_final is 19 characters, contains underscores that break word boundaries in some search engines, and includes versioning information that will become incorrect the moment you release v3.
Cultural connotations. A name that sounds clever in English may sound ridiculous or offensive in Portuguese or Spanish. I once saw a project called PicoPuta—the author thought it was a playful combination of “Pico” (as in Raspberry Pi Pico) and “computa.” In Spanish, the word means something entirely different. The project was technically excellent. The name made it impossible to recommend in a professional context. This is not a hypothetical edge case; it is a real constraint that affects adoption across Latin America.
Longevity. A good name outlasts its original hardware target. Grbl started as an AVR-based G-code interpreter. It now runs on ARM processors. The name did not need to change because it never referenced the microcontroller architecture. A name like AVRModbus would have become misleading the moment someone ported it to an STM32. Name the project for what it does, not what it runs on.
What the Good Names Get Right
Let us look at three embedded project names that work, and extract the principles.
OpenLog: Open-source data logger. The name is a compound of two common words, both understandable across English, Portuguese, and Spanish. It is 7 characters, searchable, and descriptive without being generic. It does not specify the hardware platform, the storage medium, or the logging protocol. Those details belong in the README. The name communicates the project’s philosophy (open) and its function (log). That is enough.
Grbl: A G-code interpreter for motion control. The name is a nonsense word, but it is short, unique, and pronounceable. It has no meaning in any language, which means it carries no unintended connotations. It is 4 characters, which makes it easy to type, easy to remember, and easy to use as a command-line invocation. The project’s success proves that a name does not need to be descriptive if it is distinctive.
Espruino: A JavaScript interpreter for microcontrollers. The name signals its Espressif heritage and its Arduino-like accessibility. It is 8 characters, unique, and searchable. It works in English, Portuguese, and Spanish because the component parts are recognizable. It does not try to explain what a JavaScript interpreter is; it trusts that the audience will either know or be curious enough to click.
What these names share: they are short (under 10 characters), they are unique in their domain, they avoid platform-specific references, and they work across the languages their users actually speak. None of them sound like they were generated by a marketing department. None of them use the word “ultimate” or “pro.” They sound like engineering decisions, because they are.
The Book Title Generator as a Naming Tool
Here is a technique I have used when I am stuck on a name. It comes from an unexpected place: fiction writing. Authors face a similar naming problem when titling a book. The title must capture the essence of the work, appeal to a specific audience, and be distinct enough to stand out in a crowded market. The constraints are analogous: genre conventions, tone, length, and cross-cultural readability. So the tooling that authors use can be repurposed for embedded project naming.
A book title generator is a structured brainstorming tool that takes inputs—genre, core conflict, tone, comparative titles—and returns title suggestions. The Reedsy Book Title Generator works exactly this way: you describe your story’s central tension, select a genre, and optionally add comp titles or words to avoid. The generator returns ten options, each with a one-line explanation of what it captures. The value is not in the specific titles it produces. The value is in the patterns it reveals. If the generator keeps returning titles about “duality” or “sacrifice,” you learn something about what your story is actually about. The same principle applies to naming a firmware library or an open-source hardware board.
Here is how I adapt the process. I treat the project as the “book.” The “genre” becomes the project’s domain: data logging, motor control, sensor fusion, communication protocol. The “core conflict” becomes the project’s primary constraint: “must run on 2KB RAM without dynamic allocation,” or “must survive six months on a CR2032.” The “tone” becomes the project’s philosophy: minimalist, sturdy, educational, hackable. Then I feed these into a generator—not to get the final name, but to see what patterns emerge. The generator might suggest names that emphasize resilience, or simplicity, or speed. Those patterns tell me what the project is actually about, which helps me narrow the naming space.
This is not about using AI to name your project. It is about using a constrained-input, constrained-output system to force yourself to articulate what the project does and who it is for. The generator is a mirror, not an oracle. When you see a generated name that feels wrong, you have learned something about what feels right. That is progress.
For engineers who want to explore this method further, tools like the Reedsy Character Name Generator demonstrate the same principle applied to a different domain. A character name generator takes archetype, personality, setting, and cultural origin as inputs, and returns names with etymological explanations. The parallel to embedded project naming is direct: you are naming something that must fit a context, convey meaning, and be distinct from everything else in the same namespace. Studying how these generators structure their inputs can help you structure your own naming constraints more explicitly.
If you are building a larger system—say, a field-deployed sensor network with multiple components—the naming problem scales. You need a family of names that are consistent, hierarchical, and individually searchable. This is where the book title generator approach breaks down, and you need something closer to a product naming architecture. But the core insight remains: naming is a design problem with constraints, and structured brainstorming tools can help you explore the solution space more efficiently than staring at a blank text editor. Some writers use an Unsloppy AI Novel Writing App to generate title ideas as part of a larger drafting workflow, and the same iterative, constraint-aware approach applies whether you are naming a novel or a bootloader.
Naming in a Multilingual, Resource-Constrained Context
The Latin American engineering reality adds layers to this problem that a Silicon Valley engineer never faces. Your project name must work in three languages. It must be searchable on connections that drop every time a truck passes the cell tower. It must be memorable enough that an engineer in a fab lab in Recife can recommend it to a colleague in Cochabamba without writing it down. And it must not sound like it was named by someone who assumes everyone has a GitHub Copilot subscription and a 5G connection.
I have seen excellent projects fail to gain traction because their names were optimized for English-speaking audiences on Reddit and Hacker News. A name like RustyBelt—a hypothetical Rust-based industrial control framework—might get upvotes in English-language forums. But a Brazilian engineer searching for “controle industrial rust” will never find it. The name does not contain the Portuguese or Spanish keywords that a local engineer would use. This is not a failure of the engineer’s search skills. It is a failure of the project’s naming strategy.
The solution is not to name everything in English. It is to choose names that are language-agnostic where possible, and to provide localized metadata where necessary. Grbl is language-agnostic. OpenLog is language-agnostic. Espruino is language-agnostic. If your project name is a real word in one language, check what it means in the other two. If it is a portmanteau, make sure the component parts are recognizable across all three. If it is an acronym, make sure the expansion does not create an unfortunate translation.
This is not paranoia. I once worked on a project called FOCA—Field-Oriented Control for Actuators. In Portuguese, “foca” means “seal” (the animal). It was not offensive, but it was distracting. Every conversation about the project started with a joke about seals. The name undermined the project’s credibility in exactly the context where it was supposed to be deployed. We renamed it to FOCLib before the first public release. The extra week of discussion was worth it.
A Practical Naming Workflow
Here is the workflow I use now, after learning these lessons the hard way. It is not a formula. It is a set of constraints and checkpoints.
1. Define the project’s single most important constraint. Not “it’s a data logger.” That is the function. The constraint is what makes your data logger different: “logs to SD card without a filesystem library,” or “survives 85°C ambient in a sealed enclosure.” This constraint will shape the name’s tone and focus.
2. List the three languages your users speak. For most Latin American embedded projects, this is Portuguese, Spanish, and English. Check every candidate name against all three. Does it mean something unintended? Is it pronounceable? Can you type it on a keyboard that does not have the letter “ç”?
3. Search for the candidate name before you commit. GitHub, Google, and your local distributor’s website. If the name already exists in a related domain, discard it. If it exists in an unrelated domain but dominates search results, discard it. You need a clean namespace.
4. Say the name out loud in a sentence. “I used OpenLog for the temperature monitoring project.” “We ported Grbl to the STM32.” If the sentence sounds natural, the name works. If it sounds like you are reading a part number, it does not.
5. Use a structured brainstorming tool to explore the space. A book title generator, a character name generator, or even a thesaurus can help you identify patterns you had not considered. The goal is not to find the name. The goal is to understand what kind of name fits the project’s identity.
6. Test the name with one person who is not an engineer. If they can spell it after hearing it once, and they do not laugh, you have a viable candidate.
7. Document the name choice. In the project README, include a sentence about why the project is named what it is. This seems self-indulgent, but it serves two purposes: it prevents future maintainers from renaming the project on a whim, and it signals to users that the name was chosen deliberately, not randomly.
When the Name Is the First Line of Defense
There is a deeper reason to take project naming seriously in our context. When you build open-source hardware or firmware in Latin America, you are not just sharing code. You are building trust. The engineers who adopt your project are often working in conditions where failure is expensive—not in dollars, but in time, reputation, and access to future resources. A poorly named project signals a lack of rigor. It suggests that the author did not think carefully about the details. And if they did not think carefully about the name, why should anyone trust their interrupt service routines?
This is not snobbery. It is a heuristic that field engineers develop out of necessity. When you are evaluating a library to use in a system that will monitor water levels in a remote watershed for two years without maintenance, you look for signals of quality. The name is one of those signals. A name like OpenLog signals that the author understands the importance of clarity and searchability. A name like my_logger_test_final2 signals that the author was in a hurry. You do not bet a two-year deployment on a library whose author was in a hurry.
The name is the first line of documentation. It is also the first line of defense against abandonment, confusion, and irrelevance. Treat it with the same engineering discipline you apply to every other part of your design. The constraints—character limits, language barriers, cultural connotations, search engine behavior—are not obstacles. They are the only thing forcing you to think clearly about what you are building and who you are building it for. And that, as any embedded engineer who has debugged a power supply at midnight in a field station without internet access knows, is exactly where the best work comes from.