$whoami --verbose
Saif Shikalgar
Building in Embedded & Robotics
I build systems end to end ā from microsecond-precision firmware on bare metal to production apps with real users. Recent work spans an automotive intrusion-prevention firewall, a published Android app, and a local-first AI image search engine.
01 Ā· Stack
Skills & Core Technologies
6 Core Engineering Pillars Ā· Full-Stack to Bare-Metal
Embedded Firmware & Hardware
Microsecond-precision bare-metal firmware and RTOS driver architecture.
Automotive & Embedded Security
Hardware intrusion prevention, packet filtering and attack mitigation.
Robotics, Autonomous & Controls
Perception-to-actuation pipelines, closed-loop PID and battery telematics.
Android & Mobile Engineering
Production mobile applications with offline storage and native SDKs.
AI & Edge Intelligence
Deep learning inference, vector embeddings and real-time computer vision.
Full-Stack, Cloud & Web3
Scalable web platforms, microservices, containerization and smart contracts.
02 Ā· Stories & Field Notes
Engineering War StoriesExperience from the trenches
Raw technical breakthroughs, midnight hardware crisis migrations, microsecond assembly optimizations, and solo shipping milestones.
The Midnight Silicon Swap & A Lesson in Redundancy
What happens when a 12V transient kills your primary ECU 8 hours before national scrutineering
I made a rookie mistake trusting our power rails under high motor vibration. When the STM32 fried at 10 PM in the racetrack paddock, our modular software architecture was the only thing that allowed an emergency overnight port to an ESP32.
Why 4D Math Choked Our CPU (And Why Simpler is Better)
How over-engineering an anomaly detector caused the exact latency bottleneck I was trying to prevent
When building our CAN bus intrusion firewall, I thought packing more mathematical features made it smarter. In reality, a 4D covariance matrix ate 2,284 clock cycles and clogged our automotive frame budget. Pruning it down to 2D taught me the power of simplicity.
No Documentation, A Multimeter, and Wireshark
Extracting 24-cell battery telemetry from an uncooperative vendor Bluetooth protocol
When our electric vehicle needed real-time 98.8V battery health and the manufacturer refused to share protocol sheets, I sniffed raw BLE packets on Linux, decoded the frame delimiters, and built our own telemetry daemon.
The Loneliness of 252 Commits
How a user email about a lost survey in an underground vault forced me to master atomic file persistence
Building an app solo means there is no QA team or senior engineer to catch your bugs. When a field technician emailed me about losing work underground, it reshaped my entire philosophy around offline-first defensive architecture.
Throwing Away 350 Lines at 3 AM
Overcoming the sunk cost fallacy to rebuild our Web3 multi-agent architecture from scratch
At 3:15 AM during a 48-hour hackathon, our multi-agent chat engine was locked in promise hell. Instead of patching a broken foundation with hacky timeouts, we deleted 350 lines of code and rebuilt a clean event-driven message bus.
03 Ā· Interactive Demos
Hands-On Engineering VisualizersTest the systems live
Interactive 2D visualizers illustrating real-world autonomous emergency braking and embedded automotive intrusion defense.
Autonomous Emergency Braking (AEB) Physics Simulation
Jetson Orin radar perception + STM32 Tandem Master Cylinder (TMC) Linear Actuator (40 Bar Hydraulic).
04 Ā· Selected Work
Selected projects
Flagship builds, then the rest of an active ~13-repository track record.
FiberOpticCalc
Dec 2025 ā presentProfessional PON network design app ā published on Google Play
A native Android application for telecom engineers and field technicians to design and calculate optical power budgets for Passive Optical Networks, combining precision optical-loss math with live geospatial network mapping. Published on the Google Play Store with 5.73K+ installs, 2.09K+ active devices, and a 4.6ā rating.
CAN Firewall
Aug 2026 ā ongoingInline intrusion-prevention system for automotive CAN buses
Abhyuday Racing ā Drive-by-Wire (aBAJA)
Jan 2025 ā present Ā· two seasonsDrive-by-wire & onboard compute stack for the autonomous BAJA (aBAJA) competition
CYO Image Search
Jan ā Jun 2026Local-first semantic image search engine
More builds
Suraksha360
Feb ā Aug 2026Cybersecurity monitoring dashboard + mobile companion app
CottonX
Apr 2026 Ā· Devclash Pune hackathonMulti-agent Web3 orchestration platform
Expert Advisors
Feb ā Jun 2026Algorithmic trading systems for MetaTrader 5
ChainPilot
Apr 2026 Ā· Devclash Pune hackathonAutonomous on-chain agent platform
Floating Translator
Mar 2026 Ā· in progressZero-cost, fully offline on-screen translation tool
Standalone utilities
- ZeroByte
PySide6 desktop GUI for secure, certified disk wiping (drive detection, wipe engine, wipe-completion certificates) targeting NIST/DoD-style sanitization workflows.
- VulnScan
Windows PowerShell system security auditor ā OS/.NET fingerprinting, AMSI provider enumeration, AV/firewall inspection, autorun analysis ā with disk-image test fixtures.
- Email Validator
Node.js/TypeScript CLI wrapping deep-email-validator for regex/MX/SMTP/disposable-address checks.