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ECE @ UT Austin
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I'm a rising junior at UT Austin building things close to the metal. I write production firmware that's shipped to 50 oil-field units, build flight controllers from scratch, develop FPGA firmware for tactical aerospace systems, and contribute to bionic-hand research. I work in C, C++, and Verilog on real hardware  nRF9160, ESP32, RP2040, Xilinx FPGAs  with Zephyr and FreeRTOS.

  • Southwest Research Institute

    May 2026 – Present
    Student Engineer · Tactical Aerospace (Div 16)· San Antonio, TX

    Building FPGA firmware and a bootloader for the F-16 SIU in an ITAR-controlled environment, with a Dockerized GitLab CI/CD build pipeline.

  • Human Centered Robotics Lab

    Jan 2026 – Present
    Research Assistant · UT Austin· Austin, TX

    C++ firmware on an RP2040 syncing a 16-DOF bionic hand from glove telemetry at 1ms sensor-to-actuation latency.

    try the live simulation
  • National Oilwell Varco

    Jun – Aug 2025
    Embedded Systems Intern· Houston, TX

    Replaced $20K/site legacy PLCs with a custom $250 nRF9160 board — 98% cost cut, 50 units on a LoRa mesh to AWS IoT.

Firmware in Motion

Two flagship builds — both live, both from the metal up. Open either for the full interactive simulation.

01 · Flight

LiteWing

Custom ESP32 flight controller — a 1ms PID attitude loop written in C++ from the metal up. Steer it with your cursor, or your hand.

ESP32C++FreeRTOS1ms PID
02 · Robotics

Bionic Hand

Webcam hand tracking drives a 16-DOF robotic hand in real time — a browser analog of my HCRL bionic-hand research. Runs entirely on-device.

MediaPipeR3F16-DOFHCRL

Other Work

LAP
44 / 57
S1
23.412
GAP
+3.621s
DRS
ENABLED
section · 01

Sundays are for racing.

Diehard Verstappen / Red Bull Racing fan since the start.

try typing verstappen

section · 02

Dream Garage

14 cars · click to inspect

Enter the garage
section · 04

A. Vivaldi

Professional

Violinist

SAMPADA Certified · ABRSM Grade 5

Vivaldi · Four Seasons

Let's build something.

Built with Next.js, Three.js, Framer Motion · view source →
© 2026 Kartheek Mukkavilli · Austin, TX