Available for Internships

I build things

Final-year Electronics and Communications Engineering student at VIT-AP. I buildv embedded firmware, linux drivers, and hardware accelerators. Most problems get interesting when you stop trusting the abstraction.

Atul Akella
Currently on workbench
Embedded Linux | Firmware Dev
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01 About Me

I go lower
until things make sense.

It started with a bluetooth robotic arm at 13. I didn't have a datasheet. I didn't know datasheets existed. All I knew was I wanted to understand why it worked.

That question "why?" never left. It kept following me through every project. And every time I thought I had the answer, I'd realize there was another layer worth understanding.

Now I enjoy working at the hardware-software boundary. I'm drawn to problems that reward understanding the system beneath the abstraction, whether that means debugging, designing, or building from the ground up.

Outside of that I play a lot of chess, occasionally basketball, and spend more time than I should listening to a song on repeat until I've figured out exactly what the lyrics are doing.

Firmware & OS
Bare-metal C FreeRTOS OpenAMP RPMsg Embedded Linux ARM Cortex-M4 / A9
Hardware & FPGA
Vitis HLS Vivado AXI4 Zynq Z7-10 Fixed-point arithmetic PS+PL co-design
Wireless & Drones
ESP-NOW MAVLink CRSF iNav UART / SPI / I2C
ML at the Edge
TinyML YOLOv8 DETR SAM On-device inference
02 Experience

Where I've worked.

May – Jul 2025
NIT Rourkela | Rourkela, India
FSO | Optical Comms Hardware
  • Built a simplex FSO data link from scratch. Custom UART framing with byte stuffing, NRZ encoding, and multi-protocol input bridging across I2C, UART, SPI, RJ45, and RS232.
  • Got reliable text and image transmission over a free-space laser link. Documented signal recovery pipeline built on raw photodetector output.
  • Designed the full-duplex extension path: link-layer ACK/NAK retransmission, framing protocol, and tested over actual free-space propagation.
Sep 2023 – Dec 2024
ShrimpIQ | Remote
Edge ML | Computer Vision
  • Benchmarked YOLOv8, DETR, and SAM on aquaculture field data for shrimp defect detection. +6% mAP over the existing baseline.
  • Optimised the classification pipeline for edge deployment and validated it across multiple architectures on real field data.
03 Projects

Things I've built.

Hardware, firmware, and ML. Somethimes all three at once.

Jun 2026
Real-Tim Shady

A chip with two processors inside needs both of them talking to each other reliably. This project brings up both cores on an STM32MP157 from scratch, runs a real-time control loop on one and Linux on the other, and studies exactly how fast they can pass messages and what slows that down. The application running on top is a 1 kHz adaptive PID control loop..

STM32MP157 Embedded Linux FreeRTOS Custom Linux driver
Apr 2026
CNN Inference Accelerator

Running a neural network on a chip that has both a processor and programmable logic on it. The processor handles setup and results; the programmable logic does the heavy math in parallel. I wrote the hardware description for the convolution layer myself and optimised it until it ran 2.67x faster than doing the same thing purely in software, while using a fifth of the chip resources.

Zynq-7000 FPGA 2.67x speedup 1421 inferences/sec 5x fewer DSPs
2024
Electronic Nose

Triggered by the Tirupati laddu adulteration controversy: could a small device tell the difference between pure and adulterated ghee by smell alone, with no lab equipment? Built a sensor array that reads the chemical signature of heated ghee, trained a tiny classifier that fits on a microcontroller, and got to 86.6% accuracy running entirely on-device.

86.6% accuracy Runs on microcontroller 15.8 KB flash 1 ms inference
Mar 2026
Tethered Drone

A drone you control over a cable, for situations where radio links are unreliable or battery life matters more than freedom of movement. I replaced the standard remote control radio with a custom communication stack, built a flight dashboard with live telemetry, and added a circuit to switch between tether power and battery mid-flight. It flew.

Custom radio stack Live telemetry dashboard Mid-flight power switching iNav failsafe confirmed
2024
VISU-NG, Humanoid Robot

My university's humanoid robot. It could hold a conversation, recognise faces and remember who it had met before. Demonstrated to the HRD Minister of Andhra Pradesh at two public events.

Voice interaction Face recognition Per-person memory Public demo
More on GitHub

Experiments, side projects, half-finished ideas, and things that didn't make this list. The interesting stuff usually lives here first.

04 Achievements

A few things
worth noting.

Age 13

Built my first robot

Bluetooth-controlled robotic arm, before I owned a multimeter or knew what a datasheet was. The start of everything.

Age 14

IIT Kharagpur, top 30 of 3000+ teams

Led my school team to the finals of the pan-Asia Young Innovators Program (YIP 2019). First time competing at that scale.

Age 15

Built my first portfolio

Designed and shipped a personal site with an interactive chatbot. First real full-stack project, and the reason this one exists.

Age 19

Three hackathons, college freshman year

National Hackathon 2024 (VIT-AP) and TinkerQuest '24 (IIT Roorkee × Redcliffe Labs), among others. Rapid iteration under pressure turned out to be a useful skill.

Age 20

₹14L MSME Grant, Govt. of India

Government innovation grant for CogniLift, a neurofeedback-based brain activity monitoring and therapy device. First time building something at the brain-computer interface, and the first time someone external put money behind the direction.