Archit Saraf Email & Phone Number

Greater Noida

As the only firmware engineer at Gaia, alas with a lot more competence and learnings, the highlight of my work at this time was the building of the entire Gaia Smart Feedback product for airports. This required bringing together, completing, as well as productizing all the work of the previous year at Gaia. This included remote management and configuration of the devices. Later on, I also completed the entire firmware stack for FOTA (Firmware-Over-The-Air) over GSM for our devices, work on which had begun in the previous year. Beyond this, I also assisted in choosing embedded WiFi modules, and wrote the code for adding WiFi communication capability to the devices. The airport devices have been deployed across 32 major airports of India.Over this year, I gained much more experience with the different features and aspects of the STM32 microcontrollers, as well as other embedded peripherals. As the code sizes became much larger, it has helped immensely to keep the different sections of the code extremely modular, in order to allow plug-and-play combinations of the code, and also in helping new incoming firmware engineers to work with different sections of the code.Heading the development for the Smart Feedback line of Gaia products also required me to make design and module choices throughout the development process, which inevitably led to a constant expansion of my industry network, with many new connections and leads in the embedded development, manufacturing, as well as peripheral components industries. I am now working towards adding 4G LTE capability, followed by BLE mesh capability, to our devices.

Greater Noida

Gaia Smart Cities is an IoT solutions company. As the first firmware engineer for Gaia's proprietary products, my work involved brainstorming and understanding product requirements based on the company's vision. During this year, we were inducted into the Startup Accelerator program at ST Microelectronics in Greater Noida, so the entire Gaia embedded team worked out of the ST office throughout my time at Gaia. I worked on writing the entire firmware stack for Gaia's Smart Feedback line of products, which includes human button-based feedback, as well sensor-based feedback. This included a temperature and door sensing products for the dairy industry, a proximity sensing product for a heavy machines industry, etc. along with Gaia's flagship product - the button-based Smart Feedback system. All these STM32-based IoT products utilized GSM modules for communication, along with several other embedded components like external EEPROM, a large variety of sensors, switches etc.I also assisted in the hardware design process of Gaia's proprietary Smart Feedback PCB.The biggest learning of this year was learning to find my way technically, with minimal external support. Going through this entire year gave me the confidence and ability to take complete charge of a firmware product, and build it from end-to-end. Being the only firmware engineer at Gaia, I had very little support in my firmware design and coding process. I had to constantly self-learn, ask for help, falter, and keep trying. But, going through this process, results did start to come, and this grilling prepared me quite well for my next year of immense productivity at Gaia.

At Gram Power, I led the firmware and software development on their primary product, the single phase smart meter. This meter has two variants - the non-DLMS version that uses a proprietary communications protocol called TAP, and the DLMS version that uses the standard DLMS protocol. I was involved in writing code for both the meter variants. I was also responsible for the development of Python-based shell-like applications, that enable computers to communicate with the smart meters.One significant highlight of my work here was that I was part of a 3 person team that designed and wrote the entire firmware to create a DLMS compliant meter from scratch in a mere matter of 3 months. It has taken most other competing companies a few years to build DLMS compliant meters. As a part of the exercise of building a DLMS compliant smart meter, I also gained experience with participating in laboratory development tests and getting our meter certified as per IS standards, specifically, the IS 13779 and IS 15959 for DLMS compliant smart meters. Working at Gram Power has been a tremendous opportunity to learn beyond good coding logic and practices. I've gained significant knowledge of code designing and structuring for optimum utilization of an embedded system’s rather limited resources, along with knowledge of writing highly modular and reusable code. Scheduling methods for tasks (such as round-robin, FCFS, preemptive and non-preemptive) is another area that I've gained knowledge of. All in all, Gram Power has given me the knowledge and skills to build and manage large code bases for entire products effectively.

Washington D.C. Metro Area

VT iDirect is a company that is involved in the design and manufacture of products that are part of a satellite communications network. In essence, they make everything for satellite networks, barring the satellites themselves.At iDirect, I worked as an intern in the Software Protocols and Applications Division. I was involved in a variety of tasks during my time here. I worked in two different teams - the Protocol Processor Division of the Platform and Infrastructure Team, and the Remote Terminal Applications Team.My stay in the platform and infrastructure team was short, and my work mainly revolved around setting up virtual machines on proprietary devices called protocol processors, and also around writing Python scripts using the MVC architecture based Web2Py framework.I had more major experiences as part of the remote terminal applications team. This team is responsible for designing and building the remote terminal, which is an embedded device used to receive communications from satellites. As part of this team, I was involved in doing static code analysis, fixing bugs in the code, doing black-box testing on a simulated satellite network, as well as writing unit tests for white-box testing, using the Google C++ testing framework.iDirect being a large company, I learnt a lot about important code organization and debugging tools, as well as good coding practices. I came to understand the importance of using static code analysis tools (Goanna), version control software (Git), continuous integration software (Jenkins), bug-tracking software (JIRA), code review software (Crucible), and standardized code commenting (Doxygen). I also understood the importance of black-box and white-box testing of code, and got a chance to work in an Agile Scrum environment.

Greater Pittsburgh Area

In this internship, I worked on the Biorobotics Laboratory's primary project called the SEA Snake (Series Elastic Actuator Snake). The SEA snake is a snake robot that is build by joining 17 small and identical proprietary actuator modules. This gives the robot 17 degrees of freedom. The front-most module can be a high-quality camera amongst other options. These robots have numerous applications, ranging from military surveillance by climbing up poles and recording using cameras, to crawling through tight spaces, such as pipes, in damaged nuclear reactors' debris.My work here involved doing firmware development on the field actuator modules, that used ARM Cortex-M4 based STM32F407 microcontrollers. I implemented multiple applications, such as a watchdog timer to deal with system freeze, a more efficient tachometer to track the speed of all motors on the robot, and faster data transmission from the robot sensors to the microcontroller using DMA (Direct Memory Access).

Greater Boston Area

In this project, I collaborated with the Assistant Director of the lab, Dr. Rahul Bhattacharya, in order to work on my own solo project. The project was to build a fluid level detection system for liquids stored in refrigerators. It required using knowledge of microcontroller programming, along with full stack web development.The Auto-ID Labs' primary focus under the Director Dr. Sanjay Sarma, was to further the usage of RFID technology. My project was a part of the effort to diversify and realize the varied potential of this technology. By the end of my project, I had successfully built a prototype that gathered fluid levels from RFID tags on bottles into a computer, and then sent the data to an online cloud database. This data could then be accessed from anywhere using authentication on a simple web page. This project has tremendous applications. For instance, while you're at a grocery store, you can check the quantity of milk, orange juice etc. you have remaining in your refrigerator at home, using a web page. You can accordingly make your purchases. There are also more complex and large-scale applications of using RFID technology in this manner, in that it can be used for keeping inventory in automotive industries and many other kinds of factories.The system I had built cost less than 300 USD total, while similar systems in commercial LG and Samsung refrigerators cost over 1500 USD, which is about five times more.

Bachelor Of Science (Bs), Electrical And Electronics Engineering, 3.74/4.00 Gpa

Activities and Societies: Buckeye Current Electric Motorcycle Team The Underwater Robotics Team Secular Student Alliance The Undergraduate.

Cbse Secondary And Senior Secondary Examination Certificates, Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics W/ Computer Science And English