portfolio / vol. 01
ahnaf
zareef
computer engineering student at mcmaster university, based in toronto, ontario.
experience
background.
Firmware/ML Developer Intern
Carobot Learning & Research Organization
Built an offline robotics dev-kit that trains and deploys ML models on the ESP32-S3, with UVC + CDC firmware (TinyUSB/ESP-IDF) and a Blockly NN builder in TensorFlow.js.
- ESP32-S3
- ESP-IDF
- TinyUSB
- UVC + CDC
- TensorFlow.js
- Python
- MicroPython
- Blockly
Toronto, ON
Power & Data Acquisition Member
Designed an IV Curve Tracer PCB in Altium (Darlington pair, Hall-effect sensing, MOSFET/Zener protection) and wrote ESP32 C firmware for DAC-driven IV sweeps.
- Altium Designer
- ESP32
- C
- Hall effect
- MOSFET
- Zener
- DAC/ADC
- oscilloscope
- soldering
Hamilton, ON
AI & ML Teaching Assistant
Taught supervised learning, CNNs, and MLPs to 40+ students, and guided them building LLM chatbots with the OpenAI API, LangChain, and RAG.
- scikit-learn
- TensorFlow
- OpenCV
- Python
- OpenAI API
- LangChain
- RAG
Toronto, ON
Software Developer/IT Intern
Platinum Medical
Rebuilt the patient website and e-referral system, lifting bookings 30% and cutting per-patient admin time.
- HTML
- CSS
- JavaScript
- Node.js
- MySQL
- Fetch API
Toronto, ON
selected work
projects.
XNOR-9
A Binarized Neural Network accelerator on a Tang Nano 9K FPGA, replacing multiply-accumulate with XNOR-popcount for 32× model compression. Hit 95% accuracy within the 8,640-LUT budget, with an ESP32-S3 front-end streaming hand-drawn digits to the FPGA over UART.
- FPGA
- Verilog
- Python
- ESP32
- RTL
- UART
- Yosys/nextpnr
- Larq
- TensorFlow
IV Curve Tracer
A custom Altium PCB that characterizes per-cell solar efficiency and detects faults, using a Darlington pair for high-gain current amplification and a Hall-effect sensor. ESP32 firmware drives a DAC-based IV sweep with 16-sample ADC averaging, plus MOSFET/Zener protection on the cell output and ADC.
- Altium
- PCB
- ESP32
- C
- Darlington
- Hall effect
- MOSFET
- Zener
- DAC/ADC