Projects — Naseef A K

Four systems, recorded for the decisions rather than the numbers. The part that transfers to your product is what I turned down.

DOSSIER A · STM32L476 + RASPBERRY PI

One of two senior
embedded leads

Fig. A1 — each manager decides whether the step is its own

Chose
Over — and why

One universal execution engine

Over per-recipe logic — thousands of dishes, but only one execution path anyone has to verify.

Request/response built on an async bus

Over fire-and-forget commands — a cooking step has to know its command landed before it moves on.

Recipes pre-compiled before the cook starts

Over parsing at runtime — no text parsing on the hot path while an induction coil is live.

DOSSIER B · ONE IMAGE, SIX VARIANTS

Architecture
+ subsystems

Fig. B1 — the B2B chai maker shipped as recipe data, not a fork

Chose
Over — and why

Runtime personality selection

Over a branch per product — a fork means every fix lands twice, and eventually only lands once.

Driver interfaces behind function pointers

Over compile-time switches — two electrically incompatible induction boards, one binary, chosen at runtime.

Differentiate by data, not by code

Over a product-specific host stack — the client’s machine reused the same orchestration layer wholesale.

DOSSIER C · 5 BOARDS, 1 BOOTLOADER

Sole owner
boot + update

Fig. C1 — staged in groups so no board overwrites the slot it is running

Chose
Over — and why

A/B slots with a guarded boot record

Over updating in place — a failed write in a customer’s home must fall back, not brick.

One bootloader for all five boards

Over per-board boot code — one small, auditable path instead of five that drift apart.

Signed and encrypted images

Over a plain image with a checksum — the update channel is the attack surface on a connected product.

DOSSIER D · STM32H723 + ESP32

Sole firmware owner
in development

Fig. D1 — inference sits on the control MCU; connectivity is offboard

Chose
Over — and why

Two motors through a custom gearbox

Over an actuator per axis — twelve axes of movement without twelve motors of cost, weight and wiring.

Inference on the control MCU

Over a cloud round-trip — posture correction cannot wait on a network it does not control.

A separate radio module

Over Wi-Fi on the control MCU — connectivity work never gets to interrupt the real-time loop.