Engineering
Real-World Systems
Hardware ▸ AI ▸ Software
M.Tech, Computer Science — IIT Patna
Two minutes on what we actually build
Custom PCB to cloud
Six engineering disciplines under one roof — hardware, firmware, AI, robotics, software and field deployment.
500+ machines, multi-state
Government OEM, defence-deployed, and three years of continuous uptime in public places.
Everything after this is detail
The rest of the session is how it gets made, and how you get into this line of work.
Click the thumbnail to play. Every video in this deck is on our channel, Sparklers.
An engineer who ships hardware, not a motivational speaker
Co-Founder & Director
Aeonix Research and Innovations LLP — indigenous IoT, AI and robotics, custom PCB to cloud. Bootstrapped since 2020.
Co-Founder & Technical MD
iAvatars LLC, USA — emotional-AI presence hardware. A second company, a very different problem.
M.Tech, CS — IIT Patna
B.Tech in Computer Science before that. And yes — I took the campus job too: System Engineer at TCS, 2021–22.
Patents & papers
5+ Indian patents filed and 7 peer-reviewed publications, including a Best Paper award at ICCACCS-2020.
Won · 2026Green MSME Award, World MSME Day
Won · 2024JIS Samman — Best Entrepreneur
Nominee · 2026NASSCOM Outstanding Young Entrepreneur
2026M.Tech convocation, IIT Patna
Work covered by Forbes India, The Times of India, The Telegraph and The Statesman — and in the engineering press: Electronics For You, Circuit Cellar, The MagPi, Servo, Silicon Chip.
From a college bench to this room
College, and Sparklers
B.Tech at Narula. Built robots, and ran a maker channel to 1.7M views.
The job
System Engineer at TCS. My last job before going all in.
All in on Aeonix
Bootstrapped, zero capital. Tata, ITC and IIT Hyderabad in year one.
M.Tech at IIT Patna
An advanced degree while running the company. Both at once.
Government OEM, and scale
WBPCB empanelment, deployments across states, a team of eighteen.
Going international
A Michigan branch, iAvatars LLC in the USA, and our kits teaching STEM in US schools.
There was no funding round anywhere in that sequence. The customers paid for the company — and the campus job paid for the first year.
The Stack
Hardware, AI, software, robotics — four words students treat as four separate careers. In a real product they are four layers of one loop.
A demo and a deployed system are different products
| The demo | The deployed system | |
|---|---|---|
| Runs on | Your laptop, your desk | A board in a sealed box, in the sun, in a public place |
| Input | A clean dataset you chose | Dust, glare, 2G, monsoon, and someone kicking it |
| Failure | You press restart | A technician drives 60 km with a spare |
| Success | It worked in the viva | It has worked for three years, unattended |
The deskWhere it always works
The fieldWhere it has to keep workingEverything difficult in engineering lives in the right-hand column.
“IoT” is not a device. It's a closed loop.
Any product that calls itself IoT has to answer four questions. If it cannot answer all four, it is a gadget with a Wi-Fi chip and a monthly data bill.
- What does it measure, and how often?Every extra reading costs power, bandwidth and storage. Cadence is a design decision, not a default.
- How does that leave the device?Wi-Fi, 4G, LoRa, BLE — chosen by range, power and who pays the SIM bill.
- Where does it land, and who looks at it?A database nobody opens is an expensive log file.
- What changes because of it?A truck reroutes, a refill goes out, a valve closes. No action, no IoT.
The nodeAn ESP32 — the workhorse of cheap IoT, about ₹400
The link4G LTE, for everywhere there is no Wi-Fi to borrowA smart bin that fills up and tells nobody is just a bin with a battery.
Every real system is the same loop
Six specialisations. Break any one link and the loop never closes — which means the product does not exist.
These are the parts you'll actually hold
Dev board
ESP32 or STM32 on a breadboard. Wi-Fi, BLE, deep sleep, and about ₹400.
Your own PCB
Schematic, layout, footprints, SMT assembly. The step that turns one into five hundred.
A production board
Designed, dimensioned and manufactured in-house, for machines already in the field.
LiDAR + compute
The sensor that lets a robot know where it is — and the board that decides what to do.
Coverage
Your device is only as reliable as the tower it can reach. Design for the network being gone.
None of this is exotic. Everything on this slide is buyable today, and most of it costs less than a phone.
Hardware is whatever survives the room it lives in
- Power comes first. Ask “what keeps this running?” before you design anything else. A device that needs charging every day is a device nobody uses.
- The cheap bits break first. Almost never the chip. It's the wire, the plug, or the connector somebody pulled too hard. Design for that.
- Sealed boxes get hot. A hot chip slows itself down to protect itself. Leave the heat somewhere to go.
- One is easy. Five hundred is the job. Making one that works and making hundreds that all behave the same are two different skills.
- Somebody has to repair it. Can a technician swap it in ten minutes, outdoors, without a laptop? If not, redesign it.
Our own boardCustom PCB, designed and manufactured in-houseReference point: 500+ devices in public environments, 3+ years of continuous uptime.
Hardware: what to actually learn, in order
Get current flowing
Read a circuit diagram. Ohm’s law, voltage dividers, pull-up resistors. Blink an LED. Learn a multimeter before you trust anything you build.
Make it do something
C / C++ on an ESP32 or STM32. GPIO, PWM, ADC, interrupts. UART, I²C and SPI. Read a datasheet properly. Drive a motor, read a sensor.
Make it a product
KiCad — schematic to layout to a board somebody fabricates. Power and battery design. An RTOS. Order five boards and make all five work.
Month one looks like thisA soldering iron and a board you madeNobody is born knowing this. Every step above is four weekends, and the whole ladder is about six months.
The model is the easy part. Everything around it isn't.
- A model just spots patterns. You show it thousands of examples until it can recognise the next one. That is genuinely all it is.
- Being fast matters as much as being right. An answer that arrives too late is a wrong answer. Decide your time limit before you pick a model.
- On the device, or over the internet? On the device is quick and private. In the cloud is more powerful, but it stops working when the network does.
- Your own photos beat downloaded ones. Two hundred pictures from the actual place beat twenty thousand from the internet. Every time.
- Plan for “not sure”. What should it do when it is only half confident? Decide that yourself, or it will decide for you.
Gesture recognition, liveSub-100 ms, on a public installationAccuracy you cannot run inside the latency budget is 0% accuracy.
AI: what to actually learn, in order
Get comfortable
Python, NumPy, Pandas. What training data actually is, and why it decides everything. Run somebody else’s pretrained model and watch it work.
Train your own
Collect and label a few hundred images yourself. Train a small classifier. Learn what accuracy hides — precision, recall, and the one case that matters.
Make it run anywhere
OpenCV on real camera frames. Export to ONNX, convert with TensorRT. Put it on a Jetson or a phone and measure milliseconds, not epochs.
You need less than you thinkA second-hand GPU will train your first modelsYou do not need to invent a new architecture. You need to make an existing one work on real data, fast.
Software is how it keeps working after you leave
- You must be able to update it from your desk. If you cannot send new software over the internet, every small bug becomes a train journey.
- Let the machine tell you how it is doing. A device that reports in every hour is a device you can trust. One that goes quiet is a site visit waiting to happen.
- People see the screen, not the machine. Whoever pays for it will judge it entirely by the dashboard. Make that part clear and honest.
- Save your work properly. Use Git. Not
final_v3_FINAL.zip. This is genuinely the first thing an interviewer opens. - Assume the internet will drop. Keep the data on the device and send it when the connection returns. And never ship a default password.
The unglamorous halfFirmware, backend, dashboardsHardware wins the pilot. Software wins the renewal.
Software: what to actually learn, in order
The floor everyone stands on
The Linux command line. Git properly — branch, commit, push, and read a history you did not write. One language until it feels boring.
Move data around
A REST API and a real database. MQTT publish and subscribe. A dashboard somebody else can open on their phone without you explaining it.
Keep it alive
Docker. A cloud VM. HTTPS, auth and secrets. Logs you can search. Deploy something and keep it up for a month without touching it.
Where most of the hours goNot glamorous, and utterly non-negotiableThis is the half that hardware people skip — and it is exactly why they get stuck at prototype.
A robot is the same stack, plus wheels and consequences
- A robot is only four things. Sensors to see, a computer to decide, motors to move, and a map so it knows where it is. Everything else is detail.
- Now mistakes have weight. On a screen a bug is annoying. On wheels it can hit somebody. Safety gets designed in at the start, not added later.
- Most of the code is “what if”. What if it is blocked, lost, low on battery, or a person steps in front of it? That list is the project.
- The tools are free and standard. ROS 2, Nav2 and SLAM are what the whole industry uses. Learn them once and they follow you everywhere.
Misti — oursBengal's first food-serving robot. Sensors, a computer, motors, and a map.Same four layers as everything else — but now a bug moves.
What it looks like
when it's real
One company, six engineering disciplines, and the machines that came out of them — including the ones on this table.
Smart cleantech infrastructure
Five machines, 500+ units in the field, three years of continuous public uptime.
Robots that work in real places
Misti is Bengal’s first food-serving robot. The spider kit was a cover story in SERVO and Silicon Chip, and is used for STEM training in US libraries. The drone has flown banner displays over live corporate conferences.
Interactive systems people walk up to and play
Sub-100 ms vision for tens of thousands of live users — no instructions, no second take.
And ten more, across security, health and automation
21 products in total. Point at any of them and I'll tell you what was hard about it.
The machines, actually working
Four different problems, one stack. The last one is a camera and a model doing a job a person used to walk around doing.
The robots, in rooms full of people
SPY-DER was the first thing we ever shipped abroad — it went to the USA for student training.
Devices that look after people
A wrong reading here is not a bug report, it is a person. That changes how you test.
Things people walk up to and use
No instructions, no training, no second take. It works the first time a stranger touches it, or it does not work.
These are photographs, not renders
Cloth bag vendingAcross 100+ public locations
Pad vendingRural and tribal schools and hostels
Handover dayA machine becoming somebody's responsibility
InaugurationRibbon, crowd, and a machine that must now workEvery one has a PCB we designed, firmware we wrote, and a dashboard somebody checks on a Monday morning. That's the whole job.
The client list that took four years to write
Government & defence
Government of India · Indian Army · Government of West Bengal · WBPCB · Sikkim PCB · Central PCB · National Council of Science Museums · WEBEL · Haldia Municipality
Enterprise
Tata Motors · ITC Limited · CK Birla Group · TCS · Kolkata Knight Riders · DNA Networks · CuraFoot
Academia & research
IIT Hyderabad, JIS College of Engineering, GNIT, GCELT and ten more institutions running our systems or training on them.
200+ clients. Government procurement, defence, enterprise and academia — every one of them a reference somebody else checked before signing.
The constraint is never the algorithm
AI sanitation, mass gathering
Real-time cleanliness detection across a temporary city. Hard part: crowd density, no reliable network, alerts that must reach a human who will move.
Gesture gaming and the toss car
Sub-100 ms for tens of thousands of users, plus the Curvv toss car across every IPL 2025 stadium. Hard part: it runs live, or not at all.
4G LTE surveillance
Field-deployed cameras and secure devices. Hard part: ruggedisation, power, secure links, and behaving predictably where nobody can come and debug it.
Becoming a Government OEM
Presenting to the Pollution Control Board. Hard part: compliance, procurement, and proving three years of uptime before anyone signs.
Also deployed with Tata Motors · ITC · WEBEL · CK Birla · IIT Hyderabad · Haldia Municipality · Sikkim SPCB
The same six boxes, inside one vending machine
The machine in questionCloth bag vending, launch day| Layer | In this machine | Who owns it |
|---|---|---|
| Sense | Stock sensor, coin acceptor, door switch, temperature | Embedded engineer |
| Acquire | Custom PCB, MCU firmware, motor driver, power supply, BMS | Hardware + firmware |
| Decide | Dispense logic, fault handling, offline queue, anti-jam retry | Firmware engineer |
| Carry | 4G LTE modem, MQTT over TLS, store-and-forward on network drop | IoT / backend |
| Store | Cloud ingest, database, alerting rules, UPI reconciliation | Backend engineer |
| Show | Operator dashboard, stock alerts, sales analytics, service tickets | Full-stack + design |
Six people. One product. Every one of those rows is a job you can hold.
Becoming
industry ready
Not a motivational list. What actually gets checked when a company decides whether to pay you.
Five things we actually check
Have you finished anything?
Finished means enclosed, documented, and used by someone who is not you. "It worked once in the lab" is not finished.
Can you debug code you didn't write?
Ninety percent of your first year is reading someone else's work and finding out why it stopped.
Can you read a datasheet?
Open it to a timing diagram or a register table. Can you find the answer without a tutorial?
Do you use Git properly?
Branches, real commit messages, a README. final_v3_FINAL.zip tells us everything we need to know.
Can you explain it in two minutes?
To someone non-technical. If you cannot, you do not understand it — and you cannot face a customer.
The actual jobSomebody else’s code, on somebody else’s board, at 6pmYour marks get you the interview. These five get you the offer.
Your first real project, start to finish
Buy the parts
ESP32 (₹400), a DHT22 sensor (₹150), breadboard and jumper wires (₹200). Under ₹800 total.
Get one reading
Blink an LED first. Then print the temperature to the serial monitor. That is day one finished.
Send it somewhere
Publish over MQTT to a free public broker. The moment it leaves the board, it stops being electronics and becomes IoT.
Draw it
Node-RED, Grafana or ThingSpeak — all free. Now somebody who is not you can see what your device knows.
Leave it running a week
Wi-Fi drops. Readings go strange at 3 a.m. The board resets. This step teaches you more than the other four combined.
This is the whole thingA board, a sensor and some wire — less than a pizzaOne weekend, under ₹800. Step five is what separates you from everyone else with the same kit.
India writes the world's software. It doesn't build the hardware.
The componentsAlmost all of them arrive from somewhere else
The prototyping gapToo few places to make one and try it
What closing it looks likeA board designed and made hereRead that right-hand column again. Every line is an unfilled job — and it is exactly why this company exists.
Where to actually learn this
Sparklers on that list is our own channel — 1.7M+ views, and it is how a lot of people first found us.
The roles this turns into
AutomationSomebody programs these for a living
ManufacturingIndustry 4.0 is a hiring category, not a buzzword
Healthcare devicesThe fastest-growing of the lotThere are tens of billions of connected devices in the field. Every one of them needs somebody who understands both halves.
Now watch somebody build one, step by step
SUDO V2 was a college project, and it ended up in five-plus global electronics magazines. Start small, finish it, publish it.
Internships, and what you'd actually do
- Embedded firmware — ESP32 / STM32, RTOS, drivers
- Edge AI & computer vision — Jetson, TensorRT
- Robotics — ROS 2, Nav2, sensor fusion
- Full-stack platform — dashboards, APIs, cloud
- Hardware & PCB design — schematic to DFM
- Field deployment & commissioning
- One page. No objective paragraph, no photo.
- Three project links that actually open.
- One paragraph on something that broke and how you fixed it. This is what we read first.
- Name the track. "Anything" reads as nothing.
Send it to contactus@aeonixinnovations.com
15+ collegesIoT & robotics sessions
Government trainingWBPCB — plastic waste management
Hackathon juryJudging student buildsTrack record: 50+ students mentored, 15+ colleges trained in robotics, IoT and embedded AI.
Building a
company from it
Started at 22 with no capital, no clients and no factory. What that actually involved — and what I'd tell you to do differently.
Five questions
Hands up, answer out loud. Wrong answers with real reasoning count — I'm listening for how you think, not what you memorised.
Over to you
No slides, nothing off limits — career, technical, company, money, or the parts that went badly.
Ask the awkward ones
"Should I choose AI or embedded? Which one has a future?"
"Is hardware a bad career in India compared to software?"
"M.Tech, MS abroad, or a job? What did you actually gain?"
"How do I get my first client with no track record?"
"What do you regret about the last four years?"
"My CGPA is low. Am I already out of the race?"
Guest lectureComputer-vision drones
AI India SummitOn the floor with the robot
Bengal GlobalBusiness Summit
NASSCOMTechnology Confluence
Dell TechnologiesAI summit, KolkataSome of the other rooms this talk has been given in. The questions are always better than the slides.
The prototype proves it can work.
The deployment proves it does.
Pick one track. Build three things. Finish them. Everything else — the job, the internship, the company — follows from work that survives contact with the real world.
Built. Deployed. And still running. Component photography via Wikimedia Commons — ESP32 board © Edwiyanto (CC BY-SA 4.0) · SMT close-up © John Fader (CC BY-SA 3.0) · cell tower © Cvmontuy (CC BY-SA 4.0) · LiDAR robot © S. Winkvist (public domain) · data-centre rack © Derrick Coetzee (CC0) · ultrasonic sensor © Suyash Dwivedi (CC BY-SA 4.0) · single-board computer © Gareth Halfacree (CC BY-SA 2.0) · soldering © Krzysztof Popławski (CC BY-SA 4.0) · breadboard © Jstapko (CC BY-SA 3.0) · code screen © MikeRun (CC BY-SA 4.0) · robotic arm © Oleg Yunakov (CC BY-SA 4.0) · graphics card © AMD · 3D printing © Maurizio Pesce (CC BY 2.0). All other photography © Aeonix Research and Innovations LLP.