📑 Table of Contents

• 🌱 Where It All Began — 2016
• 🧠 Real Programming Begins — 2019
• 💡 First Hardware Project — Sequential LED Blinker
• 🚘 My First Robot — Self-Driving Car
• 📡 Real-Time Vehicle Tracking — Final Year Project
• 🌐 From Projects to Profession — Silicon Labs Internship
• ❤️ Why Embedded Still Feels Like Magic

🌱 Where It All Began — 2016

"The most powerful programming language is not C, Python, or Java—it’s curiosity.”

My love for embedded systems didn’t start with microcontrollers or blinking LEDs. It started with a 10-year-old HCL laptop and a desire to understand how computers respond to human logic. In 2016, when I was in 9th standard, I began exploring HTML and CSS. My machine was far from ideal—just 2GB of RAM and a sluggish Pentium processor—but none of that mattered. What mattered was the excitement I felt every time I saved a file and refreshed the browser, watching a heading change color or a button move position. It felt like magic—magic I had created with my own hands. I didn’t know it then, but that feeling would become the foundation of a much deeper journey.

As I moved into 10th grade and then my diploma in Electronics engineering (2018–2021), I continued exploring. I transitioned from front-end design to full-stack development, teaching myself PHP and MySQL. In 2019, I started working on my first real project: an e-commerce website called Electrozon. It took me nearly five months to build, and every part of it—from user login systems to shopping cart logic—was handcrafted and carefully debugged. I didn’t do it for marks or applause. I did it because building things felt empowering. While most of my classmates were focused on theory, I was obsessed with practice. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was already developing the mindset that embedded systems would later demand: attention to detail, comfort with debugging, and a deep love for making machines do useful things.

My First Web Page

🧠 Real Programming Begins -2019

2019 was the year things got serious. Up until that point, I had been mostly working with front-end technologies and scripting languages. But then I met C—the language that would fundamentally change the way I think about programming. Unlike HTML or PHP, C didn’t hold your hand. It didn’t offer friendly error messages or abstract away complexity. It was raw, efficient, and brutally honest. My first experience with C came through Turbo C, and I still remember staring at that blue screen, trying to write a basic calculator program. It crashed repeatedly. Variables went uninitialized, loops ran forever, and syntax errors flooded the console. But something about that experience gripped me. This wasn’t just about building interfaces anymore. It was about understanding the inner workings of a system—memory, logic, control flow, data movement. I was hooked.

What C gave me was discipline. It forced me to think step-by-step. It made me appreciate things like pointers, memory allocation, and the power (and danger) of direct hardware access. I learned how to break big problems into smaller ones, how to use logic to debug issues, and most importantly, how to stay calm when nothing worked. It was also around this time I realized I was walking a different path than most of my classmates. While others were memorizing theory and preparing for semester exams, I was spending nights in the lab trying to fix a missing semicolon or understand why my loop wouldn’t break. It wasn’t easy—but it was thrilling. This was real programming, and I knew I wanted more of it.

Introduced to C Programming

💡 First Hardware Project — Sequential LED Blinker (Late 2019)

My first experience with actual hardware came in late 2019, and it was both simple and life-changing. After spending so much time writing code that only lived on screens, I wanted to build something that physically responded—something that could be touched, seen, and felt. That’s when I stumbled upon a project idea that seemed basic on the surface but turned out to be incredibly rewarding: a sequential LED blinker. The goal was to blink LEDs one after another in a loop, like a running light. I used a 555 timer and a 4017 decade counter, carefully following circuit diagrams and double-checking every connection. When I finally powered it on and saw those LEDs blink in perfect sequence, it was hard to believe something so mechanical could feel so personal.

The project introduced me to the world of electronics—resistors, capacitors, voltage drops, and IC pinouts. It was my first time using a breadboard, and I vividly remember how one loose jumper wire could stop everything from working. I learned how to troubleshoot hardware: checking continuity, using a multimeter, and being patient with physical components in a way that was very different from software. There was no “undo” button here—just deliberate problem-solving and careful handling. That project taught me that hardware has its own language and logic, and to work with it, you have to slow down, observe, and respect the details. It was the first time I saw software and hardware truly come together—and it opened a door I haven’t wanted to close since.

Sequential LED Blinker

🚘 My First Robot — Self-Driving Car with Collision Avoidance (2020)

After the thrill of my first LED-based hardware project, I wanted more—I wanted motion, logic, and autonomy. In 2020, I took the leap and built my first robotic car with basic self-driving capabilities. It was a collision avoidance system powered by an Arduino board, ultrasonic sensors, motor drivers, and a rechargeable battery pack. The idea was to have the robot detect obstacles and reroute itself, mimicking a simplified version of how autonomous vehicles navigate the world. Compared to previous projects, this one required a different level of complexity—not just in wiring and electronics, but in thinking.

I had to map out the entire system: how the ultrasonic sensor would scan its environment, how the logic would determine the direction of movement, and how the motors would respond in real time. I wrote the logic in C, keeping memory constraints and timing delays in mind. A slight miscalculation in distance could cause the car to crash. A bad connection on the motor driver could fry the circuit. Debugging meant both staring at serial monitor outputs and watching the robot physically bump into walls. Every failure felt frustrating at first—but strangely addictive. Each iteration taught me something, not just about the hardware but about my own process of thinking, planning, and adapting.

More importantly, it was the first time I saw my code come alive in motion. The robot wasn’t just blinking or beeping—it was navigating, reacting, and “deciding.” That sense of life, even in a basic system, was electrifying. It deepened my love for embedded systems and reinforced one powerful idea: that good code doesn’t just run—it moves.

Ultrasonic Collision Avoidance Car

📡 Real-Time Vehicle Tracking — Final Year Project (2020–2021)

“If you want to learn to swim, throw yourself into deep water.” — Paulo Coelho

By the final year of my diploma in 2020, I knew I wanted to challenge myself with something ambitious—something that would integrate hardware, communication protocols, and real-world applications. That’s when the idea of building a real-time vehicle tracking system came to mind. The concept was simple: use a GPS module to get the live location of a vehicle and transmit it remotely via a GSM module to a server or mobile number. But the execution was anything but simple.

The project spanned several months and became my most immersive technical experience up to that point. I used a SIM900A GSM module, a GPS receiver, and an ESP32 microcontroller. Getting the GPS module to lock onto satellites and parsing raw NMEA strings into readable latitude and longitude data was an early challenge. Then came interfacing the GSM module—sending AT commands over UART, managing baud rates, and handling the frustratingly vague response errors. The system would sometimes hang, reset, or fail silently, forcing me to debug both code and hardware wiring endlessly.

But it was also during this project that I truly began to understand how embedded systems operate in the real world—where power fluctuations, environmental interference, and timing delays aren’t just edge cases but everyday problems. I learned how to structure code for real-time decision-making, how to debug serial communication, and how to test modules in open environments. I captured dozens of photographs during the process—snapshots of breadboards, serial logs, GSM status lights, and those euphoric moments when location data finally showed up correctly.

This wasn’t just a project—it was proof to myself that I could build systems that live outside IDEs and operate in the messy, unpredictable real world. It sealed my bond with embedded systems for good.

Vehicle Tracking System - Final Diploma Project

🌐 From Projects to Profession — *Silicon Labs Internship (2025)

“Do the work, and the opportunities will follow.”

Every project I had built until now—whether it was blinking LEDs, an autonomous robot, or a GPS-enabled tracking device—was driven by passion. But I always wondered: could I turn this passion into something professional? Could I find a space where people built systems like these for a living? That question lingered as I transitioned into my B.Tech and then into M.Tech at IIT Jammu. By then, my interest had matured into a focused domain: embedded systems and wireless communication. I became fascinated by low-level software that interacts with hardware, by protocols like UART, I²C, and SPI, and by real-world technologies that power IoT ecosystems.

That’s when I discovered Silicon Labs, a global leader in Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Zigbee, and wireless SoC development. Their SDKs and development kits are used across industries for secure, energy-efficient embedded systems. The more I read, the more I felt: this is where I belong. They weren’t just building devices—they were building the infrastructure that tomorrow’s connected world will run on.

So, I applied with the best of what I had: my projects, my hands-on experience, my code, and most importantly, my story. I wasn’t coming from a traditional computer science background, but I had depth, curiosity, and proof of work. When I received the offer for a Wi-Fi SDK Intern, it was a surreal full-circle moment. From writing code in a dusty room on a slow laptop to contributing to embedded wireless development at an industry leader—this wasn’t just a milestone, it was validation. My journey through embedded systems wasn’t just personal anymore. It had become professional.

Silicon Labs Internship

❤️ Why Embedded Still Feels Like Magic

Even after years of working on projects, writing thousands of lines of C code, debugging stubborn UART failures, and watching modules fail silently for no apparent reason—embedded systems still feel magical to me. There’s something inherently satisfying about writing low-level code and seeing it manifest in physical action. Whether it’s a blinking LED, a signal on an oscilloscope, a live GPS coordinate, or a packet transmitted over Wi-Fi, the cause-effect loop in embedded development is raw, real, and intensely rewarding. There’s no room for illusions. If it works, it works because you earned it.

Embedded systems demand a different kind of thinking. You’re not just building for users—you’re building for constraints. You're writing code that often has to run in kilobytes of memory, using limited compute power, under real-time constraints, with no fancy frameworks to lean on. You need to care about debounce timings, power consumption, startup delays, and pin states. Every single part matters. That precision, that requirement to understand the system as a whole, makes embedded feel less like software development and more like engineering in its purest form.

What keeps me hooked is that embedded systems blur the lines between the abstract and the tangible. Your code doesn’t just live inside a compiler—it moves wheels, sends messages through the air, and interacts with the physical world in real-time. You’re not just programming a device—you’re programming behavior. You’re building tiny systems that do big things. And even now, every time I flash new firmware and see the board come alive, I feel the same awe I felt with that first blinking LED. That feeling has never left—and I hope it never does.