Hi! I’m Kshitij. I’m currently a firmware engineer at Tor.ai, an IIoT company based in Pune, but my relationship with electronics started long before job titles and resumes.

As a kid, I once broke a TV remote and got scolded for it - but I was mesmerized by the small green board inside and a tiny component that kept blinking whenever I pressed the membrane keypad. I didn’t know it then, but I was staring at an IR LED stubbornly transmitting signals through a half-broken circuit.

Another moment that stayed with me came during Diwali, when my father brought home a string of LEDs with a speed controller. Setting it up was my unintentional introduction to a PIC16-based controller and a potentiometer tweaking a PWM signal. I had none of the vocabulary, but all of the curiosity. By the time I had to fill in college preferences, I didn’t enter a single option that didn’t say “Electronics.”

In college, that curiosity turned into immersion. I joined the robotics team in my first year and spent most semester breaks inside the lab—unlocking it around 7:30 AM and locking it again close to midnight. I pulled apart and experimented with anything I could get my hands on: ICs, motors, chassis configurations, MCUs, sensors, driver circuits.

I was assigned to the embedded software domain even though I initially wanted to do hardware design, and I stayed because it challenged me. I still remember writing my first 8051 assembly program - a simple number addition routine - and having it work on the first try. It felt exactly like fixing those Diwali LEDs: the quiet thrill of making something invisible suddenly behave.

Since then, I’ve worked with 8051 (Assembly), PIC16, LPC2148, STM32 (where I brought up an STM32F407 platform with a bare-metal programmer’s model and peripheral drivers for RCC, GPIO, NVIC, EXTI, SPI, I2C, and USART), and later BeagleBone Black while exploring embedded Linux and device drivers.

What I do today is grounded in those years of obsessive tinkering—not just in the projects that appear on a CV.

Professional Journey

Over time, that early fascination with microcontrollers evolved into a focused journey in embedded systems, both in college robotics and in industry.

I’ve worked extensively with STM32 microcontrollers, developing bare-metal libraries for core peripherals including RCC, GPIO, NVIC, I2S, UART, and SPI. For my final year project, I leveraged these libraries to develop a PID-integrated navigation control system for a 4-wheeled robotic chassis—a project that further solidified my passion for low-level systems programming and control.

My professional experience includes:

• Knorr Bremse: Year-long internship at the Embedded R&D department of this renowned German automotive supplier
• Vicharak: Brief stint gaining startup experience
• Tor.ai: Current role as a firmware engineer, working on Industrial IoT solutions

Technical Interests

My curiosity spans across multiple domains in computing and electronics:

• Computer Architecture
• Computer Networking
• Embedded Systems
• Electronics
• Control Systems

Beyond Code

I’ve been an athlete for as long as I can remember. I hold a First Dan black belt in karate, played club cricket for three and a half years, trained in lawn tennis at an academy for about a year and a half, and have been playing football since I finished my tenth standard. In college, I captained my branch’s football team in inter-college sports tournaments.

I’m also a die-hard Manchester United fan - the kind of supporter who will stay up until 1:30 AM for a match, sleep around 3:30 AM, and still make it to work by 9:00 AM. Since graduating, I’ve finally been able to spend time in local gyms, something my parents were initially against because of their own stigma around gym culture.

When I’m not writing firmware or debugging hardware, you’ll also find me:

• 🎸 Playing the guitar
• ⚽ Watching or playing football (and supporting Manchester United through thick and thin)
• 🏏 Remembering and occasionally reliving my days as a club cricketer
• 🥋 Staying connected to martial arts (First Dan black belt in karate)
• 🏓 Playing table tennis

Finding My Tribe

I’m writing all of this in the hope of finding my tribe - a group of people who are as passionate about engineering and hardware as they are about sport and discipline. People who are happy to stay up late for their club’s matches and still show up on time the next morning; who get as excited about exercising their brain behind an MCU or a kernel driver as they do about pushing their body on a football field or in a gym. If any of this resonates with you, I hope this page finds you—and I hope to hear from you soon.