KEVIN JACOB

I build the whole vertical —
from bare metal to model weights.

Production systems with clients onboarded, AI pipelines, computer vision, and C firmware on chips with kilobytes to spare. I pick the problem first and learn whatever layer it needs.

ORACLE · e-YANTRA, IIT BOMBAY · BANGALORE, INDIA

What I have built, by the layers each system reaches

SEVEN LAYERS · EIGHT SYSTEMS · TWO OF THEM GO ALL THE WAY DOWN

SCROLL TO DESCEND ↓

ABOUT

I’ve never managed to stay at one layer of the stack.

I have been taking things apart and building worse versions of them since I was nine, and I never really stopped. The drones are where it got serious: a flight controller written from scratch on an RP2040, a nano drone flown from a phone, a Raspberry Pi bolted to a frame until it could pick a person out of a video stream and follow them. Constrained hardware teaches you something you can’t unlearn — either the loop closes in time, or the thing falls out of the sky.

Everything since has been that same instinct pointed at bigger systems. A wearable that remembers your day — built once as Pin, then rebuilt deeper as OpenRecall. A document anonymiser that runs six OCR engines and never touches the network. A multi-tenant clinic platform with paying customers on it. And when nothing off the shelf fits, the enclosure gets modelled and printed too.

By day that is Java and Spring Boot at Oracle, on billing systems carrying real money for real hospitals, and systems that has to be right rather than impressive. By night it is whatever I currently cannot stop thinking about — which has been an expense tracker, a clinic platform, a document anonymiser, a video engine and a wearable, in roughly that order.

I don’t pick a layer. I pick a problem, and then I learn whatever it needs.

EIGHT DISCIPLINES, AND WHAT PROVES THEM

CURRENTLY DEEP IN

ON-DEVICE INFERENCEKNOWLEDGE GRAPHSAUDIO DSP ON MCUsKERNELSPENETRATION TESTINGPRINTED ENCLOSURES

The stack, layer by layer

01

Product

The part people actually touch. React when it is a web app, SwiftUI when it should feel native, Flutter when it lives on a phone — and once, a Chrome extension, because the right place to intercept a document was the upload button itself.

React 19SwiftUIWidgetKitFlutterAstroTailwindChrome ExtensionsLVGL
  • PIN Live view · recall surface
  • OPENRECALL Android relay app · recall and control surface
  • CLOAK Chrome extension · macOS menu-bar app · box editor · CLI
  • CLINICPILOT React 19 + Vite 7 · Tailwind · three portals: staff, doctor and patient
  • SPENDS Flutter app · budgets · spend analytics · PIN and biometric lock
  • CUTROOM Timeline editor · shot inspector · natural-language refinement
  • DRONE Flutter ground station, shipped on Google Play
02

Service

Async Python for the systems I own end to end; Java and Spring Boot for the ones at work that carry other people’s money. Job queues, WebSocket gateways, control APIs — the boring parts that decide whether the interesting parts survive contact with reality.

FastAPIaiohttpFlaskSpring BootWebSocketsNginxDockerDigitalOcean
  • PIN FastAPI · async workers · WebSocket ingest
  • OPENRECALL aiohttp WebSocket gateway + HTTP control API
  • CLOAK FastAPI REST server with async job management
  • CLINICPILOT FastAPI · JWT RBAC · admin platform · Nginx · Docker Compose
  • CUTROOM Render backend interface · FFmpeg backend · cache
03

Data

Schema-per-tenant when isolation is the product. SQLite and a vector index when the whole system has to run on somebody’s laptop. A knowledge graph when the relationships matter more than the rows.

PostgreSQL 15asyncpgRedis 7SQLitesqlite-vecFalkorDBGraphitiFirebase
  • PIN SQLite + sqlite-vec · FalkorDB / Graphiti · media on disk
  • OPENRECALL Transcripts · memories · embeddings · on-device SD spill
  • CLOAK Job store · artefact storage · structured logging
  • CLINICPILOT PostgreSQL 15 schema-per-tenant · asyncpg · Redis 7 · backups
  • SPENDS AES-256 encrypted local database · per-account balances · encrypted Drive backup
  • CUTROOM Content-addressed IR · analysis graph · hybrid retrieval
04

Models

I treat models as components with contracts, not as magic — an ensemble has to agree with itself before anything downstream is allowed to trust it. Some of this runs in the cloud at work; a lot of it runs offline on my own hardware, because a document you cannot send anywhere is a different design problem.

GLiNERPresidioQwen2.5VLQwen3 35BInsightFace ArcFaceYOLOTensorFlow LiteMLXOllamaOpenCV
  • PIN Qwen2.5VL · Qwen3 35B · InsightFace ArcFace via Ollama
  • OPENRECALL MLX transcription · memory extraction · retrieval
  • CLOAK GLiNER · Presidio · Surya VLM · Tesseract · PaddleOCR · RapidOCR
  • SPENDS Per-bank SMS parsing · automatic categorisation into spend categories
  • CUTROOM Qwen3 35B planning · Qwen2.5VL vision · nomic embeddings via Ollama
  • DRONE OpenCV person detection and tracking on the companion Pi
05

Protocol

Bytes on a wire are a design surface. I decide what a device is allowed to say before I decide what it can do — which is why the wearables here are deliberately the least capable part of their own systems.

Binary WS framingBLE / NimBLEOpusEd25519MAVLinkESP-MESHLeader electionTime sync
  • PIN 16-byte binary header · length-prefixed frames · JSON control
  • OPENRECALL §C.6 audio · §D signed commands · §E session framing
  • DRONE MAVLink setpoints · WiFi telemetry link
  • AGRI-EDGE Neighbour discovery · leader election · time sync · failsafes
06

Firmware

C against ESP-IDF, thinking in FreeRTOS tasks and a uniform component lifecycle. Every module gets the same init / start / stop contract, so an audio path and a camera path look identical from the outside — and a control loop either closes in time or it does not.

CC++ESP-IDFFreeRTOSDMA I²Sesp_cameraNimBLEArduinoPID loops
  • PIN ESP-IDF · FreeRTOS event bus · component lifecycle
  • OPENRECALL ESP-IDF · NimBLE · DMA I²S · Opus · ring buffer · Ed25519
  • DRONE From-scratch flight controllers: IMU fusion, PID, mixing
  • AGRI-EDGE C on ESP-IDF · FreeRTOS tasks · aggregation and upload
07

Silicon

Choosing the part is a design decision, not a shopping trip: what the board can do sets what the firmware may promise, which sets what the product is allowed to claim. And when nothing off the shelf fits, I model the enclosure and print it.

ESP32-S3ESP32-C3RP2040Raspberry PiNodeMCUOV2640MPU6050Fusion 360FDM printing
  • PIN XIAO ESP32-S3 Sense · OV2640 · PSRAM · SD card
  • OPENRECALL XIAO ESP32-S3 Sense · mic · SD card · battery
  • DRONE RP2040 · ESP32 · Raspberry Pi · MPU6050 · printed airframes
  • AGRI-EDGE Custom PCB · ESP32 · LoRa / BLE / GSM · printed housing · battery

SELECTED SYSTEMS

DEEP WORK · 2022–2026

Clinicpilot

01–03

MULTI-TENANT CLINIC PLATFORM · 2025

Patients, prescriptions, lab tests, pharmacy stock and batches, billing with GST compliance, staff scheduling and a patient portal — schema-per-tenant on PostgreSQL, deployed and carrying live clinics.

FastAPIReact 19Vite 7PostgreSQL 15asyncpgRedis 7JWT
clinicpilot.app SOURCE PRIVATE

Spends

01–04

AUTOMATIC EXPENSE TRACKING · 2025

Reads the transaction messages your bank already sends you, categorises each one, and keeps a running picture of every account — because logging small spends by hand is exactly the chore nobody sustains.

FlutterDartSQLiteAES-256SMS parsingGoogle Drive APIBiometrics
SHIPPED TO THE APP STORE

OpenRecall

01–07

WEARABLE AI MEMORY · 2026

A wearable that hears what you hear and remembers it, split into three tiers that build and test independently. The device is dumb by design, and refuses to do anything it cannot cryptographically verify you asked for.

ESP-IDFNimBLEOpusEd25519KotlinaiohttpMLX
SOURCE ON GITHUB openrecall.kevinjacjac.com RESERVED

Cloak

01–04

DOCUMENT ANONYMISER · 2026

A Chrome extension that catches a file on its way to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok or Copilot, redacts what it finds, and uploads the masked copy instead. Detection runs across six OCR engines and maps every span back to pixel coordinates. Nothing reaches a server, because there is no server.

Python 3.11FastAPIpluggyGLiNERPresidioSuryaTesseract
trycloak.in SOURCE PRIVATE

CutRoom

01–04

AUTOMATIC VIDEO EDITING · 2026

Point it at a folder of clips and a one-line brief. It analyses every shot, builds an edit, and hands you the timeline — with the reason behind every cut and the alternatives it rejected.

PythonOllamaQwen3 35BQwen2.5VLFFmpegSQLiteContent addressing
cutroom.kevinjacjac.com RESERVED SOURCE PRIVATE

Drone Stack

01–07

AUTONOMOUS FLIGHT PLATFORM · 2022–2023

Flight controllers written from scratch, a companion computer that picks a person out of the video stream and follows them, and a ground station on the Play Store. Built up over three years and several airframes.

RP2040ESP32Raspberry PiC++OpenCVMPU6050MAVLink
FLIGHT CONTROLLER GROUND STATION ON PLAY

Pin

01–07

WEARABLE MEMORY BOOK · 2025

A camera you wear that sees what you see and never forgets. The device is deliberately dumb — it captures keyframes and streams them — and every piece of intelligence runs on a Mac in the same room.

ESP-IDFFreeRTOSOV2640FastAPIOllamaQwen2.5VLInsightFace
pin.kevinjacjac.com RESERVED SOURCE PRIVATE

Agri-Edge

05–07

AGRICULTURAL SENSOR MESH · 2024

A development board built at e-Yantra, IIT Bombay for putting sensors across farmland: a custom PCB carrying LoRa, BLE and GSM, C firmware that lets nodes find each other and elect a leader, and a printed housing to survive being left outside.

CESP-IDFFreeRTOSESP32LoRaBLEGSM
INSTITUTIONAL CODEBASE

DEPLOYMENTS

2 LIVE · 0 RESERVED

THINGS I'VE BUILT

A running list rather than a highlight reel. Robots, drones, motors, boards and the enclosures around them — built mostly at night, mostly to find out whether they'd work.

13 SHOWN · 2021–2026
Robotic Arm — Six degrees of freedom

Robotic Arm

2023

Driven either from a phone over WiFi or autonomously from a planned trajectory, with inverse kinematics solved on the microcontroller. Linkages modelled and printed to fit the servos I actually had.

ROBOTICSCAD & 3D PRINTFIRMWAREMOBILE
ESP32 · Servo IK · Flutter NO REPO
Vehicle Detection — Distance from geometry alone

Vehicle Detection

2022

Detection and tracking that estimates the distance to each vehicle from bounding-box geometry alone — no stereo rig, no depth sensor. My most-starred repository.

COMPUTER VISIONAI / ML
YOLO · OpenCV · Python 4 ★ ON GITHUB

Intellilens

2023

Real-time object detection running on the Raspberry Pi itself, with CAIN frame interpolation to keep the stream smooth — plus a Flutter app on the Play Store and a web dashboard watching the same feed.

COMPUTER VISIONAI / MLROBOTICSMOBILEFULL-STACK
Raspberry Pi · OpenCV · TensorFlow Lite SOURCE PRIVATE
An LLM on an ESP32 — Conversation on a microcontroller

An LLM on an ESP32

2024

A full conversational client running on a microcontroller — ESP-IDF underneath, an LVGL touch UI on top, streaming responses, on a chip with kilobytes to spare.

FIRMWAREAI / ML
ESP-IDF · LVGL · C 2 ★ ON GITHUB
Path Finder — A* on a maze robot

Path Finder

2023

A line-following robot that maps a maze, solves it for the shortest route with A*, and then runs it — built for the Meshmerize competition.

ROBOTICSFIRMWARE
C++ · A* · Line sensors SOURCE ON GITHUB
Portable Mini Amplifier — Darshana Ignite Award 2021

Portable Mini Amplifier

2021

Built so people wearing masks could still be understood. Won the Darshana Ignite Award and was picked up by Mathrubhumi — one of the few where the problem belonged to somebody else before it belonged to me.

ELECTRONICSCAD & 3D PRINT
Analog design · PCB · Enclosure design AWARD · 2021

AND ALSO

  • Smart Socket A tiny ESP32-C3 that watches you with glowing eyes while it switches your outlets. I designed and printed the enclosure — base, top and button — around the board. ELECTRONICS · CAD & 3D PRINT · FIRMWARE SOURCE ON GITHUB
  • Tracker A SwiftUI habit tracker with a contribution heatmap and a WidgetKit extension — and the whole thing, widget included, compiles with swiftc against the Command Line Tools SDK. No Xcode project file anywhere. FULL-STACK SOURCE PRIVATE
  • Axial Flux Motor A pancake motor built around a 3D-printed rotor and coils I wound by hand, with the driver code to spin it. ELECTRONICS · CAD & 3D PRINT · FIRMWARE 3 ★ ON GITHUB
  • Nano Drone A quad small enough to sit in your hand, flown straight from a phone, running on a NodeMCU. ROBOTICS · FIRMWARE · CAD & 3D PRINT SOURCE ON GITHUB
  • RC Plane Gyro A gyro stabilisation loop for RC planes — small, and the difference between a flight and a crash. ROBOTICS · FIRMWARE 2 ★ ON GITHUB
  • Pico Datalogger A datalogger on an RP2040 with a real-time clock and an SD card — the plumbing every other project ends up needing. ELECTRONICS · FIRMWARE SOURCE ON GITHUB
  • Kernel Going below the firmware, because it turns out there is always one more layer down. FIRMWARE SOURCE ON GITHUB

THE THROUGH-LINE

I pick problems,
not layers.

Clinicpilot is a cloud SaaS with paying clinics running their day on it. Cloak never touches the network, because a document you cannot send anywhere is a different problem. OpenRecall is C on a chip with kilobytes to spare, a Kotlin relay and a Python brain. The drone had to close its control loop in time or fall out of the sky.

None of those picked me because of the technology. They picked me because I wanted the thing to exist, and building the whole of it was the only way to find out whether it could.

Which is also the honest answer to “can you do X here?” — every one of these made me learn a layer I hadn’t worked at before, and the work is on this page to check.

TRACK RECORD

  • Associate Consultant
    ORACLE (OFSS)

    Working on OBMA architecture, building internal efficient tools, and maintaining robust codebase and critical systems; Java and Spring Boot backend services carrying billing and claims data for healthcare clients.

    AUG 2024 – PRESENT
  • SDE Intern, eYSIP
    e-YANTRA, IIT BOMBAY

    C firmware for ESP32 mesh networks on agricultural sensor fields — leader election, distributed time sync, live reconfiguration.

    MAY – JUL 2024
  • SDE Intern
    AYU HEALTH HOSPITALS

    OCR data-structuring for hospital intake; cut manual verification labour by 75%.

    APR – AUG 2023
  • SDE Intern
    RHEIN NECKAR DEVELOPERS

    Flutter and React property-listing surfaces on Firebase auth, Firestore and Realtime Database.

    JAN – JUN 2023
  • Independent Consultant
    UPWORK

    95+ hours delivering firmware, AI and full-stack work across ESP32, Raspberry Pi and IoT.

    JUL 2022 – JUL 2023
B.TECH CSE · GEC THRISSUR · CGPA 8.81 e-YANTRA ROBOTICS · 4th / 441 TEAMS DARSHANA IGNITE AWARD 2021 Voice Amplifier(Masks) during COVID-19