Hi, I'm
Hossein Molavi
Computer Engineering Student @ UWaterloo
Waterloo, ON
Building at the boundary between silicon and software, from bare-metal firmware and wireless protocols to cloud-connected IoT systems. Currently in my final year of Computer Engineering at the University of Waterloo.
Skills
Languages
Hardware/MCUs
Protocols
Tools
Testing
Experience
Wireless Developer Intern
Onsemi
Sept 2025 - Present | Waterloo, ON
- Developed software for hearing aids specializing in Bluetooth connectivity, audio streaming, and low-power wireless protocols including Bluetooth Classic, LE Audio, and Near-Field Magnetic Induction (NFMI).
- Hardened NFMI driver by resolving DMA and timing race conditions that caused corrupt data in received payloads, implementing RX buffer overrun and TX buffer underrun detection in the IRQ handler to flag corrupted audio frames for PLC.
- Built wireless audio interfaces supporting HFP and A2DP profiles with mSBC and CVSD codec integration, while resolving packet synchronization and connection timeout bugs.
- Developed NfmiManager application for ear-to-ear audio forwarding across HFP and A2DP Bluetooth protocols, handling fragmentation of audio SBC frames, reconstruction on the receiving side, and PLC insertion for lost or corrupted frames.
- Engineered BinauralManager module for guaranteed payload delivery via ear-to-ear communication, implementing payload confirmation, retransmission on failure, and per-packet fragmentation with individual packet retransmission.
- Brought up NFMI ear-to-ear audio forwarding and conducted RF performance testing for robust wireless audio quality.
- Captured HCI logs and Ellisys packet sniffs for AirPods and Galaxy Buds to reverse-engineer Bluetooth Classic and LE Audio implementations of commercial earbuds.
- Contributed to standardizing unit tests across the project using the CppUTest framework with gcov, creating a unified test program that fetches and compiles all module tests in the codebase.
- Wrote 200+ unit tests for the NFMI application layer, achieving 100% code coverage.
Founder & CTO
Asymptote Labs
Apr 2025 - Present | Waterloo, ON
- Founded defense technology startup building autonomous anti-drone turret systems integrating real-time computer vision with precision motor control.
- Designed optimized 4-byte UART serial protocol with start/end byte framing and state-machine parser on Arduino for robust, low-latency command reception from the Python host system.
- Engineered real-time converging control system that converts detected object pixel offsets to stepper motor pulse counts using FOV-calibrated degree-per-pixel mapping for precise turret aiming.
- Implemented non-blocking dual-axis stepper motor control with microsecond-precision timing, hardware limit switch homing, and automatic Y-axis centering calibration on startup.
- Built multi-threaded Python application with dedicated threads for YOLO inference, camera capture, and serial communication, using thread-safe queues to decouple detection latency from motor control rate.
- Integrated gun mechanism control with servo-driven enable/disable and shoot actions, debounced detection thresholds, configurable wind-up delays, and spacebar safety lockout.
Embedded Firmware Engineering Intern
Wrmth Corp.
Jan 2025 - Apr 2025 | North Bay, ON
- Engineered robust C firmware for ESP32, integrating secure BLE and Wi-Fi connectivity via MQTT and AWS IoT Core for bidirectional device communication.
- Implemented secure AWS IoT fleet provisioning using PKI certificates for scalable large-scale device deployment.
- Architected reliable over-the-air (OTA) firmware update system on FreeRTOS, handling chunked downloads and flash writes within constrained 512KB RAM.
- Achieved >99.5% success rate for secure OTA firmware updates across 10+ test devices.
- Resolved critical memory leaks by debugging race conditions with JTAG and ESP-IDF memory analysis tools.
- Optimized OTA process for constrained memory via chunked download buffers and sequential flash write operations.
Software Engineering Intern
Miltera Research Corp
Jan 2024 - Apr 2024 | Waterloo, ON
- Developed and released 3 Swift networking packages, introducing modular networking system.
- Created a foundational networking package to simplify API call programming, eliminating manual JSON construction.
- Designed 2 custom Swift packages tailored to the company's CRM systems on distinct platforms.
- Automated CRM data workflows, reducing project entry time from ~10 min to <4 seconds.
Embedded Systems Programmer
Midnight Sun Solar Car Team
Aug 2023 - Dec 2023 | Waterloo, ON
- Contributed to MSXV, Midnight Sun's 15th generation solar car that competed in the American Solar Car Challenge in Summer 2024.
- Implemented FreeRTOS wrappers for task declarations, semaphores, and queues, providing a clean abstraction layer for the vehicle firmware.
- Created thread-safe protocol APIs, implemented hard-fault register dump diagnostics, and tuned compiler flags for code size optimization.
- Enhanced micro-architecture efficiency by enabling FPU acceleration and reducing compiled code size by 15%.
- Implemented multi-channel DMA-driven ADC on the STM32F1 microcontrollers for high-throughput sensor data acquisition.
- Engineered vehicle firmware mock-up with hardware-in-loop testing infrastructure, reducing prototype validation time for automotive embedded systems.
Full Stack Engineering Intern
Lifestyle Home Products
Sept 2022 - Dec 2023 | Toronto, ON
- Developed and launched the company website (JBROntario.ca), designing the front end with WordPress and enhancing backend with Django.
- Engineered webhook endpoints to handle form submissions, improving data capture and processing efficiency.
- Optimized backend performance by implementing Locust for stress testing and employing Redis with Celery brokers.
- Streamlined internal analytics retrieval by designing and implementing an API-backed UI.
- Reduced Google Ads campaign costs by 15% (~$200K) by analyzing performance metrics and removing low-performing keywords.
Research Assistant Intern
Princess Margaret Cancer Center - Genomics Lab
Jan 2022 - Apr 2022 | Toronto, ON (Remote)
- Advanced cancer prevention research by leveraging modern Hi-C techniques and HiC-ProV3 to analyze genomic data.
- Optimized data processing workflows by implementing Python scripts and parallelized techniques on HPC clusters, reducing sample processing time by 400%.
- Enhanced system reliability by developing automated Python scripts to detect and halt bad datasets before pipeline execution.
- Designed and implemented Python command-line tools for efficient genomic data querying and visualization.
Projects
RideSafe (Capstone)
Built a dual-ESP32 cyclist safety system with radar, camera, haptics, and LED alerts. Implemented low-latency NimBLE data forwarding between rear and handlebar modules with secure bonding. Optimized display and LED pipelines using SPI DMA and RMT for responsive real-time feedback.
NVS Config (Open Source)
Published an ESP-IDF component for type-safe, macro-generated NVS parameter APIs. Added mutex safety, versioning, callbacks, and UART runtime configuration tools.
Real-Time Operating System
Built a preemptive RTOS from scratch with EDF scheduling on STM32F401. Implemented ARM PendSV/SVC context switching and a buddy-allocator task memory system.
Plant Protector - IoT Gardening Device
Built an IoT plant monitor with custom PCBs and adaptive watering based on sensor telemetry. Integrated AWS IoT MQTT and reliable ESP32-ATMega SPI communication with error correction.
5-Stage RISC-V Processor
Designed a fully pipelined 5-stage RISC-V CPU in Verilog. Implemented ALU, decoder, register file, branch logic, and memory/writeback data paths.
Toyota Computer Vision Challenge
Won top vision prize (300+ participants) with the fastest completion time. Built a C++ vehicle-tracking pipeline using the Orbbec Astra SDK.
Toyota Fleet Control Challenge
Only team to complete all autonomous fleet stages in the challenge. Built ROS2/Python control logic and extended the TMMC wrapper for Gazebo simulation.
FPGA Sorting Engine
Designed a parallel FPGA sorting engine using an even-odd transposition pipeline. Reduced sort latency through staged comparator parallelism.
Firefighter Robot
Built an autonomous flame-finding robot on PIC16F887 with custom control PCBs. Improved navigation reliability using a 3-sensor IR wall-tracking algorithm.
CAN Bus Sniffer
Built a real-time CAN packet sniffer using Arduino + MCP2515 with interrupt-driven capture. Created a PyQt5 desktop app for live viewing, filtering, and CSV export.
Stereo Audio Player
Built an FPGA stereo player that streams WAV audio from SD card to WM8731 codec. Added interrupt-driven controls and playback modes (speed change, reverse, stereo delay).
Education
University of Waterloo
Bachelor of Applied Science in Computer Engineering (Honours, Co-op)
Sept 2021 - Apr 2026 | Waterloo, ON
Relevant Courses
Interests
Embedded Systems
Firmware, RTOS, and bare-metal programming
IoT & Connected Devices
AWS IoT, MQTT, and smart hardware
PCB Design
KiCad, custom boards, and prototyping
Automotive
CAN bus, solar car, and vehicle systems
Robotics
ROS, computer vision, and autonomy
Outdoors
Hiking, camping, and exploring
Get In Touch
Have a question or want to work together? Feel free to reach out!
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