Ayaan Dhuka
Hi, I'm Ayaan, an ECE major at UT Austin. I like building stuff involving electronics and software, and I made this page to keep track of projects I'm proud of. Right now, I'm interested in all things computer architecture, from digital logic to operating systems and beyond.
I'm currently working on embedded systems software for Longhorn Racing's combustion engine car for the Formula SAE competition. This section contains some of projects I've done in the team.
January 2026 – Present
Currently building a wireless lap timing system using multiple ESP32 boards with ESP-NOW for communication and a Python UI built with Tkinter for real-time display and data logging.
September 2025 – December 2025
Built a driver information display for the car using an STM32H7 microcontroller and an LCD. The STM32 reads data from the ECU via the car's CAN bus and displays the data on the LCD. Developed the software in C and C++ using TouchGFX (an embedded graphics library).
In high school, I teamed up with two friends to make year-long robotics projects for science and engineering fairs. I focused on the embedded systems and software for the projects. This section contains the work I did for the 3 projects we made.
August 2024 – May 2025
3rd in Robotics at SEFH (Science and Engineering Fair of Houston)
Team developed an autonomous quadcopter for 3D scanning. I programmed and tuned a PID-based flight controller from scratch on an STM32F1 microcontroller using C. I also programmed an UDOO x86 Ultra in Python to store scans from a CubeEye LiDAR and camera images.
PID Tuning Process and Final Demo Video
August 2023 – May 2024
2nd in Robotics at ISEF (International Science and Engineering Fair) - $2000
1st in Robotics at TXSEF (Texas Science and Engineering Fair) - $750
Engineering Grand Award at SEFH
Team built a VTOL hybrid drone system to deliver emergency equipment like AEDs. I created the full communication subsystem that included a mobile app built with React Native for the system's user, an AWS-hosted RESTful API, and an ESP32 with LoRA (long range radio) communication all for data transfer between a user app, the cloud, and the drone.
View communication flowchart →
Source code is private because it contains sensitive info (API endpoint links, passwords, etc.)
August 2022 – May 2023
2nd in Robotics ISEF - $2000
CIA Special Award at ISEF - $1000
Engineering Grand Award at SEFH
Team built an automatic physical chessboard for playing against an AI. I developed a piece detection algorithm using 64 hall effect sensors and a piece movement algorithm using an electromagnet under the board and 4 stepper motors connected to strings. I developed a minimax chess engine on an Orange Pi 5 in Python with alpha-beta optimization, an opening database, iterative deepening, Zobrist hashing for a transposition lookup table, and more.
Project Overview and Demo