Elias Chikwanda

Developed a secure, responsive full-stack web application enabling 500+ students to attempt 175+ Cambridge multiple-choice past papers online with automated grading and progress tracking • Achieved a 30% improvement in exam preparation efficiency through intuitive UI/UX design and robust backend architecture with JWT authentication and comprehensive API documentation.

Engineered 12 core system modules including gpio.c, timer.c, and malloc.c, enabling precise control of Pi's peripherals and optimizing memory management • Designed and implemented a complete weather station and automated drip irrigation system integrating BME280 sensor for environmental monitoring and real-time soil moisture control, resulting in improved system performance and reliability.

Ported Allwinner Technology's MMC protocol implementation from a working bootloader image to a bare-metal embedded system on the Mango Pi Pro • Reverse-engineered GPIO pin configurations and clock register values to bring up the SDC0 controller, and wrote ~150 lines of core MMC driver code along with custom RISC-V utilities for timer access and cache management • Verified end-to-end by writing and reading data blocks from a physical SD card.

Designed and implemented an FPGA-based music player with four integrated extensions: chords, harmonics, dynamics, and note display • Leveraged combinational/sequential logic, pipelining, and timing optimization to produce multi-note audio with visual feedback • Engineered custom Verilog modules for parallel waveform generation, harmonic synthesis via frequency scaling, and ADSR amplitude modulation

Developed an interactive dashboard using Reflex and CSS, visualizing carbon offset supply and demand predictions to improve user understanding of decarbonization strategies • Modeled multi-year equilibrium of carbon markets using NumPy and SciPy, enabling company-specific net-zero pathways • Won 1st place in the Sustainability Track at Stanford's hackathon.