Mechanical & Mechatronics Embedded Systems AR/VR & Wearable Hardware Robotics On-device AI

I build hardware that actually ships.
And software that blends in.

CAD you describe out loud. Holograms you move with bare hands. Smart glasses with a real optical display. A flight helmet with navigation in the visor. An exoskeleton to help people walk. Designed, soldered, coded and deployed, end to end.

Building solutions to problems that appear to me and my loved ones :)

Name
Mridul Sharma
Age
19 · born
Based
Belfast, UK
Studying
BEng Mechanical Engineering · Queen’s University Belfast
Mridul Sharma
Mridul Sharma
15+
Projects built
5
Live products
2+
Years shipping
Where I'm working

Experience

Jun 2026 – Sep 2026

Infrastructure Lead · Team Dronestellar

Singapore Defence Tech Hackathon 2026 · counter-UAS drone infrastructure

  • Led ground-infrastructure design for a counter-UAS drone swarm: a readiness pipeline (launch and recovery, maintenance, inventory) feeding a cartridge-based battery hot-swap station.
  • Took the swap station through five CadQuery iterations to a 26-part, 415 × 300 × 196 mm closed-cycle design that extracts, stores, charges and re-issues 4S packs; delivered individual STEP parts and the full assembly.
  • Moved main power off magnetic pogo pins, whose plastic housings would melt at ESC current, onto self-wiping BeCu leaf-spring contacts, keeping pogo pins for BMS/ID only.
  • Built a C++17 discrete-event simulation of the readiness pipeline (threat-driven launches, four-stage bay pipeline, three drone roles, CSV-defined fleet) and a PX4 SITL + Gazebo flight-layer package.
CadQueryC++17PX4 SITLGazeboMechatronicsPower systems
2024 – present

YouTube Creator · @mridulsharma-martian

Documenting the engineering

  • Documenting the “Building Iron Man in real life” arc — AR optics, wearable health tech, gesture interfaces and on-device AI — with an end-to-end build film for every major project.
May 2025

E-book Designer & Content Creator

Freelance · online education

  • Designed and produced illustrated e-books for online education platforms, combining graphic design with instructional layout.
Selected work

Projects that run.

Five are live on the public internet right now. The rest are on a bench, in a visor, or strapped to a leg.

Flagship · New

Mexger

Live · mexger.com Free, no signup

A spatial AI studio in the browser. Describe a part in plain English and it generates real parametric CAD — a feature tree with editable millimetre dimensions, not a mesh.

  • Type 50 into the X field and the part becomes 50 mm wide. Change a bore from 6 mm to 8 mm and the whole model regenerates from the recipe.
  • Lock the aspect ratio or scale each axis independently. Export to STL, GLB or STEP.
  • Draw in the air — hand tracking through your webcam, no controllers. Pinch to grab, two hands to scale.
  • Give it target dimensions before you sketch and the drawing lands at exactly that size.
  • Runs free on GPT-OSS 120B. Want Claude, GPT-5 or Gemini? Bring your own key — encrypted AES-256-GCM before storage, never stored in plaintext, no markup on tokens.
GPT-OSS 120BParametric CADMediaPipethree.jsAES-256-GCMSTEP / GLB / STL
Open mexger.com ↗
Where it came from

Mexger is the successor to Gesture Holo, and the child of two things I’d already built. Merser Store had the brain — the model routing, the key handling, the skills engine. Gesture Holo had the hands — browser hand tracking with no headset and no controllers. Mexger is what happens when you fuse them.

Where I think it actually fits

Learning CAD. Traditional CAD has a brutal first week where you fight the interface before you make anything. Here you describe a bracket, get one, then look at the feature tree and see how it was built. Change a number, watch what happens. It’s not replacing SolidWorks — but as a first surface for understanding parametric modelling, I think it’s a much gentler on-ramp.

Three things I learned
  • Structured output beats freeform. Asking for a JSON CAD recipe produces far better parts than asking for 3D code — and the recipe stays editable afterward.
  • The hard part wasn’t generation, it was units. Making dimensions actually drive geometry took longer than the entire AI pipeline.
  • Everything runs through one endpoint. Skills, model analysis and code generation all hit the same API call with a different system prompt.
The lineage · Gesture Holo filmWatch on YouTube ↗
Live

GestureHolo

Control 3D holograms with your bare hands, in the browser. A webcam is the only hardware. The project Mexger grew out of.

MediaPipeThree.jsWebSocketPython60 fps
  • 42 landmarks tracked across both hands in real time, from a standard webcam.
  • 60 fps end to end with sub-50 ms hand-to-render latency on consumer hardware.
  • Pinch to grab, scale and rotate. Air-draw in space and extrude sketches into 3D models.
  • STL, GLB and GLTF support: inspect real assets with no headset, no controllers, no install.

Inspired by Tony Stark’s workshop and the 2013 SpaceX gesture-CAD demo, rebuilt with modern AI so it works for anyone with a browser. It evolved from laggy shape manipulation into a full spatial interface — and then into Mexger, where the gestures finally drive real parametric geometry.

V2 in dev

Smart Glasses · ANA (Project Spectra)

AI-native AR glasses: a real see-through display, an on-device assistant being built to run entirely on the frame, and health sensing built in.

CM5ESP32-S3Waveguidellama.cppECGC/C++Embedded Linux
V2 · ANA In development

Two-brain architecture: a Raspberry Pi CM5 handles vision and on-device AI while an ESP32-S3 manages sensor I/O and power, driving a reflective-waveguide see-through display. The AR and firmware modules are running in bench tests.

In development for V2: a fully on-device assistant (quantised Phi-3-mini, whisper.cpp speech recognition, Piper TTS and retrieval memory) and continuous two-point ECG through ear-tip electrodes. No cloud in the loop.

V1 · Spectra Complete

The first pair: a fully soldered, daily-driver prototype with an ESP32 driving a 1.51-inch transparent OLED over SPI, with audio, capacitive-touch controls and health sensing no off-the-shelf prototype offered at the time — heart rate, SpO₂ and IR skin temperature, from a pair of glasses. Every lesson from V1 is a design decision in V2.

Build video
In development

WALK

A powered lower-body exoskeleton to help people with paralysis or muscle loss stand and walk again.

BLDC + harmonic driveFOCSimulation-firstthree.js / cannon.jsAssistive

Hips and knees actuated by harmonic-drive BLDC motors on a rigid frame running from waist to foot, crutch-supported, with simple commands for stand, sit and step. Safety leads the control design: controlled descent on any failure, conservative lean limits, hard interlocks.

Validated so far in a 12,000-run Monte-Carlo sizing sweep and a browser physics sim passing 8 of 8 stability tests. Devices like this exist today at the price of a car; the goal is a design the people who need it can actually reach. Next milestone: a single-joint bench rig under real load.

Build short
Complete

All-in-One Vitals Monitor

Nine measurements, one handheld device — ECG and PPG heart rate, HRV, respiration, SpO₂, temperature and more. Open source (MIT).

ESP32MAX30102AD8232MLX90614MQ-39 measurementsMIT

A fully soldered ESP32 device on a 320×240 TFT reporting nine measurements: heart rate two independent ways (ECG R-peaks and PPG, cross-checked), HRV (RMSSD, SDNN, pNN50), respiration rate, SpO₂, perfusion index, FOV-corrected surface temperature, relative alcohol response and supply-rail voltage.

Acquisition and rendering are split across both ESP32 cores; the ECG task holds a fixed 250 Hz tick and never touches a blocking bus. R-peaks are detected with Pan-Tompkins plus parabolic interpolation for sub-sample timing.

Every on-screen value is measured or shown as “--”: SpO₂ is flagged as an estimate until calibrated, and alcohol is reported as a sensor resistance ratio, not BAC. The ECG channel was compared against a hospital report.

Build video
Source on GitHub ↗
Working prototype

Aviation HUD Helmet

A flight helmet with a real heads-up display: attitude, time and turn-by-turn nav through a beam-splitter prism.

ESP32-WROOM-32Prism opticsMPU6050 IMUSSD1306BLE nav

Built strictly from on-hand components on a TVS Racing shell, no scope creep allowed. An ESP32-WROOM-32 drives an SSD1306 through a 25 mm beam-splitter prism with a mirrored render, an MPU6050 supplies attitude, and phone navigation arrives over BLE, auto-swapping the HUD between a 24-hour clock and live Google Maps directions.

Servo-actuated visor, integrated audio, health-monitoring hooks and dual I²C buses round it out. Prism render, IMU attitude, BLE navigation and the servo visor are all working on hardware.

Build short
Live

Merser Store

An App Store for AI. Models, skills, agents and runtimes, one place. Half of Mexger’s DNA.

16 modelsSupabaseGroqAES-256

Discover and install models and community skills across Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Cursor and more. PromptArm rewrites raw prompts through 8 modes for 16 models from 7 providers, so you see how the same idea lands everywhere. A Library tracks token usage and quota-refresh timers per provider; creators publish their own skills, prompt packs and agents to the store.

Bring your own API keys, encrypted with AES-256-GCM, or start on the free Llama 3.3 70B tier. Prompt content is never stored; export or delete your data any time.

Build video
merser.store ↗
Live

Grind!n

A social study RPG. One hour of focus earns one G. Streaks, stakes and leaderboards do the rest.

SupabaseVanilla JS21 tables14,270 lines

A session timer converts focus into G-Score, with streaks, achievements, a socially-earned Aura and grind levels from Beginner to Legend. Lock-in mode lets you stake your G on finishing a session; Coffee Pools bring the stakes to groups.

Audited and shipped in about seven weeks: 14,270 lines, 21 Supabase tables with row-level security on every one, realtime feeds, and a campus QR launch at Queen’s University Belfast.

mygrindin.com ↗
Live

Ulchats

Talk to your favourite person, when they don’t answer back. AI personas that text like people you know.

Llama 3.3 70BFlaskSupabaseLiving voice

A WhatsApp-style app where you chat with AI versions of specific people. Describe them, or import a real chat export and it picks up their voice on its own. Every message is stored and older threads fold into running summaries, so personas remember you across devices and days.

The clever bit: the voice keeps learning, but only from the persona’s side of the conversation, never yours. It stays them; it never drifts into mirroring you. Groq for near-instant replies, Supabase Postgres for durable memory, Flask serverless on Vercel.

Build short
ulchats.com ↗
In development

Belovrr

Dating where occupation is the primary filter. Occupation is the mechanism, love is the promise.

React NativeSupabaseOCS score

Occupation is the most underused signal in dating: a proxy for lifestyle, schedule, ambition and shared grind. Every app lets people judge by job quietly; Belovrr makes it the explicit foundation, scored through an Occupation Compatibility Score.

No swiping. A vertical feed with hold-and-slide up to like, down to pass, around a radial hub, and a tap-to-reveal glassmorphism profile. Landing page and waitlist are live and capturing emails; a working app prototype is built.

Join the waitlist ↗

The bench log: earlier builds, experiments and the infrastructure behind the featured work.

WiFi CSI Presence & Breathing Detection

Complete
Watch ↗

Contactless room presence and respiratory rate on a single low-cost ESP32, using Channel State Information. No camera, no wearable.

The DSP pipeline runs I/Q decomposition, phase sanitisation and a Butterworth bandpass over the 0.1–0.5 Hz breathing band, rendered live on a four-panel dashboard. v2 reaches the practical ceiling of what a single-radio ESP32 can sense.

Build video

Local AI Inference Stack

Running daily

A fully self-hosted multi-model environment on an RTX 5080 workstation. It powers ANA end to end, offline.

gpt-oss-20b, qwen3-14b, qwen2.5-coder and gemma3-12b served through Ollama and LM Studio, with Chatterbox voice cloning, Faster-Whisper speech recognition and nomic-embed-text for retrieval. Voice in, retrieval-grounded answers out, no cloud anywhere in the loop.

Robotic Arm · QUB Team Project

Ongoing

Multi-degree-of-freedom robotic arm built in collaboration with faculty at Queen’s University Belfast.

Portfolio Website

Live

This page. Hand-coded as a single file with zero dependencies, zero trackers and no build step — every project above documented in one place.

Taser · Self-Defence Hardware Build

Complete

A high-voltage energy-storage build with USB-C charging, designed around interlocks first.

A capacitor bank driven through mutual-inductance coils steps battery voltage up to a defensive arc. Two independent interlocks were the real design exercise: a limit switch to arm the device, plus a master safety that kills everything even with the trigger held. Built, tested, complete.

Build short

Flamethrower · Ignition-Control Experiment

Complete

A combustion-control test: pressurised fuel, an electronically gated ignition chamber, and interlocks everywhere.

A pressurised butane feed released into an electronically controlled ignition chamber, lit by an electric lighter coil sitting behind a limit-switch interlock. The point was the control chain, not the flame. Tested, documented, complete.

Build video
Capabilities

What I actually use.

Mechanical & mechatronics
Mechanism designActuator sizing (BLDC + harmonic drive)FOC motor controlServo actuationHigh-current contact designMonte-Carlo design sizing
CAD & fabrication
Fusion 360CadQueryOpenSCADFreeCADParametric CAD, STEP/STLFDM 3D printing, slicer tuning
Embedded & firmware
ESP32 (Arduino, ESP-IDF)Raspberry Pi · Pico to Pi 5, CM5STM32I²CSPIUARTBLEDual-core task partitioning
Hardware & sensors
PCB design (KiCad)SolderingIMU (MPU6050)ECG (AD8232)PPG / SpO₂ (MAX30102)IR thermometry (MLX90614)Transparent OLED and TFT displays
Signal processing
Digital filtering (band-pass, Butterworth)Pan-Tompkins R-peak detectionHRV analysisWiFi CSI extraction
Optics & AR
Reflective waveguidesBeam-splitter HUDsTransparent OLED integrationOptical alignment
Robotics & simulation
PX4 SITLGazeboDiscrete-event simulation (C++17)Physics simulation (three.js / cannon.js)
On-device AI
Ollama, LM Studio, llama.cppQuantised on-device LLMs · Phi-3-mini, Gemma, QwenMediaPipewhisper.cpp, Whisper / Faster-WhisperPiper TTS, ChatterboxRAG pipelines (nomic-embed-text)Edge ImpulseGroq API
Programming
PythonC++ (C++17)CJavaScriptSQL (Postgres)
Web & real-time
ReactThree.jsSupabase · Postgres, row-level security, realtimeVercel serverless
Proof of work

Credentials

Letter of recommendation

Queen’s University Belfast

Letter of recommendation for Mridul Sharma by Dr Oleksandr Malyuskin, Senior Lecturer, Centre for Wireless Innovation, Queen's University Belfast

“He is among the very best students I have taught.”

Dr Oleksandr MalyuskinSenior Lecturer (Associate Professor) · Centre for Wireless Innovation, Queen’s University Belfast
Education

BEng (Hons) Mechanical Engineering

Queen’s University Belfast · Sep 2025 – Jun 2028 (expected) · Year 1 average: 2:1.

Before that: CBSE Class XII, PCM with Computer Science — RD Rajpal School, New Delhi · 2023 – 2025 · 84%.

QUBDocumented builds
OpenAI Academy · Course completion

Agents and Workflows

OpenAI Academy course completion certificate for Agents and Workflows, issued to Mridul Sharma
Agents & WorkflowsIssued 10 Aug 2026ID 07xbqookpr

Designing agent architectures and multi-step LLM workflows — orchestration, tool use and evaluation.

Anthropic Education · Certificate of completion

Claude Platform 101

Anthropic Education certificate of completion for Claude Platform 101, issued to Mridul Sharma
Claude Platform 101Issued Aug 2026

Claude platform fundamentals — the Messages API, prompt design, tool use and building on Claude models.

Qualcomm Academy · Certificate of completion

AI Upskilling · Model to App

Qualcomm Academy certificate: AI Upskilling Certificate, Hands-On Development from Model to App, issued to Mridul Sharma
AI Upskilling CertificateIssued 08 Jun 2026ID 9QgWgwHN7s

Hands-On Development from Model to App: edge deployment, wake-word detection, person and gesture recognition, Edge Impulse workflows.

Build something with me.

Seeking a summer 2027 internship or 2027–28 placement in mechatronics, embedded systems, AR/VR and wearable hardware, robotics or hardware product development.

Embedded systems, AR and wearables R&D, hardware product development, or a collaboration on any of the builds above. Based in Belfast, UK. I reply fast.

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