Rutvik Narayana

Aquasense Private Limited

Product Developer / Co-founder • Oct 2017 — Present

Aquasense Private Limited is an IIT-Delhi incubated, StartUp India recognized company developing innovative solutions for water resource management.

• Core member of the product development team involved in the end-end development of an acoustic based Digital Water Level Recorder (DWLR) called the “Statometer” from initial hardware development to deployment of ~1300 devices in client locations.
• Greatly reduced the time and costs incurred during onsite visits by implementing a secure Over-the-Air Programming (OTAP) system for the Statometer’s sensor and the GSM/GPRS ZEDAT (Zero Effort Data Acquisition and Transmission) Telemetry system.
• Actively involved in the research and development of improvements to the Statometer’s algorithm, thereby reducing the error rate by ~12% and improving the sensor’s robustness.
• Was solely responsible for developing the firmware of the company’s 2nd product FTU (Flow meter Telemetry Unit) that can be interfaced with any new and legacy flow meters to record and monitor water consumption in industries and manufacturing plants through an online dashboard.
• Led a team in developing an ultra-low powered version of the Statometer with a battery life of ~1.2 years. The project involved designing the power supply PCB, Optimizing the sensor algorithm to reduce the data acquisition time by 27% and redesigning parts of ZEDAT system architecture.
• Designed and implemented the cloud architecture for a project (600+ devices) on AWS to handle, process and visualize data (water level and water conductivity) being transmitted from the telemetry systems.
• Worked on interfacing the telemetry system with Air Quality sensor, Ultrasonic sensor, Radar Level sensor, Electrical Conductivity sensors, etc. using different protocols like I2C, UART, MODBUS RTU, 4-20mA, etc
• Led the effort to develop online and offline tools for device health monitoring, configuration, etc. and scripts in Python to automate manual day to day tasks.
• Other initiatives I’m proactively involved in:
  • Firmware development and maintenance of all products and custom solutions at Aquasense.
  • Manage procurement for small batch manufacturing and create Quality Control procedures for the product.
  • Manage the Repair & Maintenance team. Oversee the device installation and maintenance related operations.
  • Liaise with clients to understand their specific needs and customize the product to suit their requirements.

Premier IT Solutions Inc.

Systems Administrator • Dec 2016 — April 2017

As an intern, I analysed existing hardware systems, documented the application development process and worked on kernel customization, Driver development for the Beaglebone Board.

State University of New York at Buffalo

M.Sc., Electrical Engineering • 2014 — 2016

• Embedded Systems
• Wearable and Implantable Sensors
• Semi-conductor Materials
• Microelectronic Fabrication Lab

SRM University

B.Tech, Electronics and Communication Engineering • 2010 — 2014

• Microprocessors & Microcontrollers
• Computer Architecture
• Wireless Communication
• Digital Image Processing

Low-power wide-area (LPWA) sensor network based on LoRa™ technology.

Personal project •

• Working on designing an SX1272 based LoRa node PCB that can be used to interface with different sensors. The sensor nodes are connected to a base node (Raspberry Pi interfaced with a LoRa HAT) in a star topology.
• The sensor data is transmitted to a cloud server and can be accessed using open-source IoT applications such as thingSpeak™.

Developed a browser-based application to monitor the status of IoT devices

Personal project •

• To have a stronger understanding of AWS, I took up a self-directed learning project; Configured a LAMP server that logs MQTT messages from the sensor nodes into an SQLite database which can be accessed through a browser-based frontend to view the status of the installed devices, battery level and last measurement.

Design a 12V Voltage Regulator IC

Course project • Oct 2015 — Jan 2016

• Designed a 12V voltage regulator by integrating a two-stage cascaded operational amplifier and a Widlar Bandgap Reference Voltage circuit in Cadence Virtuoso Analog Design Environment.
• Packaged the IC and verified the design by checking for parameters like power dissipation, effect of temperature, varying input voltage etc by running simulations on Cadence ADE.

Fabrication of a crystalline Si p-n junction solar cell

Course project • Jul 2015 — Sep 2015

• The Fabrication was done in the University’s Cleanroom; the process included wafer cleaning, Photolithography, Sputtering, Etching and Ion Implantation.
• The Solar cell was tested for parameters like fill factor, maximum power and efficiency.

Developed a game on the LPC1768 development board

Course project • Feb 2015 — May 2015

• The project involved understanding the architecture and capabilities of the Cortex-M3 processor based development board, interfacing the microcontroller with a GLCD Screen, a 3-axis MEMS sensor on the Wii Nunchuk via I2C etc and developing a game in Embedded C using Keil Tools.

Application and Game Development

Personal project • Jun 2016 — Aug 2016

• Developed a “Flappy Birds” style game in Python 2.7 using the Pygame library.
• Created a 2D “Space Invaders” game in the Unity 5 environment.
• Created a GUI based application in Python that uses web scraping and a text to speech engine to display and read out the local NEWS and weather forecast (OWM API AND DarkSky API).

Best Project of the Year 2014

SRM University • 2014

• The objective of the project was to design a smart shopping cart that would eliminate the need for queues and manual labor at billing counters thereby reducing operational costs and wait times.
• Successfully designed a system with a PIC microcontroller at the core interfaced with passive RFID tags, an LCD, APR9600 Sound Recorder IC and a GSM module.

Programming languages

C, Embedded C, Python and C++.

Communication protocols

I2C, SPI, RS-485 (Modbus RTU) and USB.

μProcessors and μControllers

Cortex M0+ (SAM-D series), Cortex M3 (LPC1768), Cortex M4 (SAM4S series) and Xtensa LX6 (ESP32).

• Game development
• Playing the keyboard
• Sketching