Alpagut Sencer Karaca

Portfolio · Rev 2.1

AlpagutSencerKaraca

Engineer who works across the full hardware stack, from schematic to serial production, and from bare-metal firmware to embedded Linux microservices. Over five years I've shipped PCBs, IoT products, autonomous robots and wearable devices, and co-founded an R&D company alongside full-time roles. I care most about work that actually reaches the factory floor.

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Discipline
Hardware Design · Embedded Software Engineering
Based in
Istanbul, Turkey
Status
Taking on freelance hardware & firmware projects
Contact
alpagutsencerkaraca@gmail.com
Links
GitHub · LinkedIn

01 / Selected work

Work

Fig. 01 — Solar cellular meter-reading board · 360° view, drag to rotate

01 · PCB design

Solar cellular meter-reading board

A solar-powered remote meter-reading node: camera on an FPC connector, SIM and cellular modem stacked on the underside, a wireless module with an external antenna and a wide-input power stage. Drag the board to turn it; the view is rendered straight from the Altium STEP and Gerbers.

Altium Designer / Cellular / Camera / Solar power

Altium EZ Panelizer
Fig. 02 — Altium EZ Panelizer

02 · Open-source tool

Altium EZ Panelizer

An Altium Designer script that builds a depanelisable panel from a single board, by V-cut scoring or mouse bites, with rails, tooling holes, fiducials and the fab note generated for you.

Altium Designer / DelphiScript

View source ↗

More work

  1. 03

    High-voltage DC generator card

    Circuit design

    A driver card for an electrostatic spray gun: an LV14540 buck converter feeding a power-transistor oscillator, with the inductor and switching frequency chosen for the cascade it drives.

    Power electronics / Buck converter / High voltage
  2. 04

    PCB render pipeline

    Tooling

    One command turns an Altium STEP and its Gerbers into photorealistic Blender Cycles renders: studio stills, packaging shots and 360° turntable videos.

    Blender / Python / STEP / Gerber
  3. 05

    Altium layout helpers

    Tooling

    Scripts that speed up layout: one groups footprints by schematic sheet right after Update PCB, another draws a clean assembly drawing for both sides of the board.

    Altium Designer / DelphiScriptSource ↗

02 / Capabilities

What I do

  1. 01

    PCB design & layout

    2/4/6-layer and high-speed boards in Altium Designer, with signal-integrity and PDN analysis, and fab-ready outputs: Gerbers, drill, BOM, pick-and-place, assembly drawings and panels.

  2. 02

    Circuit design

    Motor drives, isolated and switching power supplies, RF subsystems, sensing and high-voltage stages, with every value computed and documented.

  3. 03

    Embedded firmware

    Bare-metal and RTOS firmware on STM32 and ESP32 in C/C++: CAN/CANopen, LIN, Modbus, BLE, bootloaders and over-the-air updates.

  4. 04

    Embedded Linux

    Custom Yocto layers and BSPs, systemd services and microservice architectures over ZeroMQ, gRPC and MQTT, built in CI.

  5. 05

    Production & test

    From prototype to serial production: SMT process planning, test jigs, provisioning stations and commissioning. I've taken products to runs of hundreds of units.

  6. 06

    Legacy board recovery

    Lost the design files? I rebuild a verified schematic and an editable CAD project from Gerbers or the physical board.

03 / Experience

Where I've worked

  1. Jan 2024 — Jan 2026
    Istanbul

    Delivers.ai

    Embedded Systems Team Lead

    • –Led a team of 4 engineers building the software and hardware of an autonomous food delivery robot.
    • –Designed 2/4/6-layer high-speed PCBs for motor driving, ultrasonic sensing and several RF subsystems.
    • –Architected the embedded Linux software as microservices over ZeroMQ and gRPC/Protobuf.
    • –Implemented CANopen for motor controller communication across the robot's subsystems.
    • –Ran the Yocto build environment through Azure Pipelines on a dedicated OS-build server.
    • –Oversaw production planning, test jig design and hardware commissioning.

    C/C++ / Python / ZeroMQ / gRPC / Yocto / CANopen / Altium Designer

  2. 2023 — Jun 2026
    Istanbul

    Infaura R&D Technologies

    Co-Founder & Hardware Systems Advisor

    • –Co-founded an R&D company delivering bespoke hardware and embedded software to industrial clients.
    • –Won client contracts and led end-to-end hardware and firmware engagements.
    • –Designed and mass-produced 500 units of a static powder coating machine with µA-precision current control and a fully custom LCD interface, including the manufacturing process.
    • –Advised clients on system architecture, component selection, signal integrity and production readiness.

    Altium Designer / STM32 / ESP32 / LIN / CAN / Isolated power

  3. Apr 2022 — Jan 2024
    Istanbul

    Bosphorus Industrial Software Solutions

    Embedded Software & Hardware Design Engineer

    • –Developed multi-threaded microservice applications on embedded Linux for industry-leading IoT customers.
    • –Implemented cloud connectivity with MQTT (Sparkplug B / Mosquitto).
    • –Wrote custom Yocto layers, recipes (Dunfell, Kirkstone) and kernel extensions.
    • –Designed 2/4/6-layer PCBs and led production planning, testing and commissioning.
    • –Maintained CI/CD with Azure Pipelines and agents for automated OS builds.

    C/C++ / Yocto / MQTT / ZeroMQ / gRPC / Altium Designer

  4. Jan 2021 — Dec 2021
    Istanbul

    Augmency Teknoloji

    Hardware Design Engineer

    • –Designed 6-layer high-speed PCBs for smart glasses and battery fast-charging modules.
    • –Led PDN analysis and signal integrity reviews with ICD Design Integrity and Saturn PCB Suite.
    • –Contributed to embedded Linux and Android development for head-mounted displays.
    • –Took three products into mass production: the B-Pack USB-PD battery module, Cyclops HMD Pro and Cyclops HMD Pro G.

    Altium Designer / 6-layer HDI / PDN analysis / USB-PD

  5. 2018 — 2019
    Izmir

    Artek Otomasyon

    Embedded Systems Engineer

    • –Implemented PID control algorithms, PCB designs and embedded test software for industrial automation systems.

    PID control / PCB design

04 / Toolbox

Tools & protocols

Hardware design
Altium Designer, KiCad, 2/4/6-layer PCB, High-speed signal integrity, PDN analysis, Saturn PCB Suite, ICD Design Integrity
Embedded software
C/C++, Python, Bash, FreeRTOS, ChibiOS, STM32, ESP32
Embedded Linux & build
Yocto (Dunfell, Kirkstone), systemd, OpenOCD, GCC, GDB
Protocols
CAN / CANopen, LIN, RS-232/485, SPI, I2C, USART, USB, Modbus TCP/RTU, OPC-UA, Zigbee, Bluetooth 5, 802.11, LoRa
IPC & networking
ZeroMQ, Linux message queues, gRPC / Protobuf, MQTT (Sparkplug, Mosquitto), TCP/IP, UDP
Production & tools
SMT process planning, Test jig design, Azure Pipelines, Git, Jira, Blender renders

05 / Background

Education

Degrees

2021 — 2023

Istanbul Technical University

M.Sc. Electronics Engineering, Electro-Optical Systems (not completed)

2015 — 2019

Adnan Menderes University

B.Sc. Electrical and Electronics Engineering (100% English)

Publications

2018

Implementation of a Portable and Low-Cost 3D Laser Scanner

Karaca A.S., Kalkan Y., Dönük A., Yılmaz M. Refereed journal.

2017

Implementation of a Portable and Low-Cost 3D Laser Scanner

Karaca A.S., Kalkan Y., Dönük A., Yılmaz M. 13th International Conference on Technical and Physical Problems of Electrical Engineering.

Languages

TurkishNative
EnglishProfessional

06 / Contact

Have a board
to build?

Send me the requirements, a sketch or an old board. I'll reply with how I would approach it, a timeline and a quote.

alpagutsencerkaraca@gmail.com↗