Isaac Adjei
Electronic Engineering & Computer Science
Building at the intersection of hardware, software and AI/ML.
EE & CS student at Aston University, Birmingham, building across the full stack of engineering and technology. Open to internships, placements and professional opportunities.
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About
Engineering problems worth solving
I am Zac, an Electronic Engineering and Computer Science student at Aston University. I grew up in Ghana, relocated to the UK in 2022 and earned a triple Distinction in engineering, being recognised as Best and Most Hardworking Student at Stanmore College, before starting Electronic Engineering and Computer Science at Aston. I work at the intersection of hardware and software, spanning embedded systems, machine learning and production web development.
My late father was a mechanical engineer. His words, “Always strive to make things better”, still guide everything I build. I focus on accessible technology and systems that serve real users, the kind of engineering that matters beyond the screen.
Projects
Featured work
Two-Stage Audio Amplifier
Analogue two-stage amplifier with a TL071 active band-pass filter and an OPA551 buffer, simulated in Proteus and built on a custom PCB that drives an 8 Ω speaker.
4x4x4 NeoPixel LED Cube
64 individually addressable WS2812B LEDs on an Arduino Uno with adaptive brightness, four animation modes and a custom wooden enclosure.
PHAEMOS: Predictive Maintenance Platform
An open industrial IoT platform that streams sensor readings from four microcontroller nodes, scores every reading with a calibrated Isolation Forest and turns sustained anomalies into alerts and maintenance tickets on a live dashboard.
MELOPHOS: Light-Guided Instrument Learning
An open instrument learning platform: a hub that lights the next notes above a keyboard or along a fretboard, scores what is played and keeps practice data on your own server. Early stage, with a working browser Studio for melody practice.
Vitafolio: Every Version of Your CV
A free Laravel web app for building, storing and sharing every version of a CV, each with its own theme, privacy setting and link, with LaTeX compiled in the browser, a CV checker and a student jobs tracker.
LidarSAT: GPS-Denied Drone Navigation
A four-person research project on locating a drone without GPS by matching LiDAR height profiles to public terrain maps, comparing a classic matcher with a learned one. I own the repository and tooling, error measurement and the drone side, from simulated flights to flight logs.
Writing
Featured posts
Why Every Software Engineer Should Understand Hardware
An argument for why understanding hardware - registers, memory, timing, power - makes you a significantly better software engineer, regardless of whether you ever write firmware.
Bionic Vision and Ocular Prosthetics: Where the Science Actually Stands
A technical survey of retinoblastoma, ocular prosthetics and bionic vision systems: what prosthetic eyes can and cannot do, how retinal implants work and where the engineering challenges in restoring functional vision lie.
Hubble's Flawed Mirror: How 1.3 mm Blurred a Space Telescope
How one misplaced lens let the Hubble Space Telescope reach orbit in 1990 with a mirror polished precisely to the wrong shape and what that teaches about trusting a single test.
Git Hooks That Have Saved Me: Secrets, Big Files and Force Pushes
The three global Git hooks I run on every machine, what each one checks and the real mistakes they have stopped before they reached a remote.
How the Transistor Got Small: From a Germanium Slab to Billions on a Chip
A short history of the device inside every electronic product: the 1947 point-contact transistor, the integrated circuit, the MOSFET, Moore's law and why shrinking stopped being simple. Written for students who use microcontrollers without thinking about what is inside.
Open Source as an Organisation: A Monorepo With Read-Only Split Repos
How MELOPHOS keeps every component in one repository for reviews while publishing each folder as its own read-only repository with real history, using git subtree split and one GitHub Actions workflow.
Learning
Today I Learned
Tailwind only generates class names it can find written out in full
Tailwind [treats source files as plain text](https://tailwindcss.com/docs/detecting-classes-in-source-files) and generates CSS only for complete class names it finds, so `bg-${colour}-500` built at runtime never makes it into the stylesheet. It also ignores tokens it does not recognise without any warning, which is how `items-centre` and `transition-colours` sat in 16 files of the [PHAEMOS](https://phaemos.com) dashboard doing nothing. Map values to complete class strings instead. Spell utilities the American way too.
26 Oct 2026
git push --force-with-lease refuses to overwrite work you have not seen
[`--force-with-lease`](https://git-scm.com/docs/git-push#Documentation/git-push.txt---force-with-lease) only replaces the remote branch if it still points where your remote-tracking ref says it does, so a teammate's push since your last fetch makes the push fail instead of disappear. The catch is that a background `git fetch`, from an editor for example, updates that ref and quietly renews the lease. `--force-if-includes`, added in Git 2.30, closes the gap by also checking that the remote tip appears in your local branch's reflog, so the lease only holds when you have actually integrated what you fetched.
24 Oct 2026
A floating digital input reads noise, so every input needs a pull-up or a pull-down
A CMOS input draws almost no current: the [ATmega328P datasheet](https://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/en/DeviceDoc/Atmel-7810-Automotive-Microcontrollers-ATmega328P_Datasheet.pdf) quotes at most 1 µA of leakage. With nothing driving it, the pin's voltage drifts with whatever couples onto it, so a button that is not pressed can read high, low or flicker between the two. Even touching the wire changes the answer. A resistor to the supply (a pull-up) or to ground (a pull-down) gives the pin a defined state whenever nothing else is driving it. Most microcontrollers have one built in: [`INPUT_PULLUP`](https://docs.arduino.cc/learn/microcontrollers/digital-pins/) on an Arduino Uno switches on a 20 to 50 kΩ pull-up.
22 Oct 2026
Notebook
Notes
Taking lecture notes with low vision in mind
Recording lectures with the slides open in Genio Notes, marking the moments that matter, writing my own notes and lab reports and photographing lab setups. The habits that make lectures and labs workable for me.
23 Oct 2026
Putting Fedora beside Windows on my ThinkPad
Why my ThinkPad now dual boots Windows 11 and Fedora KDE Plasma, what I kept from Windows and how the whole setup is saved so the next laptop is quick to build.
21 Oct 2026
My reading list for the autumn term
The books I am working through this term: FPGAs, embedded design, machine learning, security, faith, music and one novel I should have read years ago. Why each one is on the list.
16 Oct 2026
Skills
Technologies I work with
Platforms & Operating Systems
Core Tools
Languages & Software
Let's work together
I am actively looking for internship and placement opportunities in engineering and technology. Whether you have a role, a project, a collaboration idea or just want to connect, I am always open to a conversation.
