Oscar Jakacki

Silicon/RF Intern, Stealth startup

San Diego, Jun 2026 - Sept 2026

RF and embedded work for an IoT hardware startup. Built Python tooling for hardware bring-up testing, including a GPS post-processing pipeline with signal filtering that brought location accuracy to within 20 m. Wrote a spectrum analyzer in software to run on our own hardware, used for interference analysis in place of dedicated bench equipment. Also worked on FPGA configuration and Linux test infrastructure.

Undergraduate Researcher, Embodied Systems Lab

Northwestern, Mar 2026 - present

A biosignal acquisition system built into smart glasses, detecting heart rate and emotional state from wearable sensors. I designed the op-amp signal conditioning circuits, built the conditioning PCB from scratch, and work on the embedded C firmware running on an XIAO ESP32.

Electrical Team Member, Northwestern Solar Car

Evanston, Jan 2026 - present

Redesigned the battery management system with a teammate, moving to a passive cell balancing architecture. Measurably improved cell voltage uniformity and system efficiency.

Research Assistant, Querrey Simpson Institute for Bioelectronics

Northwestern, Sep 2025 - Jan 2026

Worked on wearable devices that collect vitals from newly transplanted tissue in infants and adults. Improved PCB and enclosure designs in Altium and Fusion 360, and collected and processed sample vitals data.

Undergraduate Researcher, Pleshko Lab, Temple University

Philadelphia, Dec 2024 - Sep 2025

Used O-PTIR spectroscopy to study bone composition, measuring how sample orientation affects molecular vibration detection so O-PTIR data can be compared against conventional FTIR.

Music genre classifier on an FPGA

Verilog, Spartan-7, Vivado

Audio goes in a line-in, the genre comes out on an OLED. A 1024-point FFT, a 26-band mel filterbank and a quantised neural net, all in hand-written Verilog with no processor, no OS and no vendor IP. Fixed point throughout, so every stage needed its own number format. 86.3% on held-out samples, 67% on real music played into the board.

The hardest bug wasn't in the design. The board has 12 MHz and 100 MHz oscillators, and I'd mapped the wrong one in the constraints file, so the real sample rate was 8x off and every frequency landed in the wrong band. Simulation never caught it, because a testbench invents its own clock, and timing never caught it either.

GitHub

Web server on a disposable vape

C, Cortex-M0+, OpenOCD, 32 KB flash

A PY32F030 from a disposable vape, serving HTTP with no network hardware. A uIP stack speaking SLIP over ARM semihosting, tunnelled through SWD bit-banged on a Raspberry Pi's GPIO with no debug probe.

The pads on the vape's own board wouldn't take solder reliably, so I designed a breakout PCB around the same chip and had it fabbed at JLCPCB. That board is what's running the server.

It didn't work for two days. OpenOCD was silently discarding every incoming packet unless the chip happened to already be blocked in a read, so traffic went out and nothing ever came back. Patching OpenOCD to buffer that data instead of dropping it fixed it.

Live GitHub

Attenda Health (Grand Prize - Second Place Overall)

WildHacks 2026, Next.js, React, Supabase

I pitched this one to my team after volunteering at a hospital, where every patient request funnelled through a single central desk. Nurses had to walk back for assignments, urgent medical needs sat in the same queue as complaints about the food, and patients who didn't speak English waited on a translator before anyone could help them.

We built a mobile app that puts the call bell in the nurse's pocket instead. Voice requests are transcribed and translated automatically, a bed map highlights in sync with the queue so you can see who's asking from where, and an "On the Way" button signals back to the patient's room. Repeated calls about the same thing collapse into one card with a counter rather than spamming the list.

Devpost