Allan Aziz: mechatronics engineer and music maker

01. Tesla: Manufacturing controls engineering intern

May to August 2026, Austin, Texas. Category: tesla.

A summer on a manufacturing controls team at Tesla in Austin. I split the time between the controls themselves (Siemens PLC and HMI software, interlocks, fail-safe behavior) and the tools around them: an AI engineering platform that reads the team's documentation and helps engineers trace and fix equipment problems. The specifics stay with Tesla; this is the shape of the work.

• Built an AI engineering platform for the controls team: document ingestion, semantic retrieval over manuals and programs, labelled debugging traces, and system graphs of how equipment connects.
• Set up versioned evaluations that check AI-generated PLC code against expected equipment behavior and safety constraints before it is used.
• Programmed and commissioned Siemens S7-1500 PLC and HMI logic in TIA Portal (SCL, ladder and function block diagram) with process interlocks and fail-safe behavior.
• Connected plant systems through REST APIs, single sign-on and RFID.
• Troubleshot equipment faults alongside mechanical, electrical and software engineers.

Tools: Siemens TIA Portal, S7-1500, SCL / LAD / FBD, HMI, Python, LLMs and retrieval, Evaluations, REST, SSO, RFID.

Role: controls engineering, plc / hmi, ai platform.

02. Music: Songwriter, producer and guitarist

Ongoing, College Station, Texas. Category: music.

I write and produce my own songs, beats and orchestral sketches, and I minor in music technology at Texas A&M. The habits carry over to the engineering: get a rough version down fast, listen hard, and fix whatever doesn't feel right.

• Write, arrange and produce in Logic Pro and Ableton Live, from the first idea to a mixed track.
• Orchestral sketches and mockups with Spitfire's BBC Symphony Orchestra for strings, brass and winds.
• Guitar first; MainStage for playing parts live.
• Built my own DSP effects rig for guitar (it's in the engineering projects).
• Minor in Music Technology at Texas A&M University.

Tools: Logic Pro, Ableton Live, MainStage, GarageBand, Spitfire BBC Symphony Orchestra, Splice, Guitar.

Role: writing, production, guitar.

03. Wearable headset: Hardware startup project with a small team

2026, in development, Texas A&M, College Station. Category: headset.

A wearable I'm building with a small team at Texas A&M: a headset that watches what's coming up behind you and tells you without blocking your ears. It's early, and parts of it stay private until the team is ready, so this is the outline.

• Designed custom four-layer circuit boards in KiCad, from schematic through fabrication and assembly.
• Building a sensor node with a camera, radar and a distance sensor; its firmware logs every reading so tests can be replayed.
• Wrote a native Mac app for the computer-vision work: live camera, object detection and a 3D replay of what the sensors saw.
• Designed and 3D-printed enclosures and mounts for the prototypes.

Tools: KiCad, ESP32-S3, C++, Swift and SwiftUI, Core ML, Python, Computer vision, 3D printing.

Role: hardware, embedded, computer vision.

04. ThinkFree Finance: Founder and software engineer

April 2025 to February 2026, College Station, Texas. Category: ai.

ThinkFree Finance explains markets for people who don't follow them for a living: renters, hourly workers, small-business owners, students. It reads the news, links it to public records and writes plain-English reports. A language model can state a wrong number as confidently as a right one, so the pipeline checks what it can and labels what it can't.

• AI pipeline: news collection, embedding-based clustering, LLM summaries and FAISS retrieval over economic reference texts, built to process over 1,000 articles a day.
• Links politicians, bills, lobbying, congressional trades and public spending using SEC EDGAR, OpenFEC, USASpending, BLS, Census and other public sources.
• Numbers in generated reports are checked against the source data, and summaries that fail are withheld.
• FastAPI website with accounts, MFA, CSRF protection, role-based access and a hash-chained audit log, plus a SwiftUI iPhone app.
• Ran my own security review in October 2026 and logged every bug I found with the test that proves the fix.

Tools: Python, FastAPI, FAISS, Sentence embeddings, LLM APIs, JavaScript, SwiftUI, pytest.

Role: founder, software, ai.

ThinkFree Finance: github / thinkfreefinance

05. hardcaml-pwm: Digital hardware design in OCaml

October 2026. Category: engineering.

A small piece of digital hardware written in OCaml with Jane Street's Hardcaml. Turn a rotary encoder and a PWM output follows, sliding to the new duty cycle over a few periods instead of jumping there. Simulated and tested, with the Verilog generated; a learning project that hasn't been run on an FPGA board yet.

• PWM block with interpolation: each new target ramps in over a fixed number of periods and lands exactly, with no rounding error.
• Quadrature decoder for an EC11-style encoder: synchronizers, debouncing, direction from the A and B edges, and clicks only on real detents.
• Waveform tests in simulation for every block, and generated Verilog.

Tools: OCaml, Hardcaml, Verilog, Simulation, Expect tests.

Role: digital design, ocaml.

hardcaml-pwm: github / hardcaml-pwm

06. DSP guitar rig: Effects hardware for guitar

Category: engineering.

A digital signal-processing effects system for my own guitar. It started on a breadboard and was tested there, and it's the project where the engineering bench and the music meet.

• Breadboarded the signal chain from guitar input to processed output.
• Tested it on the bench and by ear.

Tools: DSP, Breadboard prototyping, Guitar.

Role: hardware, dsp, guitar.

07. The Brute VR: Unity VR game, Aggie Coding Club

Fall 2022, Texas A&M, College Station. Category: engineering.

A virtual-reality game built by the Aggie Coding Club. I was one of its main contributors and built the world the player walks through: the maps, the cave level, and the environment, foliage and grass.

• Built the game's maps and its cave level in Unity.
• Environment art: assets, foliage and grass, and the scripts that place them.
• Worked in a club team through Git.

Tools: Unity, C#, VR, Git.

Role: level design, unity.

The Brute VR: github / the-brute-vr