Ali Mozaffari

Project: Perfecta – AI-Automated Barbecue System

• Designed and developed three production-ready PCBs using Altium Designer, achieving Class C safety compliance from CSA, successfully passing endurance testing of up to 100,000 cycles, and radiated and conducted EMC tests.
• Engineered a high-voltage (2.4 kV) continuous ignition circuit optimised to minimise electromagnetic interference, while achieving reliable spark generation and stable operation under repeated cycling.
• Developed flame detection circuits with analogue short circuit detection, self-test, and lockout mechanisms, improving system safety and ensuring zero ignition failures during extensive validation testing.
• Integrated a System on Module (SoM), BLE and Wi-Fi connectivity, LCD interface, and control circuits for stepper motors, solenoid valves, and multiple sensors, enabling fully automated operation with real-time monitoring.
• Implemented valve control logic entirely in digital hardware to isolate safety-critical functions from firmware, ensuring functional safety compliance and eliminating risks during software updates.
• Delivered a market-ready product that successfully passed safety and EMC certification, with initial units shipped to customers for real-world deployment.

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Project: Rollapaluza – Biking Event Automation System

• Designed three custom PCBs using Altium Designer: an optical sensor board, a display board with seven-segment and LED strip interfaces, and a main control board integrating motor drivers, RF communication, and Raspberry Pi interfaces.
• Developed PCB layouts with robust power distribution and signal integrity to ensure reliable high-speed operation, achieving stable system performance with zero hardware failures during testing and live events.
• Conducted endurance and functional testing for each assembled unit, verifying all system features, and performance requirements prior to customer delivery.
• Delivered a fully automated event control system that replaced a legacy mechanical setup, successfully operating for two consecutive days across more than 50 races at the EDS show.

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Project: Clearwater – Sonar Bell Detection Algorithm (Ongoing)

• Developing a machine learning-based detection algorithm to identify specialised underwater objects known as Sonar Bells from sonar signal data.
• Designing a signal processing pipeline using wavelet and Hilbert transforms to preprocess raw sonar signals and improve feature extraction from noisy measurements.
• Implementing a 1D convolutional neural network (CNN) to encode sonar signal traces into compact feature representations for classification tasks
• Developing a gated recurrent unit (GRU) model to detect the presence of Sonar Bell objects from extracted features in sequential sonar data.
• Applied a bootstrapping method to refine noisy labels, improving the F1 score from 75% to 83%.

Project: Side-Channel Attack on AES-128

• Designed and implemented a side-channel attack on AES-128 using Differential Power Analysis (DPA).
• Developed a high-bandwidth measurement system capable of capturing current transients up to 24 MHz, with an overall gain-bandwidth product of 1 GHz, enabling accurate measurement of peak currents for a device running on a 2 MHz clock. The system was simulated in PSpice, and implemented in Altium Designer.
• Acquired power traces from the measurement board, digitised using a Rigol oscilloscope with 25 million sampling points, and transferred via LAN to a PC for analysis.
• Wrote an optimised Python-based programme to evaluate correlations and recover AES encryption keys.

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Project: Embedded system testing

• Developed Python scripts and used the Robot Framework to perform end-to-end testing of a car radio embedded system, validating both software and hardware.

• Developed a biomedical signal acquisition prototype as part of a master's thesis. Designed hardware in Altium Designer and implemented embedded software in C using TI-RTOS to acquire and process PPG signals via I2C, and transmit physiological data over BLE. Developed a cross-platform mobile application using Flutter for real-time visualisation on iOS and Android devices.

• Developed MATLAB-based software to detect and measure critical parameters used in security analysis. Generated C code from MATLAB algorithms for deployment on a server system, and integrated the solution with a mobile application.