shaostassen.com
Shao Stassen
I work where software meets hardware — control loops on microcontrollers, autonomous robots, and the ML systems that let them see.
selected work
Things I have built
full case studies in progress
Bits → Messages
EmbeddedA serial-communication simulator whose engine also drives a real device node — the same UART runs the diagram in the browser and the /dev/ttys* you open with screen.
protocols: six, compared
case study →
Blaze and Heat
RoboticsA combat-robotics game with no hit points: the spinner stores real rotational energy, and the collision that dumps it is what decides whether armour shears off.
stored blade energy: 4302 J at 1910 RPM
in progress
case study →
Electrons → Instructions
EmbeddedAn interactive eleven-level descent from charge drifting in copper to a running program that puts a bit back on a pin — and every level can be broken on purpose.
levels: 11, each earned
case study →
Emulation-Based Fault Injection Harness
EmbeddedA campaign harness that glitches bare-metal firmware in emulation to measure which countermeasures actually stop a secure-boot bypass — across two instruction sets, with every result cross-checked against a second emulator.
exhaustive search: 95.9M fault pairs
in progress
case study →
Fast Robots: Sensor Fusion and Autonomous Navigation
RoboticsA hand-built differential-drive robot that localizes with a Bayes filter and pulls off high-speed maneuvers by Kalman-filtering sensor data faster than the sensors themselves update.
case study →
Huey: Autonomous 3 lb Combat Robot
RoboticsA beetleweight combat robot that finds and engages its opponent on its own — vision-based detection feeding an orientation controller, in an environment built to destroy it.
weight class: 3 lb
in progress
case study →
Local-First Imitation-Learning Platform
RoboticsThe whole imitation-learning loop on one laptop — teleoperate a manipulation task in the browser, record demonstrations, train a policy, then watch that policy take the controls — with no GPU anywhere in it.
CPU training: 14 s on one core
in progress
case study →
Parallel Sparse Matrix–Matrix Multiplication
Systems · HPCA parallel SpGEMM built on Gustavson's algorithm, reaching ~21× speedup on a 32-core Xeon system by attacking load imbalance and memory-bound accumulation.
speedup: ~21× on 32 cores
case study →
SpeechLens
ML · CVA fully local language-ID and transcription pipeline — faster-whisper and Silero VAD behind an explicit anti-hallucination harness — running large-v3 at 3.9× realtime on a CPU with no GPU at all.
CPU throughput: 3.9× realtime (9950X, large-v3 int8)
in progress
case study →
field log
Plates from the notebook
Evidence, mostly. Some of it is lab work; some of it is just where I happened to be standing.
