About me

1.0Overview

I’m Zhaojin, an Electrical and Computer Engineering student at Carnegie Mellon, graduating in May 2028. I grew up in Dubai and moved to Pittsburgh for college.

Most of what I do is embedded systems and the software around them. I've gone and wrote writeups for everything I've created in the Projects page, feel free to have a look!

2.0At Carnegie Mellon

Since July 2026 I’ve been an undergraduate researcher at CMU’s Microdynamic Systems Laboratory. My main project there has been moving the controller of a magnetically levitated haptic device off an old QNX PC and onto a board small enough to sit inside the device. I also built a teleoperation mode that drives the lab’s ballbot from the haptic handle, with force feedback. Both have their own pages here: the maglev haptic controller and the Shmoobot.

I also lead RoboOrchestra, a student group building robots that play instruments, and I’m on the executive board of RoboClub.

3.0Before Carnegie Mellon

I went to school at Dubai College. While I was there I started Logic Labs, an electronics program that became part of the school curriculum and is now run by a student team, and I built and ran MusBook, a lesson-scheduling platform for music teachers, on my own for two years. I also spent a year at the American University in Dubai training license-plate detectors to run on a Jetson, and did the survey analysis for a study on how people in the Gulf see generative AI, which was presented at Cambridge University and published by Springer Nature.

4.0Outside Engineering

I play viola and piano. I was First Chair Violist of the National Youth Orchestra of Dubai from 2023 to 2025 and hold an ARSM diploma, and some recordings are on YouTube. I also put a little more effort for my coffee than normal: I brew with a V60 and a Baratza Encore. As a fun side project, I've made CoffeeBrewTracker, a small Flutter app to note down everything about your brew.