Full-stack & embedded engineer

Volga Can Karakus

I build agricultural robots end to end: firmware, computer vision, cloud pipelines and the apps on top.

Volga sitting in an orange-lit lounge under a glowing AWS sign

TerraSentia on a test plot, and me at AWS.

9+: years shipping agricultural robotics software
86k: lines of C# in a game I build alone
3: clouds behind one analytics pipeline
2: products founded and built solo

Nine years in the field with TerraSentia.

Senior Software Engineer, EarthSense · 2018 to 2026

I owned systems on an autonomous crop-scouting robot, from the firmware up through the cloud analytics that turn raw field collections into crop data.

Aerial view of a palm plantation with detected trees marked in red and a serpentine robot route looping between the rows — Generated field routes: YOLOv8 finds the trees, the planner threads a serpentine path through the rows.

Aerial view of a tapering orchard block with detected tree centres and a generated back-and-forth route with rounded U-turns — Generated field routes: YOLOv8 finds the trees, the planner threads a serpentine path through the rows.

01
Cloud analytics pipeline
Containerized microservices on Azure Kubernetes that estimate crop height, LAI, width, stand count and point clouds, fed by a MongoDB change stream and a Redis job queue across AWS, Azure and GCP storage.
02
LiDAR crop-height algorithm
Polar-to-Cartesian conversion, left and right contour generation and percentile-based averaging, plus the internal Python libraries for odometry, camera projection and point clouds.
03
Autonomous path generator
Serpentine field routes built from YOLOv8-detected tree centres and field boundaries, with row clustering and curvature-constrained Bézier U-turns, exported as GeoJSON.
04
Web teleoperation
Real-time video and autonomous waypoint navigation over WebSockets and AWS Kinesis Video Streams, integrated with ROS2 Humble and shipped in Docker.
05
Data-review web app
SvelteKit on Firebase with a MongoDB Realm backend and Azure identity, used for plot alignment, video and LiDAR review, and launching pipelines.
06
LoRa firmware and operator apps
C++ LoRa firmware for Adafruit Feather M0 and custom SAMD21 modules on FreeRTOS, plus the Android apps operators use to drive the robots in the field.

Software Engineer (contract), Esit Electronik · 2025

Debugged a React Native telemetry app on Firebase, and built a YOLOv8 service that detects and counts Mediterranean fruit flies in trap imagery.

Things I build on my own time.

ShroomVerse · 2025 to present

An idle strategy game for iOS and Android.

Planets rebuild from a single seed and shatter along Voronoi cells. The economy keeps running while you are away, replayed step by step so it can never drift from the live rules.

86k lines of C# on Unity 6 URP
Five custom HLSL shaders
69 unit tests on asynchronous combat
About 30 UI panels, all built in code

Eden · 2024 to present

A smart garden sensor.

ESP32 firmware for BLE setup, camera capture and moisture sensing, with a SwiftUI companion app on Supabase.

A home desk with four monitors, a laptop and two keyboards — Where the side projects happen.

ShroomVerse colony view: a cratered asteroid planet in a starfield, with resource markers along the screen edges — ShroomVerse on iPhone. Planets grow from a single seed, and every panel is built in code.

A selected mothership with its panel open, showing the swarm unit count and an auto create button — ShroomVerse on iPhone. Planets grow from a single seed, and every panel is built in code.

Selected projects

Robot Data WebappJWT-authenticated dashboard charting robot field metrics. Node, React, MongoDB.
Companion Logging WebLocal Dockerized site with AES-256-GCM credential encryption over robot collections.
John Deere Tango automationSenior capstone: an Android controller for an automated mower, presented to John Deere engineers.

The toolkit.

Languages: Python, C#, TypeScript, JavaScript, C/C++, Java, Swift, Dart, SQL, Bash
Cloud & DevOps: AWS, Azure AKS, GCP, Docker, Kubernetes, Firebase
Backend & Data: Node, Express, Flask, Meteor, MongoDB, Redis, REST, WebSockets
Frontend: React, Svelte, SvelteKit, Vite, D3
Mobile: SwiftUI, React Native, Expo, Flutter, Android
Robotics & ML: ROS2 Humble, LiDAR, OpenCV, YOLOv8, NumPy, SciPy, GIS
Embedded: PlatformIO, ESP32, SAMD21, FreeRTOS, BLE, LoRa
Game dev: Unity 6 URP, HLSL, procedural meshes, Unity Test Framework
AI-assisted dev: Claude Code: agent loops, custom skills, subagents, hooks