Khattab Hamed

Khattab Hamed

I like to build things. Currently based in Toronto.

Bio

Happiest building at the intersection of software, hardware, and atoms.

Right now, working on tools to rebuild our manufacturing base.

Writing

Timeline

  1. Jun '25–Present

    Team Captain

    Western Aerospace Team

    Top-3 at SAE Aero Design East, the team's first podium in nine years. 40+ engineering students, two aircraft.

  2. May '24–May '25

    Software Engineering Intern

    RBC

    Built a 12-month vCPU demand forecast for RBC's private cloud across two data centers. Outputs fed directly into the next fiscal year's hardware procurement plan.

  3. 2024–Apr '25

    Flight Software Lead

    Western Aerospace Team

    Built mission autonomy for the team's VTOL aircraft (vertical takeoff, plane-like cruise). Simulated full missions end-to-end before any live flight, so failure modes surfaced on the ground.

  4. May '23–Oct '23

    R&D Intern

    Trojan Technologies

    Turned a multi-day UV lamp R&D loop into a one-command workflow. Reverse-engineered the test rig's recipe format, built a CLI to queue experiments, and shipped a pipeline that streamed data into Grafana.

  5. 2022–Apr '24

    Avionics Lead

    Western Aerospace Team

    Built the sensor suite (IMU, GPS, airspeed), power distribution, and wiring harness for the team's autonomous aircraft.

  6. May '22–Aug '22

    Research Intern

    Wearable Biomechatronics Lab, Western University

    Designed a fully 3D-printed, adjustable haptic glove with per-finger force feedback and live hand-pose reconstruction. Cheap and reproducible enough for classroom STEM kits.

Education

  1. 2020–2026

    BE, Mechatronics (Robotics) Engineering

    Western University

    Etherington Research Fellow. General Dynamics Engineering Award. Western Scholarship of Distinction.

  2. 2022–2026

    BSc, Computer Science

    Western University

    Concurrent dual degree.

Projects

Campus Food Delivery Drone

2026 · Capstone

An autonomous hybrid-VTOL drone that takes off vertically, cruises like a fixed-wing aircraft, and lowers a meal by winch from a 30 m hover. Built for last-mile food delivery on campus.

Owned the design end to end: airframe CAD, structural FEA in Ansys, aerodynamic analysis in XFLR5, VTOL-to-cruise flight model in Simulink, 48V electrical system and wiring, and autonomous flight software on PX4 with Hardware-in-the-Loop testing. Western Engineering capstone, team of four.

captions.tools

2025 · captions.tools

A fully local tool for editing images and GIFs in the browser. Nothing gets uploaded, nothing leaves your machine. Useful for the small everyday edits that desktop apps are overkill for: captions, reaction memes, mockups, chat screenshots.

It also ships with a plugin SDK. Describe an effect or element in plain English, copy the prompt the editor builds, paste it into Claude or ChatGPT, then paste the returned code back in. The new effect shows up in the toolbar next to the built-ins.

Haptic Glove

2022 · Wearable Biomechatronics Lab

A fully 3D-printed haptic glove sized to fit a range of hand shapes, with per-finger force feedback and live 3D hand reconstruction.

Designed and printed every part. Used micro-servos at each finger joint for both position sensing and force feedback, and IMUs across the hand to stream joint angles into a real-time 3D hand model. Built during a research internship at Western's Wearable Biomechatronics Lab.

wikiNow

2023 · Hack Western 9 · Best Use of Prompt Engineering, presented by Cohere

A web app that turns any question into a wikiHow-style how-to guide with per-step AI-generated illustrations. Fine-tuned Cohere's LLM on scraped wikiHow articles for the format and tone, and paired it with Stable Diffusion for the visuals.

Built in a weekend at Hack Western 9, before ChatGPT made LLM apps obvious. Devpost writeup.