johan_u

B.Eng. Engineering Product Development · SUTD · Class of 2029

Johan Untawidjaja

Greetings. I am an engineering undergraduate in Singapore, an ASEAN Undergraduate Scholar, and — depending on the hour — a photographer, a perfect-pitch pianist, or the person at the back of the orchestra carrying a double bass he learned from scratch in a single term. This is where the work lives: the things I have designed, deployed, pitched, and occasionally broken on purpose to find out why.

Studying
Engineering Product DevelopmentSUTD · Sept 2025 – 2029
Scholarship
ASEAN Undergraduate ScholarshipAwarded 2025
Leading
President, SUTD Chinese OrchestraSince March 2026
Building
SUTD Competitive RoboticsVEX U · since Oct 2025

Selected work

Six things worth showing

Each one is written up in full on the projects page — what the problem actually was, what I got wrong first, and what survived contact with a real user.

Jurnal Lentera Bursa

Sept 2026

A trading journal and calculator for Indonesian retail investors on the IDX. It answers the questions a broker app quietly refuses to: what a trade costs once every fee is counted, where the exchange's price fractions land you, what the auto-reject ceiling and floor are today, and what your true break-even price actually is.

I directed an AI teammate through the build and then audited it. Of three defects it reported back to me, I disproved two by reading the source and fixed the one that was real. That habit — treat the output as a colleague's contribution, not as an answer — is the part I would want to be judged on.

Decipher

Feb 2026

PathFinder 2026, a two-day deep-tech case run by SUTD I&E and SEVEN. One of nine teams, handed a live research project — software that characterises noise inside quantum processors — and asked to make a business of it. We built a TRL 3 to 9 roadmap across superconducting, photonic and trapped-ion hardware and pitched it to an external mentor, the principal researcher and an industry judge.

CommercialisationDeep techTeam of 4

Konora

May 2026

Two weeks in Bali with Institut Teknologi Sepuluh Nopember. Traditional Balinese performers lose thirty to forty per cent of every fee to middlemen, and no registry of them exists — Instagram is the infrastructure, WhatsApp is the contract, cash is the payment processor. We designed the marketplace that closes that gap, and let performers define their own boundaries on what they will and will not perform.

Global immersionMarket researchIndonesia

SeenScreen

Jan – Mar 2026

A carriage-occupancy display so MRT passengers stop packing into one cabin while the next runs half empty. I owned the simulated build in CAD, the final product design, and every poster and slide that went on the wall at the iDeA showcase.

CADProduct designExhibited

Solar-Powered Doorbell

May – Aug 2026

A doorbell sized by battery and photovoltaic calculation to run without ever touching mains power. The first enclosure sealed the panel in and promptly muffled the speaker and trapped heat; the second one gave the sound and the airflow somewhere to go. The failure taught more than the calculation did.

Energy systemsFull CAD setIterated

MediSync

Sept 2025

A medication and appointment reminder for elderly users with no smartphone and no dependable internet — ESP32 firmware, a web application and a serial bridge between them. The bridge did not survive the device's RAM budget, and we diagnosed that live, in front of the room.

HackathonESP32Shipped a diagnosis

Off the bench

The other half

I have never believed the engineering and the music are separate activities. Both are the same instinct — take something structured, find where it bends, and rebuild it so it sounds right.

  • 01
    SUTD Chinese Orchestra President since March 2026, marketing executive for the TENacity concert before that. I play dizi, zhongruan, double bass and the Chinese drums — the double bass from nothing to concert standard in one term, under a mentor with more patience than I deserved.
  • 02
    Photography Judge's Choice Artwork at the Santa Laurensia Art Exhibition, and my school's representative at FL2SN. Most of the images on this site are mine.
  • 03
    Communities built from nothing Fédération d'échecs Santa Laurensia, 中华小天地 (Little Chinese World), and Rejuvenate — whose peer-tutoring arm, Rejuvenate Grades, I led.
  • 04
    Competitive robotics SUTD Competitive Robotics, VEX U. Sheet metal and motor assembly on one side of the bench, autonomous routines and camera calibration on the other. A Laurel Award at the 2026 Student Achievement Awards, shared with the team.

In progress

Being written

This site replaces my old Google Site. Home, Projects and About are live; the rest arrives chapter by chapter.

  • CompetitionsPathFinder, Infinitics mathematical modelling, INASEC, the ICT Awards, and the physics olympiads.
  • MusicSUTDCO, the instruments, and what running a student orchestra's budget actually involves.
  • PhotographyA proper gallery, rather than photographs used as evidence for something else.
  • LearningWorkshops, certifications, and a straight account of how I work with AI tools and where I refuse to trust them.