Blog
From the register up.
Work at the seam between software and something physical, written up with the parts that only failed on real silicon, on a real floor, or at the two hundredth unit left in.
Arguments
What we end up saying out loud in a buying conversation, usually more than once.
- Systems6 min read
Designed on a desk, operated in a glove
An operator terminal is drawn on a good monitor, indoors, by somebody with bare hands and unhurried attention. Every one of those conditions is false at the machine, and the screen is judged by whichever one broke hardest.
- Engineering6 min read
What a calibration certificate actually buys you
Every instrumented process eventually has to defend a number to somebody who did not take it: an auditor, a regulator, a customer disputing an invoice. The defense is not the sensor. It is the chain behind it, and most projects discover they never built one on the day they need it.
- Systems6 min read
Modbus tells you where, not what
Register 40007 holds 8,192. That is everything the protocol knows and nothing anybody needs. The hard part of an edge gateway project is not speaking the protocol, it is deciding where meaning gets attached. Treat it as a plumbing exercise and the ambiguity ships into every system downstream.
- Security5 min read
The card number is not a credential
Most badge systems authenticate by reading a number off a card and comparing it to a list. That is an identifier, not proof of anything, and the federal standard that governs the largest deployment of badges in the country removed the equivalent mechanism outright.
- Systems5 min read
The update path is the product
A device that cannot be updated safely is a device with a fixed expiry date, and the date is set by the first security advisory nobody can act on. The update path is decided in the first two weeks of a hardware project and paid for over its whole life.
- Engineering6 min read
IP65 is a test, not a promise
Ingress ratings are the most quoted and least understood line on a terminal’s data sheet. They describe a laboratory procedure on a new sample, and say nothing about the two things that actually kill floor hardware. The two rating systems in common use are not interchangeable in the direction most buyers assume.
- Delivery6 min read
A pilot should buy a decision, not a demonstration
Most hardware pilots succeed and settle nothing. They prove that a device can work in a place where somebody was standing next to it, which was never in doubt, and they leave the rollout question exactly where it was.
Engineering write-ups
Systems we built end to end, walked through in full, with the parts that did not work left in.
- Engineering8 min read
Relative to what? The question that decides whether your data survives
A measurement is a number and a frame. Instrumentation projects reliably ship the number and leave the frame implicit, and a frame that was never recorded cannot be recovered afterwards by anyone, at any price.
- Engineering5 min read
From RTL to user space, and why the order matters
Five layers of stack on a single board. The engineering lesson was not about hardware; it was about the discipline of bringing up one layer at a time.
Next step
Disagree with any of this?
Good, that’s usually the start of a useful conversation. We’d rather argue with you before an engagement than during one.
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