Adding some hardware to your software

Building out some useful hardware.

Hey there! I’m looking for a new gig as a fractional senior frontend or fullstack developer (15h-20h a week). I have experience building software for public transportation, employee management, cybersecurity, and a bit of IoT, but I’m open to any industry. Please reach out if you need some help!

As developers we build a lot of cool toys for ourselves, but there is still so much more to do out there in the world. I’m digging more into hardware there days, and there are so many areas that would deserve better software.

Not every business has the budget to do a big industrial setup: there are a lot of small farms and manufacturing operations out there that will do anything from food to clothing.

With their small budgets, they’ll usually end up with some clunky desktop software and weird proprietary formats that was designed at the turn of the century and never really upgraded.

Thing you would think are solved problems are really painful, such as being able to collecting some temperature measurements and then analyze them. I bought a handful of cheap data loggers last year, and they all give out a bunch of weird PDF, or if you’re really lucky, a CSV with a weird format.

I also started doing some custom control circuits, which usually end up being activating some equipment according to time or sensor data with some Arduino code. Nothing earth-shattering, but that custom bit of logic is often a game changer.

I’m staying at the prototype level at the moment, but with modern prototyping platforms and tools it’s easier than it ever was, and a lot cheaper to go from an idea to a working solution that’s pretty robust.

I’d like to start teaching developers how to get started on hardware: many of us have some Arduinos and Raspberry Pi gathering dust, but it can be hard and intimidating to start working on physical projects. Are you in? Reply to this email if this is something you would be interested in.