Smart Plank
Embedded firmware development for connected hardware.
Overview
An ongoing contracting engagement (under NDA) doing embedded firmware development for connected hardware devices. The product details stay private, but the work is hands-on firmware engineering — microcontroller bring-up, on-device sensors, wireless connectivity, and over-the-air updates, taking a device from bare metal to talking to the cloud.
The problem
A connected hardware product lives or dies on its firmware: the device has to wake on a tight power budget, read its sensors reliably, get data to the cloud over BLE and Wi-Fi, and accept updates in the field without ever bricking. Smart Plank needed a second-generation firmware that could do all of that on a new microcontroller while the rest of the platform — hub API, mobile app, and infrastructure — kept moving. Specifics are under NDA.
The approach
Hands-on embedded engineering in C and C++: bringing up the new microcontroller from bare metal, writing the sensor drivers and power-management state machine, layering BLE and Wi-Fi connectivity on top, and building an over-the-air update path with rollback so a bad release can never strand a device. Work is driven from the bench with modern embedded toolchains and logic-analyser debugging, and integrated against the hub API and mobile client as those evolve. The engagement is ongoing.
Highlights
- Microcontroller firmware bring-up in embedded C/C++
- On-device sensors, wireless connectivity, and over-the-air updates
- Hands-on hardware debugging with modern embedded toolchains
Tech stack
Want to talk through how this was built?
I build and ship production apps end-to-end. Happy to dig into the architecture, the tradeoffs, or your next project.