Hardware & embedded

The typical case is a company that wants to measure, control or monitor something for which no suitable device can be bought: sensors in a plant, a meter somewhere without a network, an operating unit for a process that exists only here.

Then manufacturers who want to connect an existing product — the machine runs, but nobody knows from a distance what it is doing. And companies with a prototype that works but cannot go into series production because firmware, updates and manufacturing are missing.

The electronics: circuit diagram and board layout, choice of components, assembly and commissioning of the first samples. The usual basis is ESP32 and STM32; where more is needed, an embedded Linux built with Yocto.

The firmware: the program on the device, in C++ or Rust, including bootloader and updates over the air. A device without OTA updates is a device that has to be collected in after the first security flaw.

The connection: BLE, LoRa or Matter to the device, and from there encrypted into your back end. What happens with the data afterwards — evaluation, interface, alerting — we build in the same hand.

The most expensive mistakes in device projects happen at the border between the two: the board is manufactured, and only then does it turn out that the chosen radio standard halves the battery life or that the memory is not enough for an update over the air. Changes to hardware cost a production run; changes to software cost an afternoon.

That is why we design both together. The back end for the device data is built in our software development and operated on our own platform — see managed Kubernetes hosting. A fleet of devices sending data needs a counterpart that does not fall over.

We start with a build from off-the-shelf parts that answers the actual question: does the radio method carry at this spot? Is the battery enough? Is the sensor accurate enough? That is cheaper than settling those questions on a finished board.

After that the board of your own, the first samples, the firmware. For manufacturing we work with service providers; we are not a factory, but we prepare the documents so that a factory can work with them.

What comes afterwards is part of it: updates over the air, monitoring the installed base, fault-finding in the field. A device is not finished when it ships — that is where it starts.

We bill by time and materials at EUR 150 net per hour. We deliberately do not name a range here: device projects vary too widely for a figure on this page to help more than it misleads.

What tips the scales: the quantity, the radio method, the demands on battery life and environment, whether an enclosure is created — and above all whether the device needs radio approval or CE marking with testing. That is the item that blows up schedules most often, and we raise it first in the initial call.

Lucksmith e.K. is based in Bogel near Nastätten in the Rhein-Lahn district, about 25 km from Koblenz. With devices, proximity is practical: samples travel back and forth, and an hour at the bench on site settles what would otherwise take a week of correspondence. Clients in Koblenz, Wiesbaden and Limburg reach us in reasonable time; beyond that we work across Germany.