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Daniel Amundson
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Hardware/Software Integration Risk

Board-level assessment when physical constraints meet software architecture. Ensure your IoT, edge computing, and critical systems work at scale before capital deployment.

When to Bring Me In

Hardware-enabled products fail for reasons that never appear in the slide deck: RF interference, bandwidth ceilings, firmware quirks, or protocols that don’t behave the way the cloud team assumes.

I act as the independent technical voice between your hardware teams, software teams, and board. The goal: stop you from scaling an architecture that is physically impossible or economically non-viable.

Board-Level Outcomes

What you walk away with

  • • Clear go / no-go view on large IoT or edge initiatives
  • • Independent validation of vendor claims and internal assumptions
  • • Identification of hidden bandwidth, latency, and power constraints
  • • Actionable remediation plan before capital is fully deployed

What This Includes

IoT Protocol & Connectivity Audit

Independent assessment of how your devices actually talk, not how the spec says they should.

I review RF/protocol behavior, message formats, duty cycles, and error handling. The focus is on what happens under real-world conditions: moving vehicles, obstructed signals, noisy RF environments, intermittent connectivity.

  • Capture and analyze on-the-wire traffic and device behavior
  • Identify fragility under speed, distance, or density
  • Document real-world throughput vs. theoretical limits

Hardware-Constrained Architecture Review

Align your software design with the hard limits of your devices and networks.

Most software teams design as if bandwidth, CPU, and power are infinite. Hardware teams know the reality. I bridge that gap and stop cloud-heavy designs that your devices simply cannot support.

  • Stress-test architecture against power, memory, and latency constraints
  • Highlight features that will fail under field conditions
  • Recommend simplified data models and communication patterns

Build vs. Buy Feasibility Analysis

Decide where proprietary software creates advantage and where third-party tools are a trap.

I help boards and executives decide whether to license, partner, or build in-house — with a clear view of long-term control, cost, and technical risk. When necessary, I reverse-engineer existing behavior to validate what is actually required.

  • Compare long-term TCO of build vs. license paths
  • Assess lock-in and operational risk of vendor solutions
  • Clarify which components are strategic IP vs. commodity

Blind Case Study: Global Metering Infrastructure

A global water infrastructure provider needed to modernize millions of legacy meters. Their hardware team believed they needed an expensive third-party activation stack to make the devices usable.

I was brought in to evaluate the technical feasibility and real options available. By analyzing the actual on-device protocol and behavior, I discovered that the hardware already exposed everything we needed — it just hadn’t been properly understood.

Outcome:

  • Designed a lightweight custom software solution using their existing devices
  • Enabled drive-by meter reading at ~40 mph and ~30 ft range
  • Avoided a multi-million dollar licensing commitment

Considering a large IoT or hardware-enabled initiative?

Before you commit capital, we can pressure-test the technical assumptions and physical constraints. If the plan will fail in the field, it should fail on paper first.