Davis, California
Software for companies that build hardware
Instrument control, data acquisition, device communications, and telemetry at scale, with the lifecycle documentation that regulated and certified products require.
We work with hardware teams who have deep science expertise but no software engineer, and with instrument makers whose software has outlived its platform.
Approach
How we work
Hardware-literate software engineering
We choose data acquisition hardware against your requirements, validate the signal chain, and build the rigs that prove it works. When a vendor API is closed, we design around it.
Documentation discipline from regulated work
Development plans, architecture descriptions, dependency risk analysis, traceability, and verification evidence. We write these alongside the code, so they are ready when you need them.
Principal-level engineers
Three prior CTO roles and more than fifteen years of senior and staff engineering. Pebble Logic is three people: the principal and two subcontractors. The person who scopes your project is the one who writes the code.
What we do
Instrumentation and energy
Instrument software
Instrument control, DAQ integration, and desktop applications in Python and Qt, for scientific, industrial, and medical instruments. For instrument software that has outlived its platform, we offer a move to Python and Qt, with the measurement behavior checked against known injected signals before anything is retired.
The sharpest work is on instruments that have to be documented to a standard: regulated instrument software.
Energy, grid, and distributed energy resources
Fleet telemetry, device communications, and monitoring and commissioning tools for energy hardware. The evidence, from the principal's work before Pebble Logic: an OCPP 1.6 server written solo, interoperating with third-party chargers, and a rebuilt telemetry platform serving more than 40,000 commercial solar installations.
Where to start
Three ways people arrive here
A grant milestone and no software engineer
An instrument application, a data pipeline, or a dashboard, built to a date you do not control. These usually start with a two-week review so the scope and the estimate exist before anyone commits.
$7,500 fixed, two weeks
Instrument software stuck on an aging platform
A move to Python and Qt that measures what the old system measured, checked against known injected signals before anything is retired. The first such replacement is in progress now.
Hardware projects that need serious software
Design firms and systems integrators who win hardware work and would rather subcontract the software layer than hire for it. Anonymized case studies, available in more detail under NDA.
Selected work
Three projects
The first is current Pebble Logic work, with the client name withheld under a confidentiality agreement. The other two were performed by the principal before the firm was founded.
01
A bedside instrument console, replacing a closed-protocol setup
Python and PySide6 on Windows for a federally funded medical device program. The incumbent acquisition path ran through a vendor's closed proprietary protocol and was disqualified on evaluation. The replacement signal chain runs from a MEMS pressure sensor through signal conditioning to a LabJack T7, chosen by a formal trade study against 18 hard and 22 soft requirements. A second LabJack, a T4, feeds synthetic waveforms into the T7 analog input, so acquisition is verified against known signals. The software lifecycle documentation set supporting an FDA premarket submission is in progress.
02
More than 40,000 solar installations
A commercial monitoring platform rebuilt from scratch, sustaining more than 9,000 database inserts per second across roughly 500 million rows and 100 GB per month. Dashboard queries spanning months of history went from minutes to under two seconds, on a partitioned PostgreSQL and Redshift split routed by date range.
03
An OCPP 1.6 server, written solo
Written from scratch, with the Flask and PostgreSQL API and the React frontend of an EV charging platform around it. RFID authorization, usage tracking, charge-complete notification, and interoperation with third-party chargers.
Tell us about your instrument
Send a short description of the hardware, the software you have now, or the milestone you are working toward, and we can let you know whether it is a good fit.