Building Software for Embedded and Low Power Devices
Developing software for devices with limited memory, strict power budgets, and zero tolerance for failure requires a different mindset. Here is what 18 years of experience has taught me.
Not every device gets the luxury of a quad-core processor and gigabytes of RAM. Some of the most important systems in the world run on microcontrollers with a few hundred kilobytes of memory, powered by batteries that need to last months or even years. I’ve spent a significant part of my 18-year career building software for exactly those devices.
At Subsite Electronics and Ditch Witch, the products I worked on were underground detection and utility locating systems. Construction crews depend on these devices to find buried pipes and cables before they break ground. They run in extreme conditions, they need to be accurate every single time, and they can’t afford to drain their batteries halfway through a job. That’s a very different challenge than building a web app.
Why Low Power Changes Everything
When you’re building for a device with a tight power budget, every line of code has a cost. Every clock cycle, every peripheral you keep active, every radio transmission draws from a finite energy source. You learn to think about software differently.
It starts with understanding the hardware. What sleep modes does the processor support? How much current does each peripheral draw? What’s the wake-up latency? These aren’t abstract questions. They directly determine how you architect your firmware.
At ABB, I worked on embedded platforms where power efficiency wasn’t just a feature. It was a requirement baked into the product specification. You design your software around sleep states. You batch your processing. You minimize radio-on time. You treat every milliamp like it matters, because it does.
Memory Is Not Free
On a cloud server, if you need more memory you spin up a bigger instance. On an embedded device with 256KB of RAM, you get creative. Dynamic memory allocation becomes risky because fragmentation can crash your system hours or days after deployment. So you plan your memory usage at design time. Static allocation, memory pools, fixed-size buffers.
This discipline actually makes you a better engineer across the board. When I’m building web applications or cloud services at Lucin Solutions, I carry the same instinct. Resources are never unlimited. Code that respects its environment performs better, costs less to run, and scales more predictably.
Testing in the Real World
One thing that embedded development teaches you quickly is that the lab is not the field. I’ve seen firmware that passed every bench test fail in deployment because of temperature variations, electrical noise, or edge cases that only appear after thousands of operating hours. You learn to design defensively, build in self-diagnostics, and never assume that “works on my bench” means “ready to ship.”
At Lucin Solutions, we bring that same rigor to every project. Whether we’re building firmware for a sensor or a web application for a growing business, we test under conditions that reflect reality, not just the happy path.
The Growing Opportunity
The IoT market keeps expanding, and with it the demand for embedded software that’s efficient, reliable, and secure. If your business is building connected devices or thinking about it, getting the firmware right is the foundation everything else depends on. Poor embedded software leads to product recalls, battery complaints, security vulnerabilities, and customer trust issues that are expensive to fix after launch.
If you’re building a product that runs on embedded hardware and you need engineering support that understands the constraints, let’s talk.