Contract Mechatronics Engineer — Embedded Control System Design

Starting in September 2019, one of the longer-running contracts under my self-employed Mechatronics Engineering work (trading as True Hybrid Energy) was developing an embedded control system for an industrial IoT platform, intended for distribution across several different client projects.

This was a full-stack hardware project in the true sense: writing the firmware and control logic, specifying the electronics hardware requirements, and configuring a databasing solution so the platform could report back from remote, distributed installations. Designing for distribution rather than a single site changed the calculus on almost every decision — configuration had to be flexible, diagnostics had to work without physical access, and the hardware had to be robust enough to survive field conditions its designers wouldn’t get to inspect in person.

The contract ran for just over two years, into December 2021, overlapping with several other client engagements during the same period — a reminder that most of my “self-employed” years were really several parallel relationships rather than one job at a time.