// capture · core · pipelines · forward-deployed engineering

The infrastructure for the unconnected edge

One company, one platform, one name. The Mad Botter is mission-critical data and telemetry infrastructure for aerospace, heavy civil, industrial agriculture, robotics, and air-gapped environments — deterministic capture at the edge, a sovereign data layer, pipelines and BI on top. Deployed on your hardware, behind your boundary, operated by the team that built it. The systems an LLM can't write and a cloud vendor won't run.

Start the First Line Pilot See the platform

> capture sync --site crane-07 --queue offline

+ 2,143 events replayed · 0 lost · link 9.6 kbps

 

> deploy core --airgap --profile cmmc

+ enclave sealed · audit trail on

// illustrative — not customer data

// in production today: 500+ api endpoints · 70+ data models · 14,000 line items migrated · sensor fleets across five operating companies

deployment history DIRECT

U.S. Navy and Air National Guard contracts delivered directly — plus subcontract work supporting the Army and Air Force

track record 10+ YRS

production systems delivered and operated — we run what we build

reach 150K

monthly Coder Radio downloads (2026) — produced continuously since 2012

team 100%

US-based senior engineering — the people you meet run your systems

// the platform

One platform. Three layers. Your boundary.

Off-the-shelf software doesn't survive highly regulated, physical environments. The Mad Botter is one system inside one compliance boundary — capture at the edge, a sovereign data layer, pipelines and BI on top.

// illustrative — not customer data

// layer 01 · deterministic process record

Capture

Standard cloud IoT fails when bandwidth drops or security demands an air gap. The Capture layer records physical operations from the machines themselves — packing lines, 300-ton crawler cranes, secure aerospace environments.

Deterministic process capture — what actually happened on the line, recorded from the machines, not reconstructed from operator memory.
Hardware-agnostic ingestion — gateways, scales, label printers, barcode scanners, kiosks, and the serial-line equipment nobody else will talk to.
Offline-first architecture — capture continues through connectivity loss, queues locally, and reconciles in order when the link returns.
Compliance-first architecture — engineered for ITAR, EAR, CMMC, and NIST environments. We support your compliance posture; we don't certify it — and we'll say exactly that to your auditor.

// layer 02 · sovereign data layer

Core

The system of record lives on your hardware, behind your boundary — PostgreSQL, Parquet, and DuckDB, not a vendor’s cloud. Glass box: you can see past the pretty numbers, down to the exact queries that run your business.

Open formats, open standards — the storage outlives any vendor, including us.
Air-gap is a configuration — not a workaround. The record is written locally and syncs when the link exists.
Readable proof — the layer's lineage is open source: PG-Lake-Make, dredger-iot.

// layer 03 · unification + BI

Pipelines

Before you can automate the edge, you have to untangle the past. The Pipelines layer connects twenty-year-old, undocumented on-prem schemas to the core without breaking compliance — and serves BI on top.

Start self-serve — a scheduled Power BI dataset refresh, live before your next reporting meeting. $149/mo, 14-day trial.
Scale to enterprise — on-prem deployment that unifies the legacy estate and preps it for a full Capture rollout.

// in the field: aerospace & mro · heavy civil · industrial agriculture

// the front door

Start the First Line Pilot

$1,500 flat. Thirty days, one production line, verified by replay at day thirty — you judge the platform on the record it produces. The full $1,500 credits against your first platform invoice if you continue. The second door: the self-serve pipelines pilot, $149/mo with a 14-day trial, live before your next reporting meeting.

Start the First Line Pilot
first line pilot $1,500flat

thirty days · one production line · verified by replay

// forward-deployed engineering

Enterprise platforms don't install themselves

Most shops hand you a repo and wave goodbye. Every deployment runs through the same documented playbook — a standard sequence for mapping the undocumented systems, configuring the platform to your compliance posture, and verifying the record against your floor. A named delivery lead owns it end to end.

// 01 A documented deployment playbook

The same sequence every time: scope note, integration, verification, handover. Repeatable by design, so delivery does not depend on who happens to be free.

// 02 A named delivery lead

One accountable engineer owns your deployment, with a documented escalation path behind them. You always know who to call, and the answer is never "whoever picks up".

// 03 Managed operations, contracted

Monitoring, upgrades, and incident response run against an agreed service level under a separate operations agreement — not on goodwill and not on one person staying at the company.

// deployments

What the platform is running right now

Specifics rather than capabilities, because you can check specifics. All of this is in production.

// aerospace / mro

Corrosion alerts on parts nobody was watching

Field gateways — BeagleBone Black and Raspberry Pi over ethernet, Wi-Fi, or cellular — authenticating with rotating BCrypt-hashed keys and streaming temperature, humidity, pressure, vibration, and moisture into a time-series store. A rule engine evaluates per-asset thresholds including N-consecutive-breach conditions, each with its own cooldown, and grades alerts to email and Slack. High-value aerospace inventory had been sitting in storage with no monitoring at all.

// capture + core

// illustrative — not customer data

// aerospace / mro

MIL-STD-129 labels straight to the warehouse printers

Compliance labels used to mean opening a third-party tool, screenshotting the output, and eyeballing the print scale. Now they render as print-ready PDFs and stream to Zebra printers as ZPL with Code 128 and Data Matrix/PDF417 barcodes. RFID tag records cross-reference the job, the label, the shipment Transportation Control Number, and the DoD scan.

// capture

// illustrative — not customer data

// aerospace / mro

14,000 line items out of fifteen Monday boards

An order physically migrated from board to board as it aged — RFQ, orders, warehouse, finance, archive — stitched together by hand-typed reference numbers, alongside a 1.6 TB document store with no relationship to anything. Migrated into one relational job that keeps a single identity from quote to delivery.

// pipelines

// illustrative — not customer data

// heavy civil

A 300-ton crawler crane and a portable generator, same data model

Every asset across five operating companies got an identity and a weatherproof QR tag. Inspection cadences are enforced per equipment type — cranes on a different schedule and checklist than vibratory hammers — and transfers between subsidiaries run through request-and-approve with timestamped logging. Producing a certification history for an OSHA inspector went from hours of digging through filing cabinets to a scan.

// capture + core

// illustrative — not customer data

// agriculture

Software that talks to the packing line

A Python/Flask platform with 500+ endpoints and 70+ models across a multi-database PostgreSQL architecture, integrated with AWETA sorting and grading lines, automated bin fillers, scales, and barcode scanners. Windows desktop and Android apps on the warehouse floor, at loading docks, and at employee kiosks. Self-hosted over WireGuard with GitLab CI/CD — we run it, not just ship it.

// capture + core + pipelines

// illustrative — not customer data

// agriculture

Recall as a query instead of a fire drill

Lot traceability through the entire chain: harvest bin to filler to pallet to shipment to customer. Cold-chain verification captured at close, and the cleaning, waste, and pest-control records certifications demand generated as a byproduct of the work rather than a binder someone fills in later.

// capture + pipelines

// illustrative — not customer data

Written up in full: the aerospace deployment and the heavy civil fleet system.

// open source

Or skip us and read the code

The work above is private, so you'd have to take the write-up on faith. These you can just read.

// ruby dredger-iot

Running in production in both our aerospace and heavy civil deployments — you can read the hardware layer itself. GPIO and I2C abstractions for embedded Linux, pluggable sensor drivers, retry and scheduling helpers, and config-driven pin mapping for BeagleBone. Real backends via libgpiod and Linux i2c-dev, plus a simulation backend so it runs on a laptop. Published as a gem, MIT.

github → // postgres · duckdb PG-Lake-Make

Turns PostgreSQL into a lakehouse: query Parquet on S3-compatible storage directly through Postgres using DuckDB's engine, backed by MinIO or SeaweedFS. Runs on a laptop for development or your own VM for production — which is the entire point.

github → // c csv_to_parquet

A small CLI that converts CSV to Parquet through DuckDB, with type inference and correct handling of quoted fields, embedded newlines, and delimiters inside quotes. Unglamorous and useful.

github →

// faq

Straight answers

What does The Mad Botter actually do?

One platform — deterministic capture at the edge, a sovereign data layer, and pipelines and BI on top — deployed on your hardware and operated by our forward-deployed engineering team after go-live.

Is this a product or a service?

A platform, licensed to you and operated by our engineers. You own your data, your infrastructure, your configuration, and your deployment artifacts; we retain the reusable platform core, and updates and managed operations run on a platform agreement. We're not confused about it and you shouldn't be either.

What's with the name?

It's real, it's registered, and you'll remember it — which is the point of a name. The U.S. Navy signed contracts with it on the letterhead. Your procurement team will survive.

Can you operate inside ITAR and CMMC boundaries?

Yes — ITAR and EAR boundaries, CMMC and NIST posture, and facilities where "just put it in the cloud" is not an available answer. We are designed to support your compliance posture; we do not certify compliance.

Isn't this the kind of thing an LLM can do now?

Some of it, genuinely. Writing code got cheap. What did not get cheap is being accountable for a system in production — an undocumented schema nobody can explain, a packing line that talks over serial, an export-control boundary, and a deployment that has to survive Monday morning. That knowledge was never written down, so it was never in a training set.

What does it cost?

The First Line Pilot is $1,500 flat — thirty days, one production line, machine-verifiable finish. The self-serve pipelines pilot is $149/mo with a 14-day trial. Full platform deployment is scoped against your actual systems.

Start the First Line Pilot

// founder

You probably already know how I think

Michael Dominick at his desk

I'm Michael Dominick. I've hosted Coder Radio since 2012 — 150,000+ developers a month — and I write at dominickm.com. If you've listened, you already have a decade of evidence about how I think about software, which is more than you'll get from any pitch.

Founder. Vice Chair, IEEE Robotics & Automation Society, Florida West Coast Section. Host of Coder Radio since 2012 — 150,000+ developers monthly.

coder.show →dominickm.com →github →
// coder radio · latest episode 654: Prof Andrew Seely // live from the feed · 51 min · jul 18, 2026
▶
coder.show →
// dominickm.com · jul 24, 2026 AI SDRs Are Automating the Wrong Half of Sales // dominickm.com · jul 15, 2026 The $100,000 Cron Job // dominickm.com · jul 1, 2026 The 4th of July Compute Hack: The Cynical (But Brilliant) Economics of Anthropic’s Fable 5 Launch // live from dominickm.com/feed

// deploy at the edge with confidence

Built for the systems that can't fail

One platform in production across three industries. Direct Navy and Air National Guard delivery history. A 150,000-download-a-month developer channel we own. The Mad Botter is the product.

Start the First Line Pilot

// contact

Tell us what you're trying to build.