# The Mad Botter INC

> The Mad Botter is operational data infrastructure for the unconnected edge — deterministic capture, a sovereign data layer, and pipelines, deployed on your hardware and operated by forward-deployed engineers.

Positioning, in one line: the systems an LLM can't write and a cloud vendor won't run.

One company, one platform, one name. The Mad Botter IS the product — mission-critical data and telemetry infrastructure for aerospace, heavy civil, industrial agriculture, robotics, and air-gapped environments. It is deployed on the customer's hardware, behind the customer's compliance boundary, and operated after go-live by the same team that built it.

Writing code got cheap. Operating production systems did not. Anyone can generate something that works in a weekend; almost nobody can take a twenty-year-old schema nobody can explain, a packing line that talks over serial, and an export-control boundary, and be accountable for the result. That knowledge was never written down, so it was never in a training set. The scarce thing moved from code to accountability.

The company is small, senior, and 100% US-based. Voice is direct, technically literate, and specific.

The Mad Botter is not a staffing or developer-capacity vendor, not an AI-readiness consultancy, and not a generic "we build anything" development shop.

## The platform: one system, three layers, one boundary

The three capability names below are layers of one platform, not separate products and not separately purchasable. Two retain engine attributions from the marks they grew out of: Capture is powered by Vorpal, Pipelines is powered by Alice. Those are engines inside layers, never products a customer chooses between. BotterKit is retired outright.

- Capture — the deterministic process record. Physical operations recorded from the machines themselves: gateways, scales, label printers, barcode scanners, kiosks, and serial-line equipment. Offline-first with ultra-low-bandwidth sync, an ordered event log, replayable, air-gap capable. It records what happened; it does not predict what will happen.
- Core — the sovereign data layer. PostgreSQL for the operational record, Parquet on S3-compatible storage for the analytical tier, DuckDB as the query engine — all on the customer's hardware. Open formats, so the storage outlives any vendor including The Mad Botter.
- Pipelines — legacy schema unification, transformations, and BI serving, including scheduled Power BI datasets. Connects undocumented on-prem schemas to the core. The customer inspects the generated SQL and a real-data preview and approves explicitly before anything executes.

Forward-deployed engineering wraps all three: every deployment runs the same documented playbook — scope note, integration, verification, handover — owned by a named delivery lead with a defined escalation path. Managed operations run against an agreed service level under a separate operations agreement.

## Who it's for

Regulated, asset-heavy, project-centric operations — aerospace and MRO, heavy civil construction, and industrial agriculture — where one or more of these is true:

- The operational record depends on what an operator remembers writing down at the end of a shift.
- Equipment and sensor data is trapped on the machine, disconnected from the job or production consequence.
- The real operation runs through spreadsheets, email, file shares, and tribal knowledge.
- The ERP records transactions but does not reflect how work actually moves.
- A critical legacy application cannot be safely replaced, and nobody can explain its schema.
- Compliance evidence must be assembled manually before an audit.
- "Just put it in the cloud" is not an available answer — ITAR, EAR, CMMC, NIST, or an air gap.

Buyers are owners and presidents, COOs and VPs of Operations, directors of operations and maintenance, warehouse and production leaders, and program executives — alongside the CIO, CTO, IT director, IT/OT leader, and compliance or security owner who has to approve it.

## Offerings & pricing

- First Line Pilot — $1,500 flat. One production line, thirty days, verified by replay at day thirty. A preconfigured Core appliance and up to three Capture gateways — loaned from The Mad Botter's own pool, not sold — ship to the customer's dock; their maintenance tech or electrician mounts them from the included guide and bring-up is a scheduled remote session — no contractor, no site visit. Scope boundary: a US or Canadian facility, one site, one production line, up to 14 signals, equipment that can be physically reached, power within reach, and a named person who can mount hardware. The pilot is bought directly: a short intake form, then Stripe checkout — card, Link, or Cash App. There is no sales call, no assessment, and no qualifying step before payment; the customer self-assesses against the published scope boundary above. An optional twenty-minute call can be booked from the pilot page before ordering — no pitch, same price — but nothing requires it. Where procurement runs on purchase orders, an invoice is requested instead at https://themadbotter.com/start/invoice and goes out against a PO on net terms — ACH or wire. The buyer protection is the refund, not a pre-payment check: cancel any time before the kit ships for a full refund, no reason required, and after it ships one trigger remains — if bring-up cannot produce events from the equipment the customer described when ordering, that is a full refund too and the kit returns on the prepaid label. The box ships within five business days of a confirmed line: right after checkout the buyer is asked by email what is on the line — makes, models, counts — because the kit is built to that list, and one reply starts the clock. Bring-up is booked within fourteen days of delivery; the thirty-day clock starts at the first captured event, or fourteen days after delivery, whichever comes first. The architecture write-up delivered at day thirty carries the hardware specification, the deployment sequence, and the price of the rollout it describes. The full $1,500 credits against the first platform invoice if the customer continues; the loaned kit ships back on a prepaid label either way — it is never sold. Production runs on commodity units the customer buys themselves, to a specification we provide. Escorted on-site install is $2,500 flat. This is NOT a paid assessment and does not ship a report. Start at https://themadbotter.com/start
- Self-serve pipelines pilot — $149/mo (Workspace tier) with a 14-day trial. One source, one Power BI dataset, a scheduled refresh, live before the next reporting meeting. No sales call.
- Full platform deployment — $1,500 per line per month after a pilot. Hardware is separate and bought outright by the customer from their own supplier; The Mad Botter does not resell equipment, so no hardware figure is published. Scope is still per engagement — how many lines, what has to be integrated, what the compliance boundary demands — and the pilot's day-thirty architecture write-up specifies the units and the timeline, so the customer can check the number before committing to it. The $1,500 pilot credits in full against the first invoice.
- Forward-deployed engineering — bounded ownership of a defined part of the production stack rather than billed hours, delivered through a documented playbook with a named delivery lead. Monitoring, upgrades, and incident response are contracted against an agreed service level under a separate operations agreement.

## Ownership and the commercial model

Stated explicitly because two earlier claims did not reconcile. The split is:

- **Yours, permanently** — your operational data, the infrastructure it runs on, your configuration and integrations, and the deployment artifacts (exports, schemas, runbooks, credentials). In open formats, readable without The Mad Botter, and not contingent on a renewal.
- **Ours, and reused across customers** — the platform core: the Capture engine and its device abstractions, the Core data layer and its schema tooling, and the Pipelines runtime. This is licensed to the customer, not sold. It is what makes a deployment take months instead of years and why a pilot can be priced flat and low rather than quoted as a bespoke build.
- **What a platform agreement buys** — platform updates, security patches, and managed operations against an agreed service level, plus a named delivery lead and an escalation path. If the agreement lapses the deployment keeps running on the customer's hardware with their data; what stops is new versions and managed operations. There is no kill switch and nothing phones home to disable itself.

## Deployment and control

Self-hosted on infrastructure the customer owns — bare metal, their own servers, or a private cloud tenant. Ships as containers on PostgreSQL and established production technology. Edge capture runs on commodity BeagleBone and Raspberry Pi–class gateways. Self-hosted over WireGuard where a link exists; fully inside the enclave where one does not. Least-privilege access and audit logging throughout.

Engineered for ITAR, EAR, CMMC, and NIST environments. The Mad Botter is designed to support a client's compliance posture; it does not certify compliance.

Row data does not reach any AI model — only the customer's instruction plus table and column names and types. Full data-flow answers: https://themadbotter.com/security

## Open source

Public repositories at https://github.com/TheMadBotterINC — readable evidence that needs no reference check.

- dredger-iot (Ruby, MIT) — GPIO and I2C hardware integration for embedded Linux, pluggable sensor drivers, BeagleBone pin mapping, libgpiod and i2c-dev backends plus a simulation backend. Running in production in both the aerospace and heavy civil deployments.
- PG-Lake-Make — turns PostgreSQL into a lakehouse: Parquet on S3-compatible storage queried through Postgres via DuckDB, on MinIO or SeaweedFS.
- csv_to_parquet (C) — CSV to Parquet via DuckDB with automatic type inference.

## Proof

In production today: 500+ API endpoints, 70+ data models, 14,000 line items migrated, sensor fleets across five operating companies.

- Aerospace and MRO, 2026 — A Washington, DC-area aerospace parts broker and MRO shop ran its operation across fifteen Monday.com boards holding roughly 14,000 line items, a 1.6-terabyte shared document store, QuickBooks, and hand-built templates, stitched together by hand-typed reference numbers. The Mad Botter deployed the platform, migrated those ~14,000 records, and instrumented stored inventory with sensor gateways. The most valuable result: humidity and temperature alerts on parts-storage areas now warn of corrosion risk before high-value components are damaged. MIL-STD-129 labels print in one click; RFID tag records cross-reference the job, label, Transportation Control Number, and DoD scan.
- Heavy civil, 2025 — A Cincinnati-area deep foundations contractor with five subsidiaries, 15+ concurrent job sites, and 200+ field personnel tracked equipment in binders in truck cabs. The Mad Botter built an equipment operations layer with QR asset identity, inspection cadences enforced by equipment type, an audited transfer workflow, and a real-time fleet dashboard. Pulling an inspection history for an OSHA or DOT inspector went from hours to under ten seconds.
- Industrial agriculture, ongoing — A large industrial agriculture / greenhouse produce operation runs on a platform The Mad Botter designed, built, and operates: 500+ API endpoints, 70+ data models, integration with AWETA sorting and grading lines, bin fillers, scales, and scanners, plus lot traceability from harvest bin to customer.

Both case-study customers are unnamed by agreement, and the agriculture client is confidential.

Government relationship, stated precisely: direct work for the US Navy and the US Air National Guard, and subcontract work supporting the US Army and US Air Force. Specific programs are not named. The Air National Guard is a separate organization from the Air Force and direct Guard work does not license an "Air Force" claim. The aerospace case-study customer serves the Defense Logistics Agency, NATO, and allied air forces — The Mad Botter does not.

## Founder

Michael Dominick — Founder. Vice Chair, IEEE Robotics & Automation Society, Florida West Coast Section. Host of Coder Radio since 2012, reaching more than 150,000 monthly downloads (2026 basis).

## How to engage

The front door is the First Line Pilot at https://themadbotter.com/start. For anything else, "Talk to us about your operational system" opens a contact form on any page. The useful opener is whichever line's record is somebody's memory: the system everyone is nervous about, the integration one person understands, the deployment nobody wants to touch on a Friday. Direct contact: michael@themadbotter.com.

## Pages

- [Home](https://themadbotter.com/): The canonical positioning — the platform's three layers, the architecture diagram, deployments in production, open source, and the pilot.
- [The platform](https://themadbotter.com/platform): Capture, Core, and Pipelines in full, plus compliance posture and the two front doors.
- [Start the First Line Pilot](https://themadbotter.com/start): $1,500 flat, thirty days, one production line — how it runs, what ships in the box, what the customer keeps either way, whether a line qualifies, and the intake form.
- [Security](https://themadbotter.com/security): Where data lives, what reaches the AI model, what happens during an outage, air-gap posture, and vulnerability reporting.
- [Deployment specs](https://themadbotter.com/platform/deployment-specs): Container delivery, edge hardware, storage formats, network topologies, and audit logging.
- [Aerospace MRO case study](https://themadbotter.com/case-studies/aerospace-mro): From 15 Monday boards to one operational system — the full deployment.
- [Heavy civil case study](https://themadbotter.com/case-studies/heavy-civil-equipment): Turning equipment data into operational decisions across five subsidiaries.
- [Aerospace and MRO](https://themadbotter.com/mro): Jobs, parts, repair status, chain of custody, MIL-STD-129 labeling, compliance evidence, and equipment condition.
- [Heavy civil](https://themadbotter.com/aec): Projects, equipment availability and certification, field information, transfers, and utilization across concurrent sites.
- [Agriculture](https://themadbotter.com/agriculture): Production, inventory, equipment, environmental data, documents, seasonal workflows, and logistics.
- [Claude on Azure](https://themadbotter.com/claude-on-azure): For CIOs and IT directors weighing running Claude natively in their Azure tenant via Microsoft Foundry.

## Resources

- [Coder Radio](https://coder.show): Michael Dominick's weekly developer podcast, reaching more than 150,000 developers monthly.
- [Blog](https://dominickm.com): Notes from the field by Michael Dominick.
- [Open source](https://github.com/TheMadBotterINC): The Mad Botter on GitHub.

## Contact

- Email: michael@themadbotter.com