When Software Meets Hardware

TL;DR

Modernizing a fleet of 800,000 battery-powered sensors meant adapting familiar software practices to limited energy, unreliable connections and hardware constraints. The team combined real-device labs with large-scale simulations, built in diagnostics, and treated power use, disconnection and recovery as core design concerns. This exposed limits that small tests missed and made fleet-scale testing and operation more reliable, showing that engineering principles still apply even when their usual defaults do not.