Hello

I'm Dewald.
This is what I build — and how.

The lab

Seidr Labs is a one-person studio out of South Africa. The thing it makes is maintained engineering — projects that get shipped, run in production, get fixed, and shipped again. Real users on the other side, whether that's a farmer relying on a pivot controller in 40°C, a tradie running their day off their phone, or a Minecraft community trusting a plugin to hold their server up.

I split my time across three practices that look unrelated on paper and feel very related in the workshop: industrial machinery with my partners at RND Automation, embedded electronics for farms and security, and business software that I design, write, run, and maintain end-to-end. The common thread is the same one Seiðr is named for: durable, hand-built, no shortcuts.

Background

BSc Computer Science & Statistics, North-West University, Potchefstroom campus — graduated 2017. Inducted into the Golden Key International Honour Society (top 15% of class).

Hands-on engineer since long before that. The first irrigation controller I wired up was an Arduino with a relay shield and a lot of optimism. The controllers I build now run on ESP32 with proper watchdogs, OTA updates, and LoRa for sites where there isn't a network for ten kilometres. Same instinct, better tooling.

Three practices

Industrial. Co-founder and resident engineer at RND Automation, a custom-machinery shop in the Free State. We build bagging, screening, and packaging machines for agriculture and mining. I do the SolidWorks design, the Delta PLC ladder-logic programming, the electrical build, the commissioning, and the service callouts.

Embedded. HekMotor — ESP32-powered smart gate control and anti-theft alarms running on rural plots, opened by call, SMS or app, with OTA firmware updates. Arduino-driven centre-pivot irrigation controllers for farmers. Long-range LoRa wireless networks tying together remote sensors and actuators across farm-scale distances.

Software. Werktyd — face-scan time & attendance, live and onboarding SA companies. TradeJot — a Telegram-and-web CRM for small businesses, running in production. Virtual Doorbell — gate visitors ring your phone on Telegram, live and taking subscriptions. MugShotter — a privacy-by-design incident index for licensed security firms. NovaSync and Nova Quantum on the Minecraft side, and Novacar in development. All shipped or shipping, all maintained.

How I work

For the software side I work alongside an AI collaborator (Claude), which sits at the keyboard with me in long sessions. It's not a stunt — it's a workflow, and it's how this lab moves faster than a normal solo shop would. Specs, reviews, refactors, deploy pipelines — we do those together. The judgement, the priorities, and the standard of the work are mine.

For the industrial and embedded side the tools are different — SolidWorks, ladder-logic editors, oscilloscopes, the right wrench — but the discipline is the same. Do the next right thing instead of the next shiny thing. Quiet, durable engineering. The long view.

  • Tested on the real thing A feature is done when it's been clicked through, scanned, or driven on the surface a real user touches — not when the tests pass.
  • Privacy before it's demanded POPIA isn't a checkbox at the end — the products store the minimum, encrypt at rest, and log every privileged action.
  • Maintained, not abandoned Everything on the projects page is still looked after. Shipping is the start of the job, not the end of it.
  • Honest reporting Statuses on this site say what's live, what's in the field, and what's still being built. A null result gets reported as proudly as a win — see the research page.
Work with me See the projects