I'm Dewald.
This is what I build.
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 on 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.
Practice — 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.
Practice — 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.
Practice — software
Werktyd — face-scan time & attendance for South African small businesses, live and onboarding companies over Telegram and the web. TradeJot — a Telegram-and-web CRM for tradesmen, running in production on Postgres and Node. NovaSync — a Paper plugin that turns Minecraft servers into managed environments, used in production on multiple networks. Nova Quantum — a Fabric mod adding a voice-controlled AI companion. In active development: MugShotter, a privacy-by-design cross-firm incident index for licensed security firms, and Novacar, a self-hosted vehicle tracker. All shipped or shipping, all maintained.
Practice — research
A small research practice runs alongside the build work. The method is always the same: map a real scientific question against the published literature, find the cheapest experiment that could actually settle it, run it, and have independent AI reviewers attack the result before it's called a finding. So far that's meant a from-scratch study of whether quantum mechanics plays any functional role in the brain (verdict: honestly, not on current evidence — but not disproven); a consistency census of the statistics in published science, re-computing reported results to see how often they don't add up; and a careful re-audit of a celebrated scaling "law" against all the open data it claims to govern. A clean confirmation and an honest null result are equally worth reporting — the point is the careful re-check. The write-ups live on the research page.
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. Treat the user the way I'd want to be treated by a piece of equipment. Quiet, durable engineering. The long view.