seidr labs
I’m Dewald du Toit. I build software, electronics and industrial machinery in the Free State, South Africa.
Seidr Labs is a one-person studio in South Africa. What it makes is maintained engineering: projects that ship, run in production, get fixed and ship again.
There are real users on the other side. A farmer relying on a pivot controller in 40°C. A tradie running the day off a phone. A Minecraft community trusting a plugin to hold its server up.
I split my time across three practices that look unrelated on paper and feel closely 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 one Seiðr is named for: durable, hand-built, no shortcuts.
BSc Computer Science & Statistics, North-West University, Potchefstroom campus. Graduated 2017, and inducted into the Golden Key International Honour Society (top 15% of class).
I was a hands-on engineer 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.
Machinery, electronics and software share one standard: build it properly, then keep it running.
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.
All shipped or shipping, all maintained.
For the software side I work alongside an AI collaborator (Claude), which sits at the keyboard with me in long sessions. It is not a stunt. It is a workflow, and it is how this lab moves faster than a normal solo shop would. Specs, reviews, refactors and deploy pipelines we do 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. The discipline is the same.
Do the next right thing instead of the next shiny thing.
The same four rules hold across the machinery, the electronics and the software.
A feature is done when it has been clicked through, scanned or driven on the surface a real user touches, not when the tests pass.
POPIA is not a checkbox at the end. The products store the minimum, encrypt at rest and log every privileged action.
Everything on the projects page is still looked after. Shipping is the start of the job, not the end of it.
Statuses on this site say what is live, what is in the field and what is still being built. A null result gets reported as proudly as a win. See the research page.
You work directly with the person who designs, builds, hosts and maintains the result.
Free State, South Africa · SAST hours