Product · pilot customers
Groundplane
A firmware foundation for Cortex-M: verified boot, signed over-the-air updates, crash forensics and post-quantum signatures, built and tested with the discipline your auditors will ask about.
About Groundplane
Embedded software for microcontrollers and embedded Linux
Embedded software you can still support in ten years.
Volt Software builds the firmware foundations, test tooling and embedded software behind industrial products, from bare-metal Cortex-M to Yocto Linux. You get a senior engineer who can read every line that runs on your device, and who stays accountable for it.
Trusted with embedded and critical software at
- Qblox
- Itho Daalderop
- Vialis
- ChargePoint
- Thales
- Belastingdienst
What I offer
Two products and a pair of experienced hands
Start from a foundation that already works, verify your devices automatically, or bring in an engineer who has shipped this kind of software before.
Product · early access
BusBench
An automated test fixture for Modbus devices. BusBench sits on the RS485 bus as master or slave, and your Robot Framework suites decide how it behaves, so protocol bugs show up in the lab instead of the field.
About BusBenchConsulting & outsourcing
Services
Firmware for microcontrollers and embedded Linux, team and codebase assessments, and readiness for the Cyber Resilience Act and ISO 21434. On-site in the Netherlands or remote.
See servicesResults
Measured, not guessed
Engineering decisions should rest on data. A few numbers from recent work:
+50%network throughput in Qblox's quantum control firmware, from 100 to 150 commands/s
140 → 27 msML-DSA post-quantum signing on a Cortex-M33, written up here
500 kWDC fast chargers running CHAdeMO and OCPP 2.0.1 code I wrote at ChargePoint
14 yearsbuilding latency- and throughput-critical software, the last eight as an independent engineer
Why Volt Software
Built for products that live for a decade
A support promise that can be kept
Industrial machines run for ten years or more. I build on a small, stable set of dependencies that I can read in full and freeze, instead of a platform whose API changes every quarter.
The bug nobody else could find
When a device faults in the field you need to know what every task, stack and lock was doing. Crash capture with on-device backtraces, and the experience to read a Cortex-M or Cortex-R at the register level.
Compliance as engineering
The EU Cyber Resilience Act and ISO 21434 ask for secure boot, signed updates, a known software bill of materials and a vulnerability process. I build those in from the start instead of retrofitting them.
Teams that get better, not just code that ships
I have assessed departments for management, coached engineers and stood in as engineering manager. The aim is a team that can carry the product on without me.
Groundplane
Stop rebuilding the plumbing
Every embedded product team ends up writing a bootloader, an update mechanism, settings storage, logging and fault handling before they get to their actual product. Groundplane is that foundation, already built, tested on hardware and documented.
- Verified boot and signed over-the-air updates with automatic rollback
- Crash reports that survive a watchdog reset, with backtraces
- ECDSA P-256 and post-quantum ML-DSA signatures
- Hundreds of automated tests on the host and on emulated Cortex-M and Cortex-R targets
Your product application For example BusBench's Modbus layer
Services Signed OTA updates · settings storage · logging · error counters · self-test
Core library Strong types · containers · crypto (P-256, ML-DSA, SHA-256) · FreeRTOS wrappers
Platform Stage 0 verified boot · startup and MPU · fault capture with backtraces
Hardware STM32U5 (Cortex-M33) on silicon · Cortex-M33, M55 and R5 in emulation
Writing
From the blog
Long-form notes on embedded performance, C++ and what makes software hard to maintain.
ML-DSA on a Cortex-M33: From 140 ms to 27 ms, One Table at a Time
How ML-DSA-65 signing on an STM32U5 Cortex-M33 went from 140 ms to 27 ms, mostly by computing what never changes between calls once and keeping it small.
Why Programming Is Hard
Run-ins from maintaining medium to large C++ codebases: dependency upgrades that break, narrowly tested libraries and toolchains that keep moving.
static_vector Needs Type-Erasure
Why static_vector needs type erasure, and a type-erasable StaticVector in Ichor that stores differently sized, stack-allocated vectors inside one another.