Architect your product, assess the design you have, create the one you don't, and take it through to production — interaction design included. Come in wherever you are.
ApplePelotonQualcommLucentWi-Fi Alliance Board
Connected hardware fails in the seams. The industrial designer hands off to mechanical, mechanical hands off to electrical, electrical hands off to firmware, and somewhere around the third handoff a decision gets made that nobody owns and nobody can undo eighteen months later.
We take the whole chain. Not a specialist for one layer and a project manager to chase the rest. One accountable engineer who has shipped every part of it himself, pulling in the industrial designers, mechanical engineers, and factories we've worked with before.
Where we're deepest is the part that's hardest to hire for: radios and antennas, wireless networking, IoT, Matter and Thread, cloud back ends, over-the-air firmware updates that won't brick a fleet, and the telemetry that tells you what's actually happening in the field. Decades of it — from the first consumer generation of Wi-Fi to the stack shipping today. We've been on both sides of the silicon table, too: running the wireless software organization at a chip vendor, and being the customer who chose the parts and pushed the roadmaps at Apple.
What we make
Your product, as far down the road as you want to go. Some clients want the architecture settled and a working prototype. Some want the whole thing: a sketch on Monday and a purchase order with a contract manufacturer at the end.
We write the code ourselves, with an AI software team behind it — agentic development, AI coders and testers, on real shipping firmware and applications rather than a demo. That's why an engagement that used to take a quarter now produces something you can hold in a few weeks, and why the reference implementation you get is production code instead of a sketch.
Architecture Which radio, which silicon, how it's commissioned, how the fleet gets updated, what the platform looks like three generations out.
Experience and interaction design What the product asks a person to do and how it answers — setup someone finishes on the first try, and sensible behaviour when the network is gone or the battery is low. We do this ourselves. Industrial designers we've shipped with come in for form and materials.
Mechanical and electrical Enclosure, thermal, antenna placement, schematic, layout, and the bring-up when the first boards arrive.
Firmware Bare metal to RTOS to embedded Linux. Radio stacks, secure boot, encrypted telemetry, OTA that won't brick a fleet.
App and cloud The phone in the customer's hand and the services behind it — provisioning, identity, telemetry, the data that tells you whether anyone is still using the thing.
Design for manufacture DFM and DFT, BOM cost, test coverage, the unglamorous work that decides whether the tenth thousand unit costs what the first one did.
Certification FCC, UL, CE, RoHS and REACH. Interoperability testing for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Matter and Thread.
Production CM and ODM selection, quoting, tooling, NPI builds, line qualification, and staying on it through ramp.
Scoped per engagement. You can stop at any stage, and plenty of clients do.
What we mend
Programs that have stalled, and teams that need a senior technical voice they can't yet hire full time. A prototype that won't pass certification. A design win slipping because nobody can solve a firmware problem. An ODM relationship that's gone quiet. One or two days a week, or a hard push until it's unstuck.
We also help engineering teams put AI to work properly — agentic development, AI coders and testers, and the phase gates that decide which experiments earn their way past pilot. We've designed and run that program inside a company, not just recommended it.
This is the work we like best: system design, and bringing other engineers along with it. We're engineers, not project managers. The closest thing to a PMP in this building is named Claude. What we're good at is telling you why the right answer takes as long as it takes.
Monthly retainer, minimum three months. Also available for stalled design wins where a silicon vendor's customer needs someone who has solved the problem before.
What we'll tell you straight
An assessment of the design you already have. Whether the radio choice holds at volume, whether the antenna will pass certification, whether the OTA scheme is safe, what the BOM really costs, and what breaks when you go from a hundred units to a hundred thousand.
The same work for investors looking at a connected hardware company: is the technology real, can the team build it, does the manufacturing plan survive contact with volume. We've done this on the acquiring side at Qualcomm. Sometimes the answer is that it's fine and the risk is somewhere you weren't looking.
One to two weeks. Written findings, a call to walk through them, and a conversation with your engineering lead if that helps.
Thirty years of hardware that has to reach something else.
Phil Kearney — founder and principal engineer
Thirty years of building connected products, most of it inside other people's companies. The work I'm best at is architecture, system design, and getting hardware out the door, and Nightwhistle is the shortest path between that and the people who need it.
I started at InterCon Systems, a startup that shipped the first commercial TCP/IP software for the Macintosh. This was the early nineties. Most people hadn't heard of the internet yet, and it was still an open question whether TCP/IP or OSI would win. Our web browser was later licensed by AOL as the first way their customers reached the web, and shipped again as Apple's eWorld browser.
From there into consumer wireless at Lucent, where I managed the team behind the first generation of 802.11 products and co-led development of the Lucent BG-2000 and Apple's first AirPort Base Station — the first modern wireless home router. I sat in the industry meetings for Lucent back when the group still called itself WECA, and I was in the room for the branding firm's presentation where the technology stopped being 802.11 and became Wi-Fi.
Then I went to Apple to run that product line. Across four generations of AirPort I owned every technical and feature decision, grew the business tenfold to over $500 million, and led a hundred-plus engineers through their managers. The platform choices I made then — a driver abstraction that let us change silicon vendors without rebuilding, an operating system chosen for footprint and license cleanliness — paid off four product generations running. That is the whole test of an architecture.
The remit widened to all of Communications Technologies: every Wi-Fi module, Bluetooth module, and Ethernet subsystem in every Apple product, plus the cellular modems in Macs. Hardware, drivers, and the full stack above, including which chips went in and what I asked the silicon vendors to build next. I selected the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth combo module that went into the first iPhone.
My group also invented AirTunes — synchronized audio sent over Wi-Fi to a speaker across the house — along with the networked media station patents that Apple TV and most streaming players since descend from. AirTunes became AirPlay. My claims in those patents are the networked half: discovery, wireless transport, synchronized rendering.
At Qualcomm I ran the group that wrote the firmware for all of their reference design access points — the platforms Belkin, Netgear, and the rest of the Tier-1 router makers shipped their products on — and moved the entire portfolio off an internally maintained Linux distribution onto OpenWRT. I also founded AllPlay there — the same synchronized-streaming problem as AirTunes, solved a second time as a platform other companies could build on, licensed by Tier-1 audio brands — and owned the Wi-Fi driver stacks across every client chipset, with teams across three countries. I built a smart lighting business from nothing — recruited the whole engineering organization and shipped a product that won a CES Innovation Award and that I'm lead inventor on the patent family for. At Peloton I owned system architecture across connected fitness hardware, including the wireless domain, and designed the BLE-assisted Wi-Fi commissioning that gets a machine onto a customer's network. Most recently I ran all engineering — firmware, hardware, mechanical, software, quality — for a connected lighting business, concept through high-volume manufacturing with overseas ODM partners.
The thing I took from Apple and never put down is how a product should behave. I came up in a culture where industrial design led and where Steve Jobs taught all of us to care about things most companies never look at — where the experience got argued over until it was right, and where working correctly was the start of the conversation rather than the end of it. That applies as much to a setup flow on a phone as to what a device does at two in the morning when it can't find the network. Most engineers who can write a radio stack can't design the interaction, and most people who can design the interaction have never shipped firmware. I do both, which is usually the reason someone calls.
I've represented two companies on Wi-Fi Alliance boards and sat in Bluetooth SIG working groups.
What changed this year is that I ship production firmware, mobile apps, and cloud services myself, with AI as my software team. That only became possible in 2026, when the models got good enough for real embedded and application work. It isn't a demo — it's the delivery model for a consumer product I built end to end.
What we work in.
wireless
Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and BLE, 802.15.4, Thread, Matter, HomePlug. Multiprotocol coexistence, scheduling, and the spectrum arguments that come with sharing an antenna.
embedded
ESP32, FreeRTOS, embedded Linux, OpenWRT, NetBSD. Driver abstraction across silicon vendors, secure boot, encrypted telemetry, OTA at fleet scale.
PKI, mutual TLS, device attestation, ownership transfer, commissioning and provisioning flows that ordinary people can actually complete.
experience and interaction design
How a product behaves, not just what it does. Setup a non-technical person completes on the first try, sensible answers when something is wrong, and the hundred small decisions that separate a product people keep from one they put in a drawer.
above the device
iOS and Android applications, cloud services, longitudinal telemetry and fleet health, the data architecture that tells you whether anyone is still using the thing.
agentic development
AI coders and testers in the loop on production code — firmware, applications, and cloud services shipped this way, along with the review gates and test discipline that make it trustworthy.
getting it built
ODM and JDM partnership, NPI, design for manufacture and test, BOM ownership, supplier qualification, UL and CE certification, RoHS and REACH compliance.