Better Devices is an embedded engineering consultancy in Berlin. We design, build, test and investigate the hardware other companies ship, and work our team has done now runs on more than a million devices in the field.
Most of our clients have capable engineering teams of their own. They bring us in when a product has to ship and something stands in the way: a decision nobody can make with confidence yet, a team stretched past its capacity, a fault that only appears at a customer site, or a system nobody documented. This post explains where we fit, how we work, and what you can expect if you bring us in.
When teams bring us in
The conversations we have with new clients usually start in one of four places.
Before the money is committed. A new product is on the table, and someone needs to know whether it can be built, at what cost, and with which parts, before the company signs up to a design.
When the roadmap outgrows the team. The in-house engineers are good, but there are more boards, more firmware and more deadlines than people. They need senior engineers who can join and contribute in the first week, not after a quarter of onboarding.
When testing becomes the bottleneck. Every release waits on manual bench work and on the one engineer who knows how the rig is wired. The team wants testing that runs on every build, without depending on a single person.
When something fails in the field and nobody can say why. A device resets at a customer site, a wireless link drops, or a legacy system has no documentation left. Somebody has to find the root cause, and quickly.
One team across the device’s whole life
Those four moments map onto the four things we do. Most clients start with one and stay for the next, because the same engineers carry what they learned from one stage into the next.
Feasibility and architecture
We find the constraint that decides whether a product works before anyone commits to a design. That means power budgets, radio range, cost targets and the parts on the bill of materials, including whether those parts will still be made in two years. The output is a clear answer and an architecture you can build on, not a slide deck of options.
Device development
Hardware, firmware, embedded software and on-device AI, delivered by one senior team rather than four suppliers. Our engineers join your team, work in your tools and repositories, and hand over code your own people can maintain. Work this team has built runs on more than a million devices today.
Testing infrastructure
We build test setups that run on real hardware, on every build, and plug into your CI pipeline. For one client, a regression suite that took two engineers two weeks to run by hand now runs automatically in twenty minutes, on every commit. Our newest work adds AI-enabled hardware-in-the-loop testing, where an AI agent sets up and runs the tests and an engineer approves every step.
System investigation
When a device fails in a way nobody can reproduce, we find out why. For a global industrial automation company, we decoded more than fifty undocumented legacy radio protocols, unblocking a product launch and avoiding a redesign the client had expected to cost millions. Their engineering lead put it simply: “They turned an opaque environment into a predictable system we could finally build against.”
For another client, whose product was failing in the field, we recorded the problem signals on site and replayed them in our lab. That saved months of engineering time and prevented a six-month delay to the release.
How we work
Senior engineers, start to finish. The engineer who scopes your project is the engineer who does the work. You will not meet a senior person in the first call and a junior team afterwards.
Proof over promises. We commit to outcomes we can measure: a test suite that runs on every build, a root cause with the evidence behind it, a design that meets its power budget. When something we tried did not work, we say so. Our case study on our own hardware documents two faults our AI tooling introduced, alongside how we caught them.
AI with an engineer in charge. We use AI where it genuinely speeds up the work, from writing firmware to setting up tests. Nothing it produces reaches your hardware until one of our engineers has reviewed and approved it.
Built to hand over. Documentation, tests and code are written so your team can own them when we step back. Success is a client who no longer needs us for that problem.
What working with us looks like
- A conversation with an engineer. You describe the product, the deadline and what is in the way. You talk to someone who builds hardware, not a salesperson.
- A scoped plan. We come back with what we would do, in what order, and what you get at each stage, with the assumptions written down.
- The work, in your environment. Our engineers work in your repositories, tools and CI, with regular check-ins you can see progress in.
- A clean handover. Code, tests and documentation your team can run without us, plus a walkthrough with the people who will own it.
We work with teams from our offices in Berlin and Islamabad, in English and German.
Talk to the engineers
If a product of yours is heading for one of those four moments, the fastest way to find out whether we can help is a conversation. Bring the board, the deadline and the problem. Talk to the engineers and you will hear back from one of them directly.
Frequently asked questions
What kind of companies does Better Devices work with? Companies that build their own electronic products, from funded start-ups to established manufacturers, across industrial, medical, consumer and connected devices.
Do you replace our engineering team? No. We usually work alongside an in-house team, adding senior capacity or specialist skills, and hand over everything we build so your team can own it.
Can you start partway through a project? Yes. Many engagements start mid-development, with a testing bottleneck or a field failure, rather than at the beginning.