When your client wants a connected product and your team can't take the firmware, BLE, or hardware conversation across the finish line, I do. On your bench, behind your brand.
Diagnostics from $7,500 · Integration fixes from $15K · No retainer required.
Every app firm that takes on connected-product work hits the same wall. You're great at the app. Your client expects you to also be great at the thing the app talks to. That's where projects stall, customers get nervous, and trust starts leaking.
Your client's BLE wearable pairs 70% of the time. Your iOS team has spent three weeks chasing it and the issue isn't in iOS. Someone needs to look at the firmware, the GATT structure, and the radio behavior together.
A prospect comes to you with an app idea that depends on a connected device that nobody's built. You can scope the app. The hardware spec is what kills the proposal. And killing the proposal kills the prospect.
Your client's overseas manufacturer shipped boards with no documentation, no SDK, and a contact who replies once a week. The integration is yours to figure out, with nobody to ask.
The fastest way to know if I can help is a short, fixed-price engagement that produces a real document, a clear root cause, and a concrete recommendation. From there, the path forward is obvious: hire me to fix it, hand the report to your client, or take it to someone else.
Twenty minutes. You describe the project, the symptoms, and what your team has already tried. I'll tell you on the call whether a diagnostic is the right shape, or whether something smaller (or larger) makes more sense.
You forward firmware, schematics, app source, BLE traces, vendor docs. Whatever exists, under NDA. I spend a week with the material and ask the questions your team didn't know to ask.
A 15–25 page document: where the problem actually lives, what's causing it, what fixing it costs in time and money, and where the architectural risks are for the rest of the project.
A 45-minute call with your team (and your client if you want) to walk through the findings, answer questions, and decide what happens next.
Most engagements start with the diagnostic and stop there. Some keep going. Here's the rest of what I do, in case it matters to your conversation with your client.
The two-week engagement above. Where most relationships start. Either ends with a clear path forward or saves you from a path that wasn't going to work.
Take a stuck, unreliable, or undocumented hardware integration and make it work. Firmware updates, protocol redesign, new SDK for your app team, the documentation that should have existed.
Your client wants a connected device that doesn't exist yet. I scope the hardware, pick the microcontroller and protocol stack, and deliver a spec your client's manufacturer can quote.
Production-grade firmware for your client's board plus iOS and Android SDKs. Your app team integrates the SDK; their manufacturer flashes the firmware. Everyone stays in their lane.
Schematic, PCB layout, BOM, firmware, SDKs. Your client takes the design to their manufacturer of choice. I stay available through bring-up and certification.
End-to-end through a contract manufacturer I've shipped product with. Single point of contact from concept to delivered units. By application only, since capacity is limited.
Not just a designer, not just a firmware engineer. The person who has actually taken connected products from schematic to manufactured units in customers' hands. That's the experience your app team is missing on the other side of the BLE link.
I'm Nick Kulick, and I run Neon out of Northern Virginia, with a degree in electrical and computer engineering and over ten years of product development and design across the entire hardware and software stack.
Here is what separates me from nearly anyone else you could hire for this. I have personally carried a connected product through every discipline it touches and shipped it commercially to real customers. A programmable BLE pace clock for competitive swim teams was mine end-to-end: schematic, PCB layout, BOM, design-for-manufacturing, mechanical and enclosure, ATmega328 firmware, companion apps across five platforms, FCC compliance for both intentional and unintentional emitters, pre-certified module selection, and the Chinese manufacturer relationship that built the hardware. One engineer. Every layer.
When COVID hit, I designed, prototyped, and shipped a commercial UV-C disinfection product in weeks, sourcing US components when the global supply chain had seized and running final assembly stateside. It carried a patent-pending shroud-and-fan accessory that turned a surface disinfector into an air disinfector, so a room could stay occupied while it ran. It also shipped with web and iOS companion apps that calculated the exact UV exposure a space needed, something almost nothing else on the market offered.
I've also authored a multi-stage hardware bring-up procedure and the roadmap, system architecture, and product-requirements documents for a connected lighting platform. That is the kind of product discipline most hardware help never brings.
That is the engineer you are hiring. I've made every mistake a connected-product engineer can make, in production, with real customers, and I know which ones your client's team is about to make next. For larger or more speciality engagements, I bring in vetted specialists for deep firmware or PCB layout work. You only ever talk to me, and I'm always the one accountable.
A 20-minute call is the fastest way to know if there's a fit. No proposal, no slide deck, no sales pitch. Just a conversation about what your client is trying to ship and where the hardware question is sitting in the way.
Good fits for the first call are agencies with a current connected-product project that's not progressing the way it should, or a prospect in pipeline who needs a connected device that nobody on your bench knows how to scope.
If you don't have either right now but want to keep me in mind for when you do, that's also a fine reason to talk. Half of my work comes from agencies who knew where to find me when something showed up.