Hardware Prototyping and Product Development for the Sacramento Region
Field-ready prototypes for Sacramento, Davis, Roseville and Folsom teams in cleantech, energy, agtech and food tech: sealed, low-power electronics, firmware that survives a season outdoors, and the documentation utilities and public agencies ask for. Engineered in Silicon Valley, about two hours down the road.
Three free tools that run in your browser, with no sign-up: a range for the engineering, a timeline from prototype to production, and what the boards themselves should cost.
Hardware in the capital region: energy, farms and public agencies
The Sacramento region builds hardware for three kinds of customers the rest of California sometimes forgets. Energy: the region's public utility, SMUD, has a long record of early renewable and electric-vehicle programs, and the California Energy Commission and the California Air Resources Board, which shape much of the state's energy and emissions policy, are based in Sacramento. Agriculture: the farms of the Sacramento Valley surround the city, and UC Davis is one of the world's leading agricultural research universities, with a steady flow of startups in farming, food and animal health. Government: state agencies and local utilities are steady buyers of monitoring, metering and infrastructure hardware.
These customers judge hardware over years and outdoors, not over a demo. A soil sensor has to last through a growing season without a visit, a grid monitor through a decade on a pole, and a pilot with a utility or agency arrives with documentation requirements a consumer gadget never meets.
Designing for the field: heat, frost, dust and water
Valley summers regularly pass 100 °F, and winter nights can drop below freezing. Electronics in a sealed box in direct sun run far hotter than the air around them, so we size components and batteries for the enclosure's internal temperature, not the weather report. Plastics for outdoor use are UV-stabilized, such as ASA or UV-protected polycarbonate, because ordinary ABS turns chalky and brittle in the sun. Enclosures are sealed to IP67 where water can pool, with a breather vent so daily temperature swings do not pump moisture past the gasket. Cables are armored or routed where rodents cannot reach them, and connectors are chosen to be serviced with gloves on.
Power and radios for sites with neither
Most field hardware runs on a battery, a solar panel or both, so power is the core design problem. We measure sleep current on the first board rather than trusting the datasheet, and choose the radio for the site: LoRaWAN for long range and tiny payloads where a gateway can be placed, LTE-M or NB-IoT cellular where coverage exists and nobody wants to maintain a gateway, satellite for the truly remote. Solar is sized for December, not June. Lithium iron phosphate cells suit outdoor work but must not be charged below freezing, so the charger needs temperature control. Our free battery life calculator gives the first estimate, and low-power design for battery devices explains how datasheet numbers become months in the field.
Utility and public-sector pilots
Selling to a utility or an agency starts with a pilot, and pilots reward boring reliability. Expect questions about service life, surge immunity for anything on grid power, safety listing for equipment that connects to mains, how firmware is updated and secured, and who supports the units in year five. We design for a long life from the first board: parts with long availability, conservative derating, signed firmware with a rollback path, and documentation a utility engineer can review line by line. Our notes on industrial IoT boards built for a 10-year lifecycle cover the parts and layout side, and fleets of field devices usually need a cloud and IoT back end for telemetry and remote updates.
From a UC Davis lab prototype to a product
Research spinouts often arrive with something that works in the lab: a sensor on a breadboard, a script on a laptop, a rig held together with tape. Turning that into a product means separating the science from the scaffolding, keeping the measurement that makes the idea valuable and replacing everything else with hardware that can be built, calibrated and shipped. Food tech adds food-contact materials and washdown, which can mean IP69K sealing for high-pressure, high-temperature cleaning. We start with a short review of the lab setup and a plan for the first field-ready revision, sized to the grant or seed budget you actually have; Hardware for Startups explains how a first engagement runs.
Sacramento from Silicon Valley: close enough to drive
Our base is in Silicon Valley, not Sacramento, but this is the closest of the California metros we serve: roughly two hours by car. That changes the working model. Engineering still runs remotely, with shared CAD, a readable repository and video reviews in the same time zone, but a field install, a pilot site visit or a day at your lab is an easy drive rather than a flight. Boards and prototypes are brought up on our bench before they leave, and anything that ships usually arrives the next business day.
The work covers PCB design, embedded firmware, mechanical design for outdoor enclosures, rapid prototyping through EVT, DVT and PVT, certification preparation and transfer to manufacturing. For a grant proposal or a board deck, the free hardware timeline planner and project cost estimator give you defensible first numbers.
Sacramento hardware prototyping questions
Can you visit our field site or lab in the Sacramento area?
Yes, when it helps. We are based in Silicon Valley, about a two-hour drive away, so installing a pilot batch, looking at a failed unit where it failed or reviewing a lab setup is a day trip. Most of the engineering itself runs remotely, so visits are planned around the moments that need hands on hardware.
LoRaWAN or cellular for an agricultural sensor?
It depends on the site and the data. LoRaWAN suits many sensors spread over a farm sending small, infrequent messages, but someone has to install and power a gateway. Cellular LTE-M or NB-IoT needs no gateway and works anywhere with coverage, at the cost of a data plan and more energy per message. We often prototype with both on the first board and decide with field data.
How long will a solar-powered sensor last?
With a correctly sized panel and battery it can run for years, and the real limits become battery aging and the worst winter week. The design work is sizing for that week: the sleep current, the energy per transmission and the shortest, cloudiest days of the year. The free battery life calculator gives a first estimate before we measure the real board.
Can you work within a grant budget and timeline?
Yes. Grant work comes with a set budget, reporting dates and a defined scope, and we plan phases to match them. Priced in engineering hours; you get a written quote with phases before any work starts, which makes it easy to map our phases onto grant milestones. The free hardware timeline planner and project cost estimator help with the proposal itself.
What does a utility expect from a pilot device?
Reliability first, then documentation. Expect questions about service life, surge immunity, safety listing for mains-connected equipment, firmware update security and long-term support. We design with those questions in mind and help you assemble the answers, so the pilot is judged on the data it collects rather than on paperwork gaps.
Building hardware in Sacramento?
Thirty minutes with a senior engineer, free. Bring the idea, the board or the deadline, and you will leave knowing what the first prototype should prove.