Stand and Salute

What it is

Stand and Salute LLC is building an automated flag pole system. Dreamforge hired me as contract engineering lead.

The system raises and lowers a flag, moves to half-staff when observance calls for it, and has to keep working when nobody is at the pole. It lives outdoors. It has a motor. A wrong position is obvious to anyone looking up.

Stand and Salute is still pre-production, so there is no public marketing site yet. The engineering work is already underway.

The hard part

Early versions depended on an off-the-shelf cloud platform for intelligence. For unattended outdoor hardware, that gets brittle fast. If the cloud hiccups, the pole is stuck waiting on a vendor the team does not control.

Before production, reliability has to sit with the product, including when the network is gone.

What we needed to prove

• Can the unit behave correctly with no internet?
• Can it be watched and commanded remotely when the network is up?
• Can safe motion behavior live on the machine itself?
• Can a technician bring up a unit without an engineer on site?

The current work answers those with a running proof of concept, then hardens the path to production.

What I owned

Software across the device and the cloud, plus the handoff path so other people can run it.

• On-device software: motion, operator controls, safety, status
• Cloud backend and operator dashboard: device visibility, scheduling, remote command
• Offline-capable operation through outages
• Provisioning and update tooling
• Field docs, technician setup, troubleshooting, acceptance checks
• Software tests that can run without a physical pole in the room

I covered embedded Linux, motion safety, device lifecycle, offline-first design, cloud backend and dashboard work, and technician-ready documentation.

Status

Pre-production. The proof of concept is running and looking solid. Next step is production fleet deployment.

If you have a physical build with the same kind of reliability pressure, say hello at Build Beyond Belief.