Four disciplines.
One practice.
Continuous context.
PixelWise exists because ideas that cross layers — board, firmware, software, cloud — stall the moment you split them across teams with no shared context. One principal holds the full picture — from your concept to a working prototype. Specialists and AI agents contribute where the work demands depth, but the engineering judgment that connects the layers never leaves the room.
The Practice Model
PixelWise is one engineer's practice — not a firm, not an agency, not a team hiding behind a logo. When an engagement needs depth beyond one person's reach, the practice expands: domain specialists contribute their lane, AI agents accelerate analysis and implementation, and the principal directs the integration across every layer.
What stays constant: the engineering judgment that connects your idea to a working prototype never passes through a handoff. You talk to the person making the cross-layer decisions. That's the product.
Signal History
Arduino Uno ships. ARM Cortex-M3 ecosystem matures. Embedded development moves from lab benches to garage workstations.
Raspberry Pi launches. Node.js goes mainstream. Full-stack becomes one person's job — and single-board computers put Linux in every project.
FreeRTOS hits critical adoption. MQTT becomes an OASIS standard. Connected devices get a real messaging layer.
ESP32 ships Wi-Fi and BLE on a microcontroller for $4. Zephyr RTOS open-sourced by the Linux Foundation.
KiCad 5.0 makes professional PCB design free and open-source. RISC-V ISA gains commercial traction.
TFLite Micro runs inference on Cortex-M4. Machine learning meets the memory and power constraints of real devices.
Stable Diffusion and ChatGPT open the generative era. Open-source LLMs proliferate. The interface between AI and everything else becomes the problem.
Claude MCP, OpenAI Assistants API, and tool-use architectures move AI from chat windows into operational workflows.
Anthropic publishes "Building Effective Agents." AI-assisted development governance formalizes human-AI collaboration as methodology, not novelty.
Four disciplines formalized into one principal-led practice. The work that crosses layers — continuous context.
The Principal
Chris Slothouber
Founder & Principal Engineer
Systems engineer who routes boards, writes firmware, and deploys the software that ties them together. Career spans IT infrastructure, public-sector technology, and open-source hardware — from hand-soldering prototype boards to reverse-engineering undocumented hardware with an oscilloscope. PixelWise is the formalization of that range into one practice.
If it crosses layers, bring it in.
Describe the Idea