Project information

• Category: IoT
• Client: INSTAR Deutschland GmbH (Waletech) Shenzhen, China
• Project date: 01 March, 2016
• Project URL: www.instar.com

The problem: a brand-new smart-home integration, and no one who could reverse-engineer it or tell a failing combo from a failing camera.

I was day-one QA and Tier-2 support for the integration — reverse-engineering the firmware interfaces, testing every combo of camera firmware × automation platform × OS, and fixing (or filing) the bugs. I'm still the first-escalation contact when someone says "my Home Assistant automation broke after a firmware update."

The payoff: owning it end to end — first webhook spike to ongoing production support — is what made the integration a differentiator instead of a one-week feature flag.