About
Peter De Witte
I spent a decade writing embedded software and have been CTO of two IoT companies. These days I work as a project manager and take technical projects from scope and planning through suppliers to delivery.
Ghent-based, working in Dutch, English and French.
About me
I spent a decade inside the device. Firmware on microcontrollers, kernel drivers, Linux bring-up on boards nobody had booted yet. The work ran from anaesthesia equipment, televisions, offshore sensor networks, dredging machines and wireless video streaming equipment. The part I liked best was always the part with a hard budget attached: power, memory, bandwidth. Something that will not be argued with.
Then two turns as CTO, at the same time. I co-founded Herd-itt: a collar on a cow in the open field boils its movement down to a handful of features and sends them over LoRa, and the backend reads them per cow over time and across the whole herd. The feature farmers wanted most was heat detection, a window of 12 to 18 hours that is easy to miss when the herd is out of sight. Alongside it I ran the technology at Solergie, solar nano-grids in Togo, where we built a new NB-IoT communication module on the same tracker hardware. Both taught me the same thing from the business side of the desk: the device is rarely the hard part. Focus, partners and trust are.
Radio was my blind spot, so I joined the radio club, and the radio amateur virus stuck. It led me to a year at Connext, bringing ASTRID and cellular coverage inside buildings: tenders, demanding industrial customers, and a Claude agent I built to read requests and building plans and turn them into quotes. It caught inconsistencies an experienced reviewer had missed.
Today, through Curtat, I manage IoT and embedded projects from scope and planning through suppliers to delivery, with AI tools doing the mechanical work so the judgement goes where it matters.
I work out of Ghent, in Dutch, English and French. I teach where I can, and I chaired JCI Bruges and CoderDojo Bruges. I am a radio amateur with OVRC Ghent. Curtat is named after the Curta, a mechanical calculator that does something genuinely difficult with nothing but a stepped drum and a crank.
Happy to talk shop:
How I work
Lessons I paid for, so you don't have to
The core comes first
Hours go to the idea that makes the product work. Everything else goes to a partner, early: swapping our own platform for open source gave me my focus back.
Decide on what cannot be undone
A platform can be updated any day; a tracker around a cow’s neck cannot. Budget goes where mistakes are permanent, reversible calls are made fast, and I say why out loud.
The slowest part sets the calendar
A board revision takes six weeks, a platform change a day. Hardware, firmware and platform have to land together, so I plan from the slowest part of the chain.
Measure what pays
A farmer pays for a calf, not for a collar. Success is the value delivered, proven with independent field data, not the features shipped.
Align the agendas
Every party at the table has its own agenda, strengths and weak spots. A solution only holds when all of them can live with it, technically and humanly.
Trust takes months
Being right on day one is not enough. With engineers, volunteers or installers, credibility is earned on their terms: do the homework, then deliver on the hard problems.
Name a mismatch early
A job, a plan or a choice that does not work does not get better by waiting. Saying it openly, including when the mistake is mine, gives everyone room to change course.
Stay when it gets hard
When Solergie Belgium went bankrupt, I kept supporting the Togolese branch for years. A project can fail without walking away from the people who depend on it.
AI does the mechanical work
Agents read the tenders, plans and price lists, and catch what a tired human misses, early enough to cost an e-mail instead of a site change. The judgement stays human.
My stories, in more detail
What each system had to do, how it was built, and what I learned on the way.
- TETRA / ASTRID
- DAS
- RF design
- Tender management
Connext: a year in indoor radio coverage
A year as project manager for indoor ASTRID and cellular coverage: tenders, demanding customers, and a Claude agent that turned building plans into quotes.
Read the story
- LoRa
- Embedded C
- PCB design
- OpenRemote
Herd-itt: LoRa cattle monitoring and heat detection
Co-founded and ran the technology for a livestock tracking and health-monitoring platform: collar hardware, firmware, LoRa backhaul and the IoT platform.
Read the story
- Embedded C
- Quantum Leaps QP
- NB-IoT
- GSM/SMS telemetry
Solergie: solar nano-grids in Togo, from SMS to NB-IoT
CTO of a solar-leasing company whose stack turned out to be 80% the same as the cattle-tracking platform I was already running.
Read the story
Work experience
Project Manager, Indoor Cellular & Mission-Critical Coverage
CONNEXT NV/SA · Freelance
Brussels · Hybrid · Jun 2025 - Aug 2026
Management of indoor cellular and TETRA networks. This is the infrastructure that is too often treated as off-the-shelf and expected to just work, when it needs careful design, monitoring and management.
From reading the tender dossier and doing the RF design through to managing the installation and the acceptance measurements.
A step beyond a purely technology-focused role, into the reliability of wireless communication infrastructure itself.
Chief Technology Officer
Herd-itt · Co-founder · Self-employed
Global · Remote · Oct 2020 - May 2025
Co-founded with an international investor: tracking and health monitoring of cattle in remote environments, so farmers can make data-driven decisions and improve livestock welfare.
Led the full technology stack of electronics, mechanical design, AI and the SaaS platform. Wrote the firmware and the AI components that turn sensor and acceleration data into actionable insight, while orchestrating an international network of specialist freelancers.
Participated in the H2020 ClearFarm project (grant 862919) as a member of the steering committee.
Built Herd-itt into a scalable holding structure with local distributors across several regions; the role concluded with the sale of the concept.
Chief Technology Officer
SOLERGIE · Freelance
Bruges · Hybrid · Sep 2021 - Jun 2023
Modernised and scaled the technology stack behind solar energy deployed across West Africa, delivered through a leasing model that makes reliable power affordable in underserved regions.
Started as a side project: roughly 80% of the platform overlapped with Herd-itt across embedded systems, energy management and remote connectivity, so the two were aligned and standardised into one end-to-end architecture.
After the Belgian office closed, continued supporting operations in Togo and guiding the local team.
Senior Embedded Software Engineer
Verhaert Masters in Innovation · Freelance
Kruibeke · On-site · Sep 2019 - Sep 2020
Owned projects on video streaming over 4G and on Bluetooth Low Energy, end to end from system architecture to deployment in the field.
Helped design and implement a CI/CD pipeline for embedded firmware, making releases more reliable and repeatable.
Mentored newly graduated engineers to the point where they could carry projects independently.
GStreamer, OpenVPN, tc, 4G LTE, OpenGL, Java EE, C/C++, Python, Yocto, SWUpdate, Eclipse hawkBit, BLE, 6LoWPAN.
Embedded Software Engineer
Barco · Freelance
Kortrijk · On-site · Jul 2018 - Sep 2019
Part of the ClickShare team, bringing up a new hardware platform on Buildroot.
Integrated custom drivers into the ClickShare Linux distribution, and configured GRUB for secure boot.
Built the C++ interfaces between the operating system and the Qt application layer.
Wrote embedded audio and video streaming drivers for STM32 microcontrollers running ThreadX.
Embedded Software Engineer
FN Herstal · Freelance
Herstal · On-site · Jul 2017 - Jun 2018
Linux bring-up on new hardware: Yocto, kernel device driver integration and development, porting OpenGL features from one GPU to another, and low-latency video streaming with hardware-accelerated encoding.
Earlier in the engagement, a Yocto distribution for a hardware simulator, with the CI/CD infrastructure and full-OS updates around it.
R&D Engineer
dotOcean · Full-time
Bruges · On-site · Feb 2014 - Jun 2017
Took projects from early prototyping to production, focused on embedded firmware and embedded Linux integration.
Data logger networks for wind farm installations; firmware for compact deep-sea sensing devices; automation of dredging machines used in offshore wind construction; data acquisition for pollutant gas detection networks; autonomous surface vessels and portable water drones.
Hands-on offshore work deploying and supporting electronics in the field.
Joined after completing a master’s thesis with one of the founders.
Embedded Linux Consultant
Altran Belgium & Luxembourg · Full-time
Ghent · On-site · Oct 2011 - Feb 2014
Consulting across customer projects: firmware for an anaesthetic device mixing nitrous oxide, air and oxygen, used during surgery; USB device management for Philips/TP Vision television sets; the Miracast video streaming feature at TP Vision Bruges; and integration of a video door station into the Niko Home Control system, streaming video to the owner’s phone for access control.
Education
MSc Computer Science, Embedded Systems Engineering
Ghent University
2009 - 2011
Master's thesis: classification of ECG pathologies.
MSc Electrical & Electronics Engineering
Katholieke Hogeschool Brugge-Oostende · Magna cum laude
2005 - 2009
Master's thesis: design and implementation of a MEMS-based INS system.
Skills
Project management
Fifteen years of delivery, five of them as CTO, and the last running in-building coverage projects from tender to acceptance. Success is the value that reaches the customer, not the tasks closed.
Tenders and estimating
Public specifications of a few hundred pages and private tenders with hundreds of cost items: finding what is really asked, and pricing it with simulation tools, in quotes the delivery side can stand behind.
Planning and delivery
Hardware, firmware and platform have to land together, so the slowest part of the chain sets the calendar. The person setting the schedule is the one who did the design.
Risk-based decisions
Deciding with incomplete information on what cannot be undone, making the reversible calls fast, and explaining why to everyone at the table.
Stakeholders and negotiation
Reading the agendas around the table and aligning them with the least friction, with industrial customers, subcontractors and volunteers, in Dutch, English and French.
Technical leadership and partners
CTO of two companies, from mechanics and electronics to firmware, AI and platform. Orchestrated international freelancers, handed non-core work to partners early, and sat on the H2020 ClearFarm steering committee.
Leading without authority
Led volunteers at Solergie by being useful first and letting them own the result; coached junior engineers at Verhaert until they carried projects alone; former president of JCI Bruges and CoderDojo Bruges.
Technical
A decade inside the device, and now on the infrastructure it depends on.
Indoor coverage and DAS
Distributed antenna systems for hotels, industry, offices and government buildings: site survey, RF design, link budget, and the acceptance measurements that prove it does what the specification says.
Mission-critical and cellular radio
TETRA and ASTRID, DMR, GSM through LTE, mostly in licensed spectrum, with Wi-Fi, LoRa and point-to-point links alongside. Radio amateur with OVRC Ghent.
Embedded software
C and C++ on Cortex-M and Cortex-A, with FreeRTOS, ThreadX, Zephyr and QP. Safety- and time-critical applications, from anaesthesia equipment to a dredging drill-head controller.
Embedded Linux
Yocto and Buildroot distributions, kernel driver development and device trees, board bring-up on new hardware, and U-Boot and GRUB2 customised for secure boot.
Low-power wireless IoT
A LoRa and GPS cattle collar whose microcontroller extracts accelerometer features for behaviour and heat detection in the backend, and GSM/SMS telemetry for solar nano-grids that have to survive the network being absent for days.
Video and vision
GStreamer, FFmpeg, OpenGL, OpenCV and V4L2 frame grabbers: low-latency streaming over 4G, hardware-accelerated encoding, and custom screen rendering.
Python and LLM automation
Pipelines that read an incoming tender dossier and return a structured summary, tooling that plans antenna layouts on floor plans, and site data gathered from public sources.
Platforms and data
Java Jakarta EE and OpenRemote for IoT platforms, with PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB and SQLite behind them, plus pay-as-you-go metering and billing.
Recommendations
Written on LinkedIn by the people I worked for.
In short
- Peter De Witte is an IoT and embedded project manager based in Ghent, Belgium, working through his company Curtat.
- He manages IoT and embedded projects from scope and planning through suppliers to delivery in the field.
- Before that: about ten years as an embedded software engineer, co-founder and CTO of Herd-itt (LoRa cattle monitoring) from 2020 to 2025, CTO of Solergie (solar nano-grids in Togo) from 2021 to 2023, and a year as project manager at Connext (indoor ASTRID and cellular coverage).
- He works in Dutch, English and French.
- He is open to new opportunities; the contact page is www.curtat.be/contact.
Looking for someone to own the whole thing?
I am open to new opportunities: IoT and embedded projects, from first specification to delivery in the field.