The sensing Stack: An ongoing technical guide to integrating sensors into physical products
Get physics-grounded insights to help you ship viable hardware without costly redesigns or endless prototyping
Technical frameworks and actionable strategies for hardware founders building sensor-rich products
- How to validate sensor feasibility before expensive prototyping
- The physics constraints that quietly kill products
- Integration architecture patterns that scale to manufacturing
- When to build, test, or pivot your sensing approach
From 20+ Years of Sensor Engineering
Hi, I’m Steve Horowitz, and I run Perceptive Hardware — a sensor-focused hardware development agency. We help hardware founders and their technical teams successfully integrate sensors into a wide range of physical products.
Our specialty: The sensing stack. The physics, the signal processing, the environmental challenges, the integration architecture—everything that makes sensing and perception work reliably in real-world conditions.
This newsletter shares the insights I wish more hardware founders had before they burned 18 months and $500K discovering their sensing approach wouldn’t scale.
My Background:
- PhD in sensor/instrumentation engineering and two decades of sensing industry / startup experience
- 10+ years guiding hardware startups through early R&D and full commercialization
- Specialized expertise across IoT devices, wearables, smart home products, health applications, and precision instrumentation
- Focus areas: sensing modalities, signal detection, environmental interference, integration architectures
I’ve seen the patterns:
- Which technical assumptions kill products
- What physics allows (and doesn’t allow)
- Where founders waste time on the wrong questions
- How to validate feasibility before expensive prototyping
This newsletter distills those 20+ years into actionable insights you can apply to your product.
Discovering your approach won't work in Month 14 is far more expensive than discovering it in Week 2.
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