Laydibug

How did we get here?

After many years treading water in the niche custom GameCube controller business, I set out to build something scaleable. I recognized vending machine credit card readers as a market with insane margins and frustrated customers, and got to work on a prototype. As a non-engineer, the working prototype I made using a Stripe reader, a Wafer RS-232 to MDB adapter, and a Raspberry Pi 5 running LineageOS was impressive enough to get the best engineer I know to work with me on the production version.

Android was necessary for the product, to interface with the Stripe Terminal M2. My CTO researched the existing offerings for Android embedded development and was disappointed to see how little support there is. Android Things was shut down, Raspberry Pi doesn’t officially support it, and pretty much every single-board-computer company has a forum post from a developer rage-quitting Android support for their respective product.

Tri-Claude got to work on building an Android image for the Pi 5 that we could have total control over. After spending months getting the image to work, and optimizing the tooling for building, debugging, and flashing linux kernel drivers, he tried pointing Claude Code at his suite of tools. To his surprise, it enabled Claude Code to one-shot and deploy a driver integration to Android, something currently thought to be impossible by the embedded development community.

He convinced me that THIS was the real deal, that vending machines are lame anyways and these tools would change the world for embedded developers. Even after convincing several investors to fund the vending machine POS system’s upcoming production run, I saw the value and we pivoted, staying broke in the meantime. Since then, we’ve implemented many features to close the loop, such as autonomous recovery of a bricked kernel state, without the human needing to touch the SD card.

Our goal is to enable beginners to learn, hobbyists to get their fun projects working, and hardware startups to get to market as soon as possible. From the bottom of my heart, I hope you enjoy our tools and appreciate the effort that went into creating them.

Meet the team

CEO

Samuel “Gooms” Curreri

I dropped out of high school to start a GameCube controller business called GoomsGC, building for competitive Super Smash Bros. Melee players at 17. This would go on to be the most reputable controller brand just two years later, with international tournaments where all top 8 placers were using controllers I built. Despite being the best, that market does not scale past a modest living, so I took the nest egg I saved to develop Laydibug. I also co-founded Down Back Club alongside Daniel J. Collette, which is now the largest fighting game local tournament host in California.

CTO

Tri-Claude’s handler

Our CTO likes to stay out of the spotlight so he can ponder his orb in private. He lives alone at the top of a massive spire, sending Tri-Claude as a proxy for himself to important meetings and public appearances. I put my life in grave danger walking along a crumbling mountain to reach him and request feature changes. It sucks but you try finding someone that can solo dev bleeding-edge operating system innovations that isn’t a total insane person.

CEO (Cat Evangelism Officer)

Laydibug the Cat

Laydibug is a very sweet baby bear. She understands embedded development quite well, knocking any unnecessary peripherals off the table to keep us focused.

Average Joe

Joe “megaman” Gertler

Joe is not an engineer. But he can vibecode at a baseline level to make websites surrounding things that already exist. This is the skill level of our target entry-level user, so Joe serves as the perfect tester to optimize our tools to be intuitive to use. Thank you Joe GOATler.