Bespoke software for the systems the world runs on.
G&B Software Engineering Solutions develops and customises bespoke-designed software that features in every corner of modern society — mainstreaming pipeline architecture, backed by engineers and businesses, delivered with the discipline that industry and finance demand.
START A CONVERSATION WHAT WE BUILDHelp first. Never promise what cannot be delivered. No half-measures.The engineering ethos behind every G&B system
Seasoned engineering for today's industry and finance.
Software now sits inside every transaction, every plant floor, every compliance file and every emergency. G&B builds the bespoke systems that carry that weight — designed around the client, engineered to be examined, and hardened against the failures that only field discipline finds.
Bespoke Software Design
Ground-up applications shaped to one organisation's workflow — not templates bent out of shape. From concept and architecture through build, field trial and hand-over, one accountable engineering line.
Pipeline Architecture
Mainstreamed pipeline architecture for the data that businesses live on: capture, verification, transport and delivery — engineered end to end, instrumented so every stage can prove it ran.
Compliance & Verification Platforms
Digital verification of identity, place and event — trusted records for accreditation, audit and regulatory reporting where a record must stand up to scrutiny years later.
Safety-Critical & Emergency Systems
Our proving ground. Software whose users may be unconscious, offline, or in danger — engineered to keep working when the device sleeps, the network drops and the worst case arrives.
If they cannot get the phone out of the bag, the phone still starts the chain.
G&B’s flagship is a personal-safety ecosystem — from a trigger on a sleeping phone to a named unit at the door — built, field-tested and hardened in-house. SHOMER is the product on the person. SHOMER Responder is the product on the unit. HQ is the floor that owns the ending.
Four names. One chain.
Judge the house by what it ships. This is what ships.
SHOMER
Stays awake when the phone does not. Ten independent doors start the same rescue — hands-free, screen-dark, pocket-deep. Writes a file in the first seconds. Does not close its own case.
- Shake, tap, bang, voice, covert phrase, fall, dead-man, button
- SMS pin, then live tracking link, plus automatic call
- Medical, vehicle and passenger profile already on the incident
- Guided setup that verifies the phone is truly protection-ready
PULSAR
The engineering core — trigger intelligence, dispatch pipeline and telemetry — refined through on-device field trials, not slide decks.
- Sensor-fusion trigger stack, tuned per device class
- Self-auditing via the Stellar Guardian line
- Field-trial instrumentation for evidence-based thresholds
BERTHA
Behaviour Enabled Response and Threat Handling Architecture — the on-device ear. One spoken word summons help. A quieter phrase does it without paging the room.
- Offline wake-word recognition — no internet for the listen
- Enrolled phrases, not a factory slogan
- Listens through true device sleep
SHOMER Responder & HQ
The other end of the alert. A named unit. A live board. The floor confirms the close — the driver does not.
- Addressed dispatch and an honest status stepper
- GO LIVE — track, call, short video, nearby radios
- Two-decision close and a signed evidence pack
Trigger to named unit — in one minute.
Trigger
A word, a quieter phrase, a shake, a tap, a bang, a fall, a missed check-in, or one button — on a phone that may be asleep in a pocket. No unlocking. No dialling.
Confirm — except when it must not
Most automatic doors offer a full-screen breath so accidents can die cheap. The quieter phrase does not. No banner. No veto. Immediate covert dispatch.
Dispatch
The floor receives who, why, medical, vehicle, a live link and a moving pin. SMS goes out in two stages — pin first, live link once tracking is actually up. An automatic call rides with it.
Respond & close
A named unit accepts, moves, goes live. The officer may request a close. Only HQ confirms. When the floor ends it, the phone stops hunting.
The person is not asked to be calm. The unit is not asked to be judge. The floor is not asked to guess.
Already on duty while the phone is locked.
Most safety apps start when someone opens them. SHOMER starts when the phone starts.
Arms itself after reboot
Nobody has to find the icon first. Protection-readiness is verified in setup — never assumed.
Fall and check-in over the lock
A downed person is not asked to unlock. “Are you okay?” is the question. Silence is the start.
Wake-word through sleep
BERTHA listens in a pocket or a bag. Hands stay where they are. Offline for the listen.
One control, same chain
The home-screen widget fires the same rescue as the in-app button. No menu hunt.
A single button is a fantasy about a single kind of minute.
Every live door lands on the same floor, with the same live picture, under the same rule: the person on the phone does not write the ending. Doors are armed per handset. A trigger that cannot be quieted is how an app ends up in a drawer.
| Door | The minute it is built for | What ships |
|---|---|---|
| Shake | The body is already in it. Phone in a hand or a pocket. | High-priority impact. No menu. No unlock. |
| Back tap | A knock against a palm, a thigh, a wheel. | Help that does not look like a performance. |
| Front tap | A deliberate strike on the glass. | Its own door. A full SOS — not a lesser one. |
| Hard bang | The phone hits a dash, a wall, the ground. | The blow is a reason, not a curiosity. |
| Acoustic tap | A knock that needs a second witness. | Microphone confirmation. Off unless you arm it. |
| Spoken help | Hands are not free. The voice still is. | Enrolled wake-word. Open SOS. Optional confirmation breath. |
| Quieter phrase | The room must not know help has been asked for. | No cancel banner. Immediate covert dispatch. |
| Fall | A body goes down and does not answer. | Lock-screen “Are you okay?” Silence starts the chain. |
| Missed check-in | Someone was supposed to still be there. | Dead-man window. Absence becomes a start. |
| One button | The person still has a thumb. | Deliberate. Same floor. Same rule. Not second-class. |
If the confirmation screen never appears, the service still fires on a deadline. A frozen interface cannot veto a rescue. The alarm is written before a tidy login finishes — a held queue so a slow network cannot kill the start.
The door that does not wait to be taken back.
Trained by the person. Not a slogan on a billboard. No banner. No veto. The floor sees a kidnapping-class event — not another SOS.
This is the sentence a family has to hear once, not demonstrated as theatre. Combined with a live position and a live link, it is the difference between a call that can be overheard and a chain that cannot.
A file, not a shout.
| The floor receives | Why it is a capability |
|---|---|
| Who they are | Name, phone, casualty — not an anonymous ping. |
| Why it started | Which door opened, including whether it is covert. |
| Medical and vehicle | What a unit needs before they open a door or stop a car. |
| Passengers | Who else was supposed to be in that vehicle. |
| A live link | A page the floor opens. No street narration required. |
| A moving position | Not a last-known pin that went cold. A hunt that keeps writing. |
| The words | When there was a phrase, the phrase travels with the incident. |
It calls. It texts a pin. Then it texts the live link.
Automatic voice call
Placed in the same minute the door opened — carrier-grade, not a hope that someone is watching a chat.
Two-stage message
First the pin. Then the live link once tracking is actually up. The link is not a promise of a picture that does not exist yet.
Live session + black-box
Keeps writing until HQ closes the job. A last-ditch picture if the trail goes thin. The person does not have to remember to switch it off.
More than a coordinate
Proximity burst of nearby radios. Camera-on-SOS. Torch strobe so a unit in the dark has something to see. Journey tracking, external GPS, a perimeter you drew.
Arm the doors that minute actually needs.
| On this person | Arm this |
|---|---|
| Travelling executive | Both voice doors. Shake and taps. Check-in on known corridors. Journey when they move. Covert phrase briefed — not performed. |
| Driver | Shake, back tap, hard bang, button. Vehicle and passenger profile complete. Voice if the cabin already talks. |
| Household | Fall and missed check-in. Spoken help. Perimeter on the home. Quieter phrase named once. |
| Site / lone worker | Missed check-in as the spine. Fall. Shake. Button. Journey between sites. Medical complete. |
What we will not sell as a trigger.
- A camera trigger as the start. Looking at a lens is not how help begins.
- A photograph of a face, offered as a rescue.
- “The phone heard a threatening noise” as a default door.
- A magic phrase that works in every crowd and every engine. Voice is a door. That is why the other nine exist.
- A trigger that cannot be switched off on a given handset.
- The person writing the ending. Retract and resolve on the phone are a notify. HQ still confirms.
SHOMER does not make a person safe. It makes help able to start when the person cannot be a competent user of software — and it hands that start to a floor that can name a unit.
Built for international realities.
Engineered in South Africa — where software must survive load-shedding, patchy networks and hard budgets — and expanding to clients, shareholders and stakeholders worldwide. Systems proven in demanding conditions travel well.
Industry & Operations
Bespoke operational software and data pipelines for the plant floor, the fleet and the field — instrumented, auditable, built to the client's process.
Finance & Compliance
Verification engines and trusted-record platforms for environments where every entry must be provable — accreditation, audit trails, regulatory reporting.
Safety & Communities
The flagship domain: personal guardianship for individuals and families, and coordinated response for estates, organisations and control rooms.
Business direction. Clinical discipline. One line of accountability.
Wayne J Gaddin — Chief Executive Officer. Commercial direction, partnerships and the company's expanding international frontier: clients, shareholders and stakeholders who need an engineering partner that answers for its work.
Jonathan Brinkman — Technical Division. A systems builder with a clinical background — a discipline that leaves habits software needs: never declare a thing healthy without examining it, treat causes rather than symptoms, and accept that when systems carry people's money or safety, "mostly working" is not working.
Every G&B system is developed under a verdict discipline: nothing is called WORKING until it has been observed working — on real devices, in the real conditions it was built for.
The G&B Method
- Field-tested on real devices before any claim is made
- Self-auditing systems — the software checks its own health monthly
- Honest setup — the app verifies protection-readiness, never assumes it
- Evidence over opinion — every threshold tuned from device logs
- Help first. No half-measures.
Hear the frequency. Measure the trigger.
The Reed Room — Product Analysis & Marketing Synopsis. A browser-native frequency workbench (20 Hz–20 kHz, Web Audio, 12-TET) that starts as a musician’s ear lab and becomes a closed-loop bench for on-device acoustic triggers.
Not a tuner app with extra knobs.
The Reed Room is a browser-native frequency workbench (20 Hz–20 kHz, Web Audio, 12-TET) that starts as a musician’s ear lab and becomes a closed-loop bench for on-device acoustic triggers.
Two products live in one UI:
The player’s ear lab
Tone, timbre, concert pitch, live pitch/harmonic analysis, beats, sweeps, ear training. This is the reed / horn / nylon-guitar language the name promises.
The engineer’s bench
Measurement, wake-word stimulus, spectrum CSV, capture, filter forensics, and 16 kHz Black-Box training exports for a detector you call Bertha on a device/stack you call SHOMER (INMP441 path, mel bands, flatness veto).
That dual nature is the product. Most tools pick one side. You built the bench that lets a player hear why a tenor is bright, then lets an engineer prove why a bark fires Bertha and a shout does not.
Built for the bench, not the stage. That should stay the spine of the brand.
Three doors. One bench.
Embedded / edge-audio engineers
People building or debugging always-on acoustic triggers: wake words, event sounds (bark, clatter, voice), keyword spotting on MEMS mics. People who currently stitch Audacity + REW + a notebook + a Python training folder + “why did the phone fire at 02:14.”
Reed, horn, and string players
Woodwind, brass, and acoustic-string players who want a physical relationship to frequency: waveform → timbre, A=440 vs A=442, written vs concert, cents, harmonics, beats as the actual tuning method.
Educators and DSP students
Audio educators, DSP students, and anyone teaching “what a waveform is” without opening a DAW.
The conversion path is unusual and strong: a sax player lands on Mod 01–03; an engineer stays for Mod 07–09. Do not flatten that into “music app” or “ML tool.” Sell the shared object: frequency as something you can generate, hear, measure, filter, and ship.
One sentence.
Hear the frequency. Measure the trigger. Don’t train on the wrong microphone.
Longer: The Reed Room is the honest workbench between “the board fired” and “here is the Hz, the band, the flatness, the clip, and the 16 kHz manifest the pipeline can actually eat.”
Nine modules. Seven layers.
| Layer | Modules | Buyer language |
|---|---|---|
| Generate | 01 Tone, 04 Beats, 05 Sweep | Calibrated stimulus: sine / square / tri / saw, intervals, log / linear sweeps |
| Reference | 02 Tuner | Concert A + transposition (C / B♭ tenor-tpt / E♭ alto) — written A is the right concert pitch |
| Listen live | 03 Analyser | Note, Hz, cents, harmonic stack, peak hold, noise floor |
| Characterise speech / events | 06 Bench | Envelope + energy placement — “it misfired because energy sat at X” |
| Stimulus vs device | 07 Probe | Timed battery into a phone running SHOMER; timeline CSV to line up with Bertha logcat |
| Offline spectrum | 08 CSV | File-only analysis; ambient floor subtracted; plain-English verdict |
| Capture → forensics → train | 09 Recorder + Filter Bench | Record / import, slow playback, in / out, EQ / gate / comp / spectral tools, A/B false-fire vs real Bertha, 16 kHz mono PCM + stamped manifest |
The Filter Bench is not “fun FX.” It is band discovery: find the slice that fires Bertha, notch it, export the filtered selection. That is a product feature, not a plugin pack.
Honesty as architecture, not a disclaimer footer.
Named limits
You refuse to pretend a Mac mic is an INMP441. You stamp source=macmic, warn about ~3 dB rolloff by 7 kHz vs native 16 kHz on the board, and tell people not to train a shipping model on these clips. In a market full of “just record and train,” that is a trust moat. Competitors oversell; you under-claim and stay correct.
Frequency-first trigger theory
Stated in the UI. Loudness-first baby monitors and VAD toys cannot say this without lying.
Closed loop
Generate → play at the device → import logcat / spectrum → compare false-fire vs real trigger → notch → re-export pipeline audio. Most tools do one arrow of that loop.
Musician physics as onboarding
Sine = flute. Saw = bowed string / brass. Beat rate → unison. Sweep → your hearing rolls off. The engineering product inherits a pedagogy instead of a settings panel.
Pure Web Audio
No install theater. A bench that opens in a browser is how you get it onto the same Mac that is already next to the phone and the speaker.
Pipeline-shaped exports
16 kHz mono PCM WAV, class / split manifest, fix_manifest_paths.sh, explicit split between archival .mp4 and training WAV. That is “this person has been burned by path and sample-rate bugs.”
Workshop, not SaaS.
The UI already has a voice:
- Short physical metaphors
- Named limits (“digital dBFS, not calibrated SPL”; “clocks will skew”)
- Named internals (FLATNESS_VETO_MAX 0.72, FEATURE_CONTRACT fmax 8000 Hz)
- Anti-hype: not a substitute for field captures
Marketing should sound like the footer:
Do not rebrand this as “AI audio studio” or “next-gen voice platform.” That would erase the only thing that makes it credible.
Lead with A. Keep B as the public face of the name.
The acoustic workbench for people who ship on-device listeners.
Lead with this.
Two doors, one bench
Door 1: “Reed, horn, and string players who want to see what they hear.” Door 2: “Engineers who need to know why the trigger fired.” Same app. Two landing pages. One name. Keep this as the public face of the name.
Serious back room
Conservatories + DSP courses use 01–05; research labs unlock 06–09. Risk: students never find the real product.
Hear the timbre. Measure the trigger.
The Reed Room — Frequency workbench. 20 Hz–20 kHz.
Hear the timbre. Measure the trigger.
Built for the bench, not the stage.
Concert pitch for players. Ground truth for the board.
Elevator — 20 seconds
The Reed Room is a browser frequency workbench. Musicians use it to connect waveform, concert pitch, and ear. Engineers use the same bench to stimulate a device, align logs, isolate the band that wakes the detector, and export 16 kHz training audio that is honestly labelled as Mac-mic — not board audio.
One-paragraph synopsis — site / deck
The Reed Room is a pure Web Audio frequency workbench spanning 20 Hz–20 kHz. Nine modules move from first principles — sine vs saw, A=440 vs A=442, beats, sweeps, live cents and harmonics — into a measurement and capture suite for on-device acoustic triggers. Play a defined stimulus at a phone running SHOMER, import Bertha’s timeline, load a spectrum CSV, record the real sound, compare a false-fire against a real trigger, and cut the band that actually matters. Exports follow the Black-Box contract: 16 kHz mono PCM, stamped source, no pretence that a laptop capsule is an INMP441. It is a bench instrument: limited, explicit, and built so “it misfired” becomes “energy sat here.”
Short social
Not a DAW. Not a magic wake-word trainer. A frequency bench with a limiter, a tuner that knows B♭ and E♭, and a filter stack for finding the Hertz that wake the board.
The missing instrument between the ear, the MEMS capsule, and train.py.
You are not competing with GuitarTuna, Ableton, or Picovoice’s cloud trainer as a category clone. You sit in the gap:
- Consumer tuners don’t export training manifests or subtract mel floors.
- DAWs don’t speak concert transposition + Bertha logcat + flatness veto.
- Wake-word SaaS hides the frequency. You put frequency on the front panel.
- REW / SpectraPLUS are measurement-first and musician-last; they also don’t close the device-stimulus loop in one page.
Bottom line
The Reed Room’s market story is rare: a craft object (reed, horn, ear, 12-TET) welded to a forensic object (Hz, mel, flatness, 16 kHz, the wrong mic labelled as the wrong mic).
Sell it as a workbench with a conscience. The synopsis in one line:
The Reed Room is the frequency bench for players who want to hear pitch as physics, and for engineers who need to know exactly which frequencies wake the machine.
It will not tell you a file is recoverable when it isn’t.
You deleted something you needed. Or a drive died. Or a video from the one day that mattered won’t open any more. You are about to search for recovery software, and every result will promise you the world. Recovery Core looks at the disk, works out what is genuinely still there, what is gone, and why — and then it tells you. Before you pay for anything.
The name came back. The bytes did not.
Most recovery tools hand you a long list of “recovered” files, and a good share of them are garbage. You find out when you open the photo and it’s half grey, or the video plays for nine seconds and stops. The tool called it a win. It wasn’t.
Whether your data is recoverable is decided by the medium, not the software. A deleted file on a spinning hard drive is usually still there. The same file on a modern SSD is usually gone within seconds. An overwritten file, or an encrypted one without the key, is gone for good — and no product can change that. Recovery Core’s job is to know which case you are in and say so plainly.
What’s there. What’s gone. And why. Data recovery that would rather tell you no than sell you a lie.
It grades the blocks. Then it speaks.
Recovery Core checks whether the actual data blocks behind a deleted file have been reused, using the correct signal for each filesystem.
INTACT
The data blocks are verified untouched. What you get back is exactly what you lost. Proven on real bytes across all five supported filesystems.
PARTIAL / OVERWRITTEN
Some or all blocks have been reused. Recovery would hand you wrong bytes — so it tells you that instead of handing you garbage.
NAME-ONLY
The filename survived but the map to its contents did not. You get the truth, not a hollow file with the right name.
INTACT IF UNFRAGMENTED
On FAT and exFAT — most camera cards and USB sticks — deleting a file wipes the chain that says where its pieces are. A fragmented file will recover wrong even when every block is untouched. Recovery Core flags these separately rather than promising byte-perfect and quietly delivering something else.
Native parsers. Read-only. The patient is never touched.
| Surface | What ships |
|---|---|
| Deleted files | FAT12/16/32, exFAT, NTFS, ext4 and APFS — native, dependency-free parsers. APFS is the flagship: seven independent paths back to a deleted file, exploiting the way macOS keeps old copies of its own structures. |
| Corrupted files | Fourteen formats — JPEG, PNG, GIF, BMP, TIFF, WebP, ICO, HEIC, SVG, ZIP, MP4, PDF, WAV, MP3. Damaged video is rebuilt using a healthy reference file from the same device. Structure is repaired where content survives; destroyed bytes are never invented; every result says whether it is complete. |
| Nameless data | Carved from raw disk in seventeen types — including the camera-photo case most tools get wrong, where the embedded thumbnail’s end marker truncates the real image. |
| Media | Any readable device or image: raw disks, EnCase E01, VHD, VMDK, MBR and GPT, ISO and UDF optical media. Always read-only. |
When it has to stand up.
For legal, insurance and investigative work, every recovery ships with a manifest: path, size, SHA-256 hash and confidence grade for every file. A single command re-hashes the whole pull to prove nothing has changed since recovery, and generates a client-facing report with a live custody check. Chain of custody is built in, not bolted on.
Honest scan
Tells you what is actually there. Before you pay for anything.
Proven recovery
Recovery for what it can prove. No data, no fee.
Defensible custody
The tier for work that must survive scrutiny — manifest, re-hash, live custody check.
Available as a scriptable command-line tool and a desktop application. Desktop only — because on-device phone undelete is not possible, and we won’t sell you one.
Some data cannot be recovered by any software.
- Apple-Silicon internal drives read as zeros by design.
- SSDs with TRIM discard deleted data within seconds.
- Overwritten or key-less encrypted files are gone.
Recovery Core says so up front. When the problem is physical — a dead board, a failed drive — that is lab work, and the local recovery service takes it from there on a no-data, no-fee basis.
No data, no fee.
It will not let silence pass for health.
VERAX is G&B’s software-assurance product. It sits under Quality Assurance, server-side. It proves a system correct across the three moments code can fail — before it runs, while it runs, and on demand — so a client never has to take “mostly working” on trust.
Correctness does not compose. Silence is not a passing grade.
A single request crosses dozens of hand-offs. The number of interleavings is uncountable by hand. Two files can each be correct, each pass their own tests, and still break when they run together. The fault lives between them — and nothing owns the space between them.
Then it fails without saying so. No exception. No log line. No failing test. The system reports itself healthy, and the report is wrong.
VERAX exists to kill the false-green.
The public proof points are not typing mistakes. Knight Capital 2012 — a stale routine on one of eight servers. Cloudflare 2019 — one regex, catastrophic backtracking. CrowdStrike 2024 — a template declared twenty-one fields, a caller supplied twenty, the interpreter read the twenty-first. Each was a seam. Nothing was watching it.
Three instruments. One roof. Three moments.
The same class of fault, caught at three different times — and none of the three can be found by the other two. That is why the suite is bought as one system.
“The code was wrong.”
Reads the whole source tree at once. Resolves every name and type. Follows a value across files. Static — it never runs the program.
- Three verdicts, not two: Verified / Failed / Unverified
- Unverified is the default. Nothing is green because nobody looked.
- Provenance on every claim — machine reading, analysis, or a person
“The code stopped.”
Carries no data. One heartbeat, arriving and arriving. Silence is the alarm. Its only job is to keep arriving — until it stops.
- Deliberately dumb and hard
- The absence is the signal
- Nothing left running has to raise an error for the finding to exist
“The code will not answer.”
Asks, instead of waiting to be told. Sends a real request to a named component and requires a real answer inside a stated time.
- Silence under direct question is a finding
- No tick without fresh output
- Nothing else in the system would report that silence
A human assumption dressed as a machine reading is itself a fault.
| Claim | What it means on the floor |
|---|---|
| Three verdicts | Verified. Failed. Unverified. The third is the product. Pass/fail tools paint unchecked code green. |
| Provenance | Every claim is stamped: read from the system, worked out by analysis, or stated by a person. |
| Two fault signatures | An action ran with its guard removed — or an effect happened that nothing authorised. |
| Host-agnostic | The unauthorised-effect signature needs no opinion about intended behaviour. It travels. |
| Adoption gate | A detector is not accepted until a fault is planted in clean code and found — without firing on the clean version. |
Juncture classes each carry a detector. Counts move as the registry grows; we quote the registry, not a slide. Ten unrelated disciplines independently arrived at the same way of making imbalance visible. Offered as evidence it is a law, not a metaphor.
Assurance. Not a productivity toy.
Structure of the source
Measures software from the structure of its source, not from behaviour. That is LIBRA’s home ground.
Prove it. Don’t assert it.
The tier where a regulated buyer asks for a verification tool — federal software attestation, aviation-grade evidence, a defence safety case.
Never block the life-safety path
Remediation may raise, escalate or grant. It may not veto or fabricate. A VERAX fault cannot alter a SHOMER path.
The verdict lives here
Fleet health, pipeline proof and on-demand challenge run on the server. The client is not asked to trust a dashboard that smiled.
The elevator.
It won’t call silence health.
VERAX proves software correct at all three moments it can fail — before it runs, while it runs, on demand.
Most tools answer pass/fail, so the thing nobody checked gets reported as healthy. VERAX refuses that. LIBRA reads the source and returns verified / failed / unverified with provenance on every claim. JUNO watches the system run and treats silence as the alarm. Stellar Guardian asks components directly and calls a non-answer a finding. Three failure modes, none findable by the other two, under one roof.
Bring us the problem. We'll examine it properly.
Partnerships, pilots, and deployments — from a single family to a community fleet. Based in Cape Town, serving South Africa.
EMAIL G&BCape Town, Western Cape · Gauteng, South Africa