Draw a line on the water with your finger. The boat sails it.
SeaRebbel builds proprietary marine autopilot hardware, with a routing SDK originally written in MATLAB. We put it in a skipper’s hand: a React Native app that turns a rough finger-drawn path into a navigable route, avoids land and reefs, and sends it to the device over Bluetooth to steer.
The intelligence existed. It had no way of reaching a skipper.
SeaRebbel’s routing logic was written in MATLAB, which is where that kind of work belongs while it is being developed and nowhere near where it needs to run. It had been compiled down to native iOS and Android SDKs, so the capability was real and on the device. What did not exist was any way for an application team to use it.
The product had to be one app on both platforms, which meant React Native, which meant the native SDKs had to be reachable from JavaScript. That bridge was the precondition for everything else on this page.
And the interface had to suit somebody standing on a moving boat. Not a waypoint table. A finger on a chart.
Three languages between the algorithm and the screen
The routing code was authored in MATLAB and delivered as native SDKs, one for each platform, with different shapes and different assumptions. We wrote the layer that makes both of them look like one thing to the React Native application, so the app has a single routing interface rather than two platform-specific ones.
A finger-drawn line is not a route. It crosses land.
The app works like a whiteboard. A skipper draws the path they want across the chart, roughly, with a finger, on a boat that is moving. What comes out of that gesture is a dense, jittery set of points that runs over headlands and straight across reefs. What the autopilot needs is a clean sequence of coordinates that is safe to sail.
Turning the first into the second has to happen fast enough that it still feels like a response to the gesture. Drawing to plotted route runs in under three seconds, which is the number that decides whether a skipper trusts the tool or goes back to waypoints.
What SeaRebbel has now that they did not
“The DaaS Labs proved to be an exceptional partner, consistently demonstrating reliability, responsiveness, and a strong sense of project ownership. Their expertise in React and React Native is impressive, and they consistently delivered clean, efficient code while adhering to best practices. Beyond the technical skills, their proactive communication and problem-solving abilities made a significant positive impact on our project.”