use Encode qw( decode encode );

... input ...

foreach ($hardwareValue1, $hardwareValue2) {
    $_ = decode('UTF-8', $_);
}

... do some work ...

foreach ($hardwareValue1, $hardwareValue2) {
    $_ = encode('iso-latin-1', $_);
}

... output ...

##</code><code>##

use Encode qw( from_to );

... input ...

foreach ($hardwareValue1, $hardwareValue2) {
    $_ = from_to($_, 'UTF-8', 'iso-latin-1');
}

... output ...