Our Services
We have a variety of capabilities to help with your product development goals
Microcontroller firmware development
We code embedded software that runs on a PCB-mounted microcontroller to provide control of an Embedded System. Most often the circuit boards are developed by us too, but if a customer takes ownership for the PCB design we can provide firmware development as a standalone service as well. Our favorite microcontrollers to work with are devices from Atmel: the 8-bit AVR and 32-bit ARM-based SAM cores.
Mechanical design, system integration
Many of our electronics designs are tightly integrated within electromechanical systems, needing to interface with sensors and actuators. When the client chooses to take responsibility for the mechanical design, we communicate early and often to ensure that the mechanical interfaces implemented within our electronics design work as expected. When we provide the mechanical design for the electronics housing and other mechanical features, we use Onshape, a professional 3D CAD system that includes excellent support for remote collaboration. This allows our customers to easily review the design directly within the native CAD software, zooming in and rotating around, all at no cost.
Graphical User Interface (GUI) development
Many circuit boards have a communications interface enabling the exchange of data and control commands. For these systems (developed either by us or our customers) we develop a GUI that runs on a PC to display the data received and allow the operator to select and send configuration settings to the board. When the GUI is intended to run on a Windows PC, we typically create native Windows applications written using the C# programming language. For multi-platform applications (Windows + Linux) we use the Python programming language.
We design custom circuit boards to meet your functional and size requirements. Many of our projects are Embedded Systems with a microcontroller surrounded by analog, digital, and power electronics circuits. We use and recommend Altium Designer, a very high quality electronic CAD design software package, to efficiently design PCBs and produce the associated manufacturing documentation for bare board fabrication and assembly.
Schematic design and PCB layout
"Transforming great ideas into reality" is our tagline, and it's what we love to do best. Many of the most game-changing product development efforts require the integration of electrical, software, and mechanical functionality. As described in more detail in our other service listings, we can provide standalone services for circuit board design, embedded software and GUI development, and mechanical design, but we always love the opportunity to work with customers to integrate all of these aspects together in a prototype or product development effort. We especially enjoy early stage development when we have the opportunity to create something meaningful and real from nothing more than an idea.
We are happy to support our customers in whatever manner works for them. Sometimes this means that our customers take on some development work themselves, or engage another third party to help. We can still help troubleshoot any problems that occur and provide design review services for software or hardware development to help prevent problems from occurring in the first place.
