Electronic Design

Most of our projects are based on our electronic designs. Our designs are either from scratch or from existing designs, re-engineered to take advantage of the latest technology.
Working from requirements, our designs focus on issues that most benefit the manufacture and life of the product.

Design considerations include:

• Component count, cost and availability
• Ease of manufacture and configuration
• Power supply range, stability and efficiency
• Environmental suitability and tolerance
• Flexibility for future requirement changes

If you own the rights to an existing product and don't have the supporting documentation, we may be able to reproduce the same or equivalent design to re-manufacture the product. Most re-engineered products can benefit from improvements to reduce cost and power requirements etc.

Circuit card and housing design

Electronic circuits are captured as schematic with a software package. The capture package produces net lists, which combined with footprints of all the components used, are then used to lay out circuit cards.

Factors that govern the layout of circuits include:

• Minimisation of card area to reduce cost
• EMC considerations, in extreme cases, with lightning suppression
• Ease of assembly by pick and place assembly plant
• Clearance of mounted component in final assembly
• Minimisation or if possible, elimination of wiring

It is usual to lay out a circuit card in conjunction with the design of the product housing. We have solid modelling facilities that are used in conjunction with the design of the circuit cards to prove the design before commissioning circuit cards.

Firmware Development

Specialising in real time and multitasking software for microcontrollers, our developments range from intelligent ballistic motor control, through protocol interfacing, data acquisition and logging, to bingo calling machines. The majority of our developments are realised for the Microchip and Atmel ranges of microcontrollers. Designs are predominantly developed using object based techniques and documented before implementation.

Elements of previous designs include:

• Telemetry transducer interfacing
• PWM closed loop power control
• Proportional valve control
• Protocol stack management
• Satellite link management
• Battery state monitoring

Although our core business is based on firmware development, we also develop API's, drivers and some Windows applications.

Programming languages we use include:

• Assembler
• C, C++
• Ada
• VB, VBA
• HTML, PHP, Java