Embedded Software Development

Working at the level of hardware registers, bit manipulation, memory locations and cycle execution times, our embedded software engineers understand how to make your hardware really perform.

Writing in C (or occasionally even hand-coding in assembler) gives us fine control over the processor's behaviour.

Our experience spans a wide range of technologies and target processors from small low power microcontrollers to complex Arm® Cortex® cores.

Software that directly controls or receives inputs from hardware often requires microsecond precision. This means that sequential code that blocks other functions or waits around for other parts to finish is indeterminate, hard to test, and ultimately unreliable.

In the world of embedded software development, it's critical to know precisely what happens when. That's why we write carefully structured, non-blocking code.

This might be bare metal (no operating system) with a simple scheduler, or making use of a RTOS (real time operating system) for more complex projects.

Keeping your product up-to-date when it's out in the field is critical.

Adding new features, giving your UI an uplift or - dare we say it! - installing patches and bug fixes are all straightforward if you've already planned ahead.

We are experienced in creating bespoke bootloaders for many platforms to allow easy in-field application updates.

Good human-machine interfaces are every bit as important as correct functionality - after all, if someone can't easily figure out how to control your device, they're not going to want to use it!

Embedded systems aren't limited to using simple alphanumeric LCD screens, although sometimes these are perfectly sufficient.

If you want a full colour graphical touch-screen to really engage your users, we can integrate that into your system too.

We develop our embedded graphical user interfaces (GUIs) with a range of technologies / frameworks based upon the platform, including C#, TouchGFX and Flutter to really bring your UIs to life.

As internet connectivity takes an increasingly dominant role in our everyday lives, so there is an ever-expanding requirement for 'things' to report their status and be controlled remotely too.

Devices typically communicate wirelessly to a central hub on a local network before then connecting to the 'outside world'.

Whether it's WiFi, Ethernet, Bluetooth / BLE, Zigbee, an ISM band custom protocol, MiWi, LoRaWAN or GSM 3G/4G, we can give your system the connectivity it needs.

We also offer PC and tablet application development for interfacing to your product.

We can offer anything from a simple USB connection for the configuration of your device to a high speed Ethernet connection for data retrieval.

Our PC GUI-based application software is typically coded in C#.

Even if your embedded system doesn't require a snazzy app for the end-user, taking the time to create an app for internal use that allows you to view, test or configure critical parameters via a network connection or a serial port is always well worth the investment.

Our engineers use integrated development environments (IDEs) tailored to the relevant microcontroller family to speed up development, and with our phased process we get code up and running on real target devices as soon as possible in the lifecycle.

With real-time debugging techniques, code tracing and profiling, our integrated team of software and hardware engineers can work together to see into the fine detail of program execution, allowing us to quickly test code, find bugs, measure function execution times and analyse power consumption on real hardware throughout the whole development process.

Our software is bespoke to your product, and our embedded software development service is tailored to your needs.

We can offer you our full circuit design and PCB layout service, but we're equally happy developing embedded software for hardware you've already designed, or fixing bugs or adding features to your existing software.

And if you need to interface to another device or app that a third party is developing, we'll make sure the comms protocol is well defined so everything functions smoothly.

We focus on what's best for your needs, so we don't tie you in to our services.

When we develop software for you, we deliver the source code as well as the binaries as standard, so you can use it, develop it and maintain it in to the future.