A circuit board that works, can be manufactured, and remains yours

Your device works. On the desk, with a breadboard, a handful of wires, and an Arduino you once bought for a trial. Now a client wants ten, then fifty, and suddenly it is no longer a trial but a product. A circuit board you can screw into an enclosure, that can take vibration and temperature, and that someone other than you can make, is a different thing from a setup that happens to work.

Architecture before layout

A good circuit board does not start in the drawing program but with the question of what the device must do and where it hangs. A sensor in a cold room has different requirements than a controller in a cabinet next to a frequency drive. We go through those requirements: the power supply, the connections, which signals go in and out, how long it has to run on a battery, and what it may cost per unit. Then we draw the schematic and design the board, in a size that fits your enclosure and with the connectors where the cables can actually reach them.

We have a small series of those made and assembled, usually five to ten units. They go to you, in your own situation, and not to a test bench that resembles practice. What goes wrong there, we work into the next version. Two rounds are often enough. If you first want to see whether the idea works at all before investing in a board design, Hardware prototyping is the step before this.

Select parts for the product lifetime

Most designs do not fail on the engineering but on purchasing. A chip that was simply in stock during the design turns out a year later to have a 40-week lead time, or has been taken out of production. Then you have a working design nobody can make. That is why we choose every part not only on price and performance, but also on how long it will still be made, how many manufacturers supply an equivalent alternative, and whether you can order it from a regular distributor in the quantities you need.

For the critical parts, usually the microcontroller, the power supply, and the radio, we record which alternative fits without changing the board. That is in the bill of materials you get from us. If it gets tight later anyway, Component sourcing helps you find and secure stock.

Measure the first boards

A board that works is not yet a board that works well. A power supply that sits just inside its margin gets hot at an ambient temperature of 30 degrees Celsius. A sensor signal that is clean on the desk gets noisy as soon as the motor next to it starts. You do not see that from the outside; you see it on an oscilloscope. So we measure the key signals, the power consumption in every mode, and the behavior at a supply voltage that is too low or too high, and we record it in a short measurement report.

That work pays off later. A device you sell in Europe must meet the CE and EMC requirements, and most failures at a test house come from choices in the layout: where the ground runs, how the power supply is decoupled, which traces are too long. We take that into account during the design, so the formal test under CE and EMC certification holds no surprises. We can also include in the design the setup you will later use to check every board from the factory.

Receive files you can use without us

You get the complete design: the schematic, the layout, the bill of materials, the production files for the board manufacturer, and the data the assembler needs to place the parts in the right spot. Not as a PDF, but as source files in a common program, so another designer or your own people can continue with it later. You are the owner, and you are not bound to us to have the next batch made.

It is convenient if you do, though. Under Small-batch manufacturing, we have the first hundred or thousand units made at manufacturers we know, and if the firmware comes from us too, hardware and software are in one hand. Not sure whether a board of your own is the right step, or whether a ready-made module with a few modifications is enough? That is exactly what we find out in the free intake. If a module will do, we tell you right away.