One of the pleasures of consulting with Startups and Small Businesses is the variety of projects that come our way. The electronics world is exploding with new ideas, and the embedded firmware along with it. So we get to work with clever people who are developing interesting new products.

Here are some examples of recent and ongoing projects for very different applications:

Limited Access Point: A good way to upload and download information from your smartphone to a nearby device is to add Limited Access Point capability to the device. This WiFi mode is commonly used for printers and cameras. One of our clients needs it to gather sensor information from a remote device once a month, and occasionally change the device configuration. A nearby user can login with a tablet or smartphone, download the data, and make any needed changes from a custom app we provide.

Mysterious Corrosion: Outdoor systems sometimes have underground wires that connect devices. But if the wires get nicked during installation, they can quickly deteriorate with electric corrosion. We helped a client identify this problem and redesign the devices to minimize the impact of this effect.

Mission Control: One of our longterm customers develops drone systems for non-military surveillance and photography. We are currently helping him design and assemble custom trailers with all the equipment needed to fly the drones and capture the streaming data. As needed, we design and make interface circuits to ease the connections between devices.

WiFi Range Improvement: Some of our current clients are not getting the expected WiFi range from their products. In some cases, the device is so small that it compromises the standard antenna, so a custom antenna is needed. In others, the nearby logic circuitry is too noisy for the WiFi to function, so we need to make changes to the circuit board and add some filtering so that the radio communications are not degraded. (The same issues arise in products with other radios, like Bluetooth and cellular modules).

I’ll See You in Court!: Patent disputes are centered around ‘Prior Art’ and ‘Disclosure Dates’. We use our broad experience in creating new products and patenting them to dig up information that is useful for lawyers.