IoT product development from first idea to a product in the field

There's no standard starting point and we don't pretend there is. Some clients hand over a tight specification and want it engineered and built. Some have a working principle but no product around it. Some have already spent money elsewhere and ended up with a prototype that demos well and can't be manufactured. The first job is usually to pin down what the device actually has to do: what it measures, where it lives, how it's powered, what it has to survive, and what would make it a commercial success rather than a clever demo. Get that wrong and everything downstream is wasted money, so we spend real time on it before anyone lays out a board. Once it's clear, we carry the work the whole way to hardware you can sell.

A finished product is electronics, firmware, a radio link, a mechanical design and a way to make it at volume. Most projects stall in the gaps between the people who own each of those parts: the firmware waiting on the hardware, the hardware waiting on the radio, the radio waiting on the enclosure. We hold the whole lot under one roof. The team that scopes the radio link also lays out the board, writes the firmware, designs the enclosure and builds the first units, so the awkward questions that normally bounce between three companies get answered in one room. For you that means fewer contracts to manage, nobody pointing fingers when something slips, and a much shorter line from a decision to a working sample on your desk.

The people who build your product are the same engineers behind our own: UK RF and embedded specialists with decades at the front line of radio design, several of them shareholders in this business. That experience earns its keep in the places IoT products usually die — getting a usable signal out of a basement or a steel enclosure, squeezing years out of a single battery, and building something that still works after two winters outdoors. Plenty of firms can give you a board that talks to Wi-Fi on a desk. Far fewer can make a low-power wireless product behave on a real site, for years, with nobody there to nurse it. If that's the hard part of your product, it's the part we're strongest on.

A working prototype and a manufacturable product are two different things, and the gap between them is where most projects quietly fail. We design for manufacture early: parts that can actually be sourced in the quantities you'll need, a board a factory can assemble and test, enclosure tooling thought through before it becomes a problem, and the radio and EMC testing planned in rather than discovered at the end when it's expensive to fix. Compliance — CE and UKCA marking, radio approvals — gets mapped out early so it doesn't ambush the launch. What you should end up with is a product that can be built in volume, will pass the tests it has to pass, and runs reliably out in the field. Not a one-off that looked good in a meeting.

Because we manufacture our own hardware, the work doesn't stop at a sample that works. We take the design through pilot builds and into volume manufacture in the UK, and if you want it, we'll support the product in the field the same way we support our own deployments — watching how the fleet behaves, dealing with what real-world use throws up, keeping it running. One team carries it from the first phone call through to devices working on your customers' sites.