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Emerging Technology

Firmware Development Services

Firmware is the code that runs directly on the chip, no operating system to fall back on, kilobytes of memory rather than gigabytes, real-time deadlines that are missed silently, and a device in the field that you cannot simply restart. It is a specialist discipline where a bug can brick a product nobody can reach and a careless update can take out a whole batch at once. We write firmware for people who need it to be right, because in this domain right is the only acceptable standard.

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What Firmware Development means in practice

Who it’s for: Organisations building a physical or connected product, custom hardware, or an IoT or industrial sensor system, who need the low-level software on the device engineered by specialists, not adapted from application-software habits that quietly fall apart under real-time and resource constraints.

Firmware is the software that runs on the hardware itself, on the microcontroller inside a sensor, a motor controller, a medical device or a piece of industrial equipment. It is a fundamentally different discipline from the application and platform software most engineers write. There is often no operating system underneath you, memory is measured in kilobytes rather than gigabytes, the processor is slow and power-constrained by design, and the code has to meet real-time deadlines that, when missed, produce no error message, just a device that behaves wrongly. We write that code in C and C++, and increasingly in Rust where its memory-safety guarantees earn their place, either bare-metal or on a real-time operating system like FreeRTOS or Zephyr.

The thing that makes firmware unforgiving is that the device is out in the world and you are not. A bug in a web application is a bad afternoon and a redeploy; a bug in deployed firmware can brick a product sitting on a customer’s wall, in a machine on a factory floor, or in a location nobody will physically visit for years. That reality changes how the work has to be done: everything is tested on real hardware rather than assumed from a simulator, the resource and timing budgets are treated as hard limits rather than aspirations, and the ability to update safely in the field is designed in from the start rather than wished for after the first serious bug ships. We build with those constraints as first principles, not as afterthoughts.

Firmware rarely exists on its own. It is usually one half of a connected product: the code on the device, talking to a platform in the cloud that ingests its data, manages the fleet and pushes it updates. We build both halves, and that matters: the seams between firmware and platform (the connectivity protocol, the authentication scheme, the over-the-air update mechanism), are exactly where connected products succeed or fail, and designing them jointly rather than assuming them is a large part of getting a product to work. For the platform side (connectivity, data ingestion, storage and fleet management), see our IoT development service; this service is the code that runs on the device.

What you get

  • Firmware written in C, C++ or Rust for your target microcontroller, bare-metal where the device is simple enough to warrant it, or on an RTOS like FreeRTOS or Zephyr where concurrent tasks and real-time scheduling justify the overhead, with the choice made against your hardware rather than habit
  • Device drivers and peripheral interfacing, talking to sensors, actuators and other chips over the buses that connect them (I2C, SPI, UART and the rest), written to the datasheet and hardened against the real-world misbehaviour that datasheets never quite describe
  • A hardware abstraction layer that keeps the device-specific code in one place, so the firmware is portable across hardware revisions and testable off the target rather than welded to one exact board
  • Power management designed for the device’s real duty cycle (sleep modes, wake sources and clock control), because on a battery-powered product the difference between naive and careful firmware is often the difference between weeks and years of runtime
  • A secure over-the-air (OTA) update mechanism (signed, verified and reversible), so the firmware can be fixed and improved across a deployed fleet without bricking devices, because a product you cannot safely update is one whose bugs are permanent
  • Secure boot and a verified update chain, so the device runs only firmware you actually signed and an attacker cannot replace it with their own. The foundation that makes everything else on the device trustworthy
  • Rigorous testing on real hardware (not just a simulator), with the timing, memory and power behaviour measured rather than assumed, and the awkward edge cases (brown-outs, corrupt input, interrupted updates) deliberately exercised

What Firmware Development does for you

  • The device does its job reliably, for years

    A physical product is judged by whether it keeps working, quietly, long after it was bought. Firmware written with the real constraints in mind: meeting timing deterministically, staying within memory and power, degrading sensibly when something goes wrong rather than locking up, is what makes a device dependable in the field instead of one that works on the bench and then behaves strangely once it meets real power supplies, real temperatures and real input. That reliability is not luck; it is the product of budgeting the resources as hard limits and testing against the awkward conditions the field guarantees.

  • You can fix and improve the product after it ships

    A device without a safe update mechanism is frozen the day it leaves the factory. Every bug and every security hole in it is permanent, and the only fix is a recall. A properly built OTA path changes that entirely: you can correct problems, add capability and close vulnerabilities across a whole deployed fleet remotely, for the product’s whole life. Over a multi-year lifespan that capability is often the difference between a product that stays viable and one that quietly rots, and it is worth building carefully because a careless version of it is itself a way to lose devices.

  • Battery life measured in years, not weeks

    On a battery-powered device, power management is not a nicety. It is often the headline specification. The difference between firmware that keeps the processor awake because it is easier and firmware that sleeps aggressively, wakes only when it must, and shuts down peripherals it is not using can be one or two orders of magnitude in runtime. We design the power behaviour around the device’s real duty cycle, because on a sensor that has to last years on a coin cell, careful firmware is what makes the product physically possible rather than a unit that needs its battery changed every fortnight.

Why teams choose us for Firmware Development

  • Firmware is a genuinely separate discipline, and we treat it as one, written by engineers who work in kilobytes and real-time deadlines, not application developers reaching down into embedded and discovering the hard way that their usual habits allocate memory that is not there and miss deadlines that are silent
  • We test on real hardware as a matter of course, because firmware that has only run in a simulator has not really run. The bugs that brick devices live in the gap between the model and the silicon, and we go looking for them there
  • Security is designed in from secure boot upward, not bolted on, because firmware is extremely hard to patch once deployed and an insecure device is a serious, well-documented attack surface, so the update chain and the boot chain are trustworthy by construction
  • We build the firmware and the platform it talks to, so the seams between them (protocol, authentication, OTA), are designed jointly by people who own both sides, rather than assumed across a boundary where connected products so often break

What Firmware Development includes

The concrete pieces of work this covers, scoped to what your problem actually needs.

  • Bare-metal and RTOS firmware

    The first structural decision is whether the firmware runs bare-metal (directly on the hardware with your own main loop and interrupt handlers), or on a real-time operating system like FreeRTOS or Zephyr. Bare-metal is the right answer for simple, tightly-constrained devices where an RTOS is overhead you cannot spare and complexity you do not need. An RTOS earns its place when the device juggles several concurrent activities with different timing requirements, where hand-rolling the scheduling would be more error-prone than using a proven kernel. We make that call against your device rather than by preference, because both are correct in the right place and wrong in the other.

  • Device drivers and peripheral interfacing

    A microcontroller on its own does nothing useful. Its value comes from what it is wired to: sensors reading the world, actuators changing it, memory, radios and other chips. Making those work means writing drivers that speak the peripheral’s protocol correctly over the bus that connects it. I2C and SPI for on-board chips, UART for serial links, and the microcontroller’s own timers, ADCs and GPIO. Datasheets describe the happy path; real parts have quirks, timing sensitivities and failure modes the datasheet omits, so we write drivers that are robust against a peripheral misbehaving rather than ones that assume it never will.

  • Hardware abstraction and portability

    Firmware welded to one exact chip is firmware you rewrite every time the hardware changes, and hardware changes, as parts go out of stock, revisions ship and cost pressure forces a swap. We put the hardware-specific code behind a clean abstraction layer, so the bulk of the firmware talks to an interface rather than to registers directly. That keeps the device-specific detail in one place, makes a hardware revision or a chip substitution a contained change rather than a rewrite, and (just as valuably), lets much of the logic be tested off the target, where a test is fast and a failure is legible.

  • Power management

    On anything battery-powered, how the firmware manages power often decides whether the product is viable at all. The microcontroller and its peripherals have low-power and sleep states, and the art is keeping the device asleep as much as possible, waking only for what it must do, and shutting down whatever it is not using. We design this around the device’s real duty cycle (how often it must sense, compute and communicate), because that is what determines the true average draw. Done well, it is the difference between a sensor that runs for years on a small cell and one that is impractical; done naively, the battery is flat before anyone notices why.

  • Connectivity firmware

    For a connected device, the firmware has to speak to the outside world reliably over links that are anything but reliable. That means implementing the connectivity (often MQTT over a cellular, Wi-Fi or low-power radio link), with the field’s realities built in: buffering readings locally when the link is down and sending them when it returns, reconnecting cleanly, and authenticating the device so the platform knows who it is talking to. This is where the firmware meets the platform, and we build both sides so the protocol, message format and authentication are designed as one rather than assumed across a boundary.

  • Secure boot and OTA updates

    Two capabilities keep a deployed device both trustworthy and improvable, and they are linked. Secure boot ensures the device only runs firmware you actually signed, so an attacker cannot replace it with their own. Signed OTA lets you update that firmware in the field: verified against the same trust chain, staged to a subset before the whole fleet, and reversible so a bad update rolls back rather than bricking the unit. These are among the hardest parts of firmware to get right, and among the most consequential: they are what let a product be fixed and secured for years, and getting them wrong is how you either lock bugs in permanently or lose a batch of devices to a botched push.

Where it fits

  • Firmware for a new connected product

    You are bringing a physical product to market with a microcontroller inside it, and you need the on-device software: reading its sensors, driving its outputs, managing power, connecting securely to the cloud, and updating over the air. We write that firmware, and (because we build the platform side too), design its connectivity and update seams to fit the platform it talks to, so the two halves of the product are engineered together rather than bolted together late.

  • Bring-up and drivers for custom hardware

    A freshly designed board arrives from the fabricator and does nothing until firmware makes it work. We do the bring-up: getting the chip booting, the clocks and power rails behaving, each peripheral responding, and write the drivers that turn a bare board into a functioning device. Because firmware and hardware decisions are intertwined, this work is most valuable when it starts while the board is still being designed, where a firmware perspective can catch a costly hardware choice before the board is fabricated.

  • Low-power sensor and IoT devices

    A sensor that has to sit in the field for years on a battery, sensing and reporting, lives or dies by its firmware’s power discipline and its connectivity resilience. We build the firmware that sleeps aggressively and wakes only to work, captures data reliably, communicates over a poor link without losing readings, and can be updated remotely as it ages. The on-device foundation that, paired with the platform, makes a fleet of remote sensors actually operable rather than a maintenance burden.

  • Industrial and control firmware

    Equipment that has to respond deterministically (a motor controller, an instrument, a piece of process control), where timing is a hard requirement and a missed deadline has physical consequences. This is real-time firmware in the strict sense, where the structure of interrupts, tasks and timing has to guarantee the deadline is met every time rather than usually, and where the device has to fail safely rather than unpredictably when something goes wrong. We build for that determinism and for the long service life industrial equipment demands.

How we approach Firmware Development

We start from the constraints the hardware actually imposes, because in firmware those constraints are the design. How much flash and RAM does the microcontroller have; what are the hard real-time deadlines; what is the power budget and duty cycle; what peripherals and buses are on the board; does the product need to run for a decade on a coin cell or is it mains-powered. These answers decide everything downstream: whether bare-metal or an RTOS makes sense, how the memory is laid out, how interrupts and tasks are structured, and getting them wrong is expensive to unwind once the hardware and the firmware architecture are set. So we establish them first, ideally while the hardware is still being designed, because firmware and hardware decisions are deeply intertwined and the cheapest time to influence a board is before it is fabricated.

From there we treat two things as non-negotiable from the first commit: testing on real hardware, and a safe update path. Firmware that has only ever run in a simulator has not really run, because the bugs that matter: timing races, peripheral quirks, brown-out behaviour, memory that was fine until an interrupt fired at the wrong moment, live in the gap between the model and the silicon. And because the device will be in the field and we will not, the ability to update it safely, with secure boot and signed reversible OTA, is designed in from the start rather than retrofitted after the first bug proves it was needed. We operate what we build, which in firmware means the people making these decisions are the ones who would have to answer for a batch of bricked devices. A powerful incentive to be careful.

How we approach a firmware engagement

We begin with the hardware and its constraints, because in firmware those constraints are the specification. What is the microcontroller and how much flash and RAM does it have; what peripherals and buses are on the board; what are the hard real-time deadlines; what is the power source and the duty cycle; how long must the product keep working. Where the hardware is still being designed, we want to be in that conversation, because firmware and hardware are so intertwined that an early firmware perspective can prevent an expensive board respin: a peripheral placed on the wrong bus, a pin that should have been an interrupt, a power rail that makes the intended sleep strategy impossible. The cheapest time to fix hardware is before it exists.

We then decide the firmware’s architecture against those constraints: bare-metal or RTOS, how memory is laid out, how interrupts and tasks are structured, where the hardware abstraction boundary sits, and build behind a hardware abstraction layer so as much logic as possible can be tested off the target. Real firmware, though, is proven on real hardware, so we test on the actual silicon throughout, measuring the timing, memory headroom and power draw rather than assuming them, and deliberately exercising the ugly conditions: brown-outs, corrupt or hostile input, an interrupt firing at the worst moment, an update interrupted halfway.

From early on we build in the things that are painful or impossible to add later: secure boot, and a signed, reversible OTA path. These are not features to bolt on at the end (they shape the memory layout and the boot flow), and they are what make a deployed device both trustworthy and fixable. We are honest throughout about where the risk sits: field updates are genuinely dangerous, real-time bugs are subtle, and firmware has to be maintainable for the many years the product will live, so we build for that lifecycle rather than for a demo that runs once on the bench.

Bare-metal, RTOS, and the hardware abstraction layer

The foundational architectural choice in firmware is bare-metal versus an RTOS. Bare-metal means your code owns the machine directly: a main loop, interrupt handlers, and no scheduler between you and the hardware. It is lean, predictable and entirely appropriate for a device doing a small number of things where an operating system would be overhead you cannot afford in flash, RAM or complexity. A real-time operating system like FreeRTOS or Zephyr introduces a scheduler, tasks and synchronisation primitives, which earn their cost when the device has several concurrent activities with different timing requirements that would be fiddly and bug-prone to interleave by hand. Neither is universally right; we choose per device, because forcing an RTOS onto a trivial device wastes resources and hand-scheduling a genuinely concurrent one invites exactly the timing bugs an RTOS exists to prevent.

Whichever we choose, a hardware abstraction layer sits between the device-specific code and the rest of the firmware. The lowest layer knows about registers, pins and this exact chip; above it, the firmware’s logic talks to clean interfaces (read this sensor, drive this output, send this message), without knowing which chip it is running on. This is not architectural neatness for its own sake. It keeps the hardware-specific detail contained, so a board revision or a forced chip substitution is a bounded change rather than a rewrite; it lets much of the firmware be tested on a development machine, where tests are fast and failures are readable, rather than only on the target; and it makes the codebase legible to the engineers who will maintain it over the product’s long life.

Around that structure, memory is treated as the hard limit it is. On a microcontroller there is no virtual memory and no comfortable headroom; dynamic allocation is used sparingly or not at all, because fragmentation and out-of-memory on a device with kilobytes of RAM is not an exception you catch and recover from, it is a device that stops working. The memory layout (where code, constants, stack and any heap live), is a deliberate design decision, and secure boot and OTA make it more so, because the device has to hold and validate a new firmware image while still running the old one. Designing that layout up front, rather than discovering its constraints when the linker runs out of room, is part of getting the architecture right.

Security designed in, because firmware is hard to patch and a serious attack surface

Firmware security is unusually consequential for two reasons that compound each other. First, firmware is hard to patch: unlike a server you can update in seconds, a deployed device may be physically inaccessible, on a poor connection, or reachable only through an update mechanism that is itself risky to use, so a vulnerability shipped in firmware can persist for the life of the product. Second, an insecure device is a genuinely serious attack surface: deployed devices are small, internet-connected computers, often physically accessible and frequently shipped with weak defaults, which is exactly why insecure firmware has been recruited into some of the largest botnets ever seen and used as a way into the networks devices sit on. Insecure firmware does not just endanger your product; it endangers your customers and the wider internet. So on firmware, security is a design constraint from the boot chain up, not a hardening pass at the end.

The foundation is secure boot: the device verifies, at power-on, that the firmware it is about to run was signed by a key you control, and refuses to run anything that was not. This is what makes everything else trustworthy, without it, an attacker who can write to the device’s flash simply replaces your firmware with theirs. On top of secure boot, the update path uses the same trust chain: OTA images are signed and verified before they are applied, so the device only ever runs code you actually issued. An unauthenticated update mechanism is a remote-code-execution hole waiting to be found, so the update path is treated as security-critical infrastructure rather than a convenience feature.

Beyond the boot and update chain, the device is built to authenticate rather than trust, and to protect what secrets it holds. Each device has its own identity and credentials, not a shared secret that one cracked unit exposes for the whole fleet, and it proves that identity to the platform rather than being taken at its word. Sensitive material is protected using the microcontroller’s security features where they exist, and the firmware validates input it receives rather than assuming it is well-formed and friendly, because a device on a network will eventually meet hostile input. And because devices live for years, the security decisions made today have to hold up for a long time, and the ability to update is what lets you respond when they do not, which is precisely why the secure, reliable update path matters so much. The platform side of this (per-device identity at fleet scale, encrypted ingestion, compromise response), is covered by our IoT development service; the two are designed to fit together.

Signs it’s time

  • You are building a connected or physical product (a device with a microcontroller inside it), and need the code that runs on the device, whether or not you also need the platform it talks to
  • You have custom hardware, or hardware under design, and need firmware written for it, including the driver and bring-up work that turns a freshly fabricated board into something that runs
  • You are building an IoT device or a sensor system and need the on-device software done properly: reliable data capture, careful power management, secure connectivity and a safe way to update the fleet
  • You have industrial, instrumentation or control hardware with real-time requirements, where timing has to be met deterministically and a missed deadline has real physical consequences

Where firmware ends and the platform begins

A connected product has two software halves, and being precise about the boundary between them prevents a great deal of trouble. The firmware is the code on the device: reading sensors, driving hardware, managing power, and speaking the connectivity protocol. The platform is everything the device talks to: the broker, the ingestion pipeline, the storage, the analytics, the dashboards and the fleet management. This service is the firmware; our IoT development service is the platform. Most real products need both, and they are genuinely different disciplines, firmware works in kilobytes and real-time deadlines, the platform works in scale and data volume, so we treat them as distinct crafts rather than pretending one team does both casually and produces a weak version of each.

The two halves meet at a small number of contracts that matter enormously: the connectivity protocol and message format, the authentication scheme, and the OTA update mechanism. These seams are where connected products succeed or fail, because a mismatch there is cheap to prevent in design and painfully expensive to fix once devices are deployed: a firmware that expects one authentication flow and a platform that offers another is the sort of problem that surfaces only in the field. Because we build both sides, we design these contracts jointly and defend them, rather than assuming them across an organisational boundary. Where you already have a platform, or a firmware team, we own our half and make the seam explicit rather than hoping it lines up.

On tooling and language, we are pragmatic. C remains the lingua franca of firmware and we write a great deal of it; C++ earns its place where its abstractions help without costing what the device cannot spare; and Rust is increasingly compelling where its memory-safety guarantees eliminate, at compile time, a whole category of the bugs that plague firmware written in C. The choice is made on the device, the toolchain support and the team who will maintain it, not on fashion. And because we operate what we build, these decisions are made by the people who would have to answer for a device misbehaving in the field, which, in a discipline this unforgiving, is the strongest possible pressure toward getting them right.

Technologies we build it with

Chosen per problem, not per fashion. This is the stack we most often reach for on this work.

How we deliver

  1. 01

    Discover

    We map the system, the constraints and the business it serves, including the parts nobody documented.

    Architecture brief

  2. 02

    Architect

    Decisions get made, written down and defended before a line of production code exists.

    Decision records

  3. 03

    Build

    Short cycles against working software. You see progress in the product, not in a status deck.

    Shipping increments

  4. 04

    Operate

    Monitoring, incident response and iteration. The system is alive, so the engagement is too.

    Runbooks & SLOs

Want a straight answer on Firmware Development?

A short call with a senior engineer, before you write a brief. If Firmware Development is the wrong answer for your situation, we will say so and tell you what we think is right.

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What changes

  • Firmware that holds up in the field

    Code that meets its real-time deadlines, lives within its memory and power budget, and copes with the brown-outs, corrupt inputs and peripheral misbehaviour the real world produces, tested on real hardware, so the device works where it is deployed rather than only on the bench.

  • A device you can update safely

    Secure boot plus signed, verified, reversible OTA, so you can fix bugs and close security holes across a deployed fleet for years without visiting a unit or fearing that a bad update bricks the lot. The capability that keeps a product viable long after it ships.

  • A device that is not the weak link

    Secure boot, a verified update chain and a device that authenticates rather than trusts, so your product is not the insecure firmware that becomes an attacker’s way in, because insecure devices are a notorious and consequential attack surface.

Industries we serve

Domain knowledge changes what gets built. A few of the sectors we know before the first meeting.

How pricing works

  • The biggest driver is the complexity of the device and its constraints. Simple firmware on a capable microcontroller with generous resources is a very different undertaking from tightly-constrained real-time firmware that has to meet hard deadlines within a few kilobytes of RAM and a strict power budget. The number and awkwardness of the peripherals matters too: every sensor and chip that needs a driver, especially the ones with quirky datasheets or poor documentation, is real work, so we scope against the actual hardware rather than a generic idea of firmware.
  • The security and update requirements are the next driver, and they are not optional on a connected product. Secure boot and a signed, reversible OTA path are among the harder parts of firmware to build correctly, and a device that genuinely needs them is a larger undertaking than one that does not. We are explicit about which of these your product requires, because they are exactly the capabilities that are painful to retrofit: building them in from the start is far cheaper than adding them after the first serious field bug proves they were needed.
  • Where the hardware is still being designed, involving us early usually reduces total cost rather than adding to it, because a firmware perspective during hardware design catches the expensive mistakes. A peripheral on the wrong bus, a pin that should have been an interrupt, a power arrangement that makes the intended battery life impossible, while they are still cheap to fix. A board respin after fabrication is far more expensive than a conversation before it.
  • Firmware has a long tail, and we are honest that the cost does not end at launch. Products live for years, field bugs surface, security decisions age, and the firmware has to remain maintainable and updatable throughout. We build for that lifecycle deliberately (legible code, a hardware abstraction that survives revisions, a dependable update path), because firmware written only to pass its first demo becomes very expensive to keep alive, and on a device you cannot easily reach that expense is the kind that turns into a recall.

Typical timeline

  1. 01

    Constraints and architecture

    Establishing the hardware realities that decide the design. The microcontroller and its memory, the peripherals and buses, the real-time deadlines, the power budget and duty cycle, the product lifespan, and choosing the firmware architecture against them: bare-metal or RTOS, memory layout, and where the hardware abstraction boundary sits. Where the board is still being designed, this is the point to influence it.

  2. 02

    Bring-up and drivers

    Getting the device to run: booting the chip, bringing up clocks and power, and writing the drivers that make each peripheral work over its bus, hardened against the quirks and failure modes real parts have rather than the happy path the datasheet describes. This is where a bare board becomes a functioning device.

  3. 03

    Application logic, power and connectivity

    Building the firmware’s actual behaviour on top of the drivers (the sensing, control and logic the product exists to do), with power management designed around the real duty cycle, and, for connected devices, resilient connectivity that buffers and recovers over an unreliable link and authenticates to the platform.

  4. 04

    Secure boot, OTA and hardware testing

    Building in secure boot and a signed, reversible OTA path, then proving the whole firmware on real hardware under realistic and adverse conditions, measured timing and power, brown-outs, corrupt input, an update interrupted and rolled back, before handing over firmware that is trustworthy, updatable and maintainable for the product’s long life.

What working with us actually means

  • Firmware specialists, not application developers reaching down

    Embedded is its own discipline, and the failures come from treating it like ordinary software. Application habits: allocating memory freely, assuming deadlines are soft, trusting that a bug is just a redeploy away from a fix, quietly break on a microcontroller. Our firmware is written by senior engineers who work natively in kilobytes and real-time constraints, so the trade-offs are made by people who know what actually bites on a device rather than what works fine on a server.

  • We test on real hardware, because that is where the bugs are

    Firmware that has only run in a simulator has not really run. The bugs that brick devices: timing races, peripheral quirks, brown-out behaviour, an interrupt firing at the worst possible moment, live in the gap between the model and the silicon, and the only way to find them is to run on the silicon and go looking. We test on real hardware throughout and deliberately exercise the ugly conditions the field guarantees, rather than discovering them in a customer’s deployment.

  • Security and updatability designed in from the boot chain up

    Firmware is hard to patch once deployed and an insecure device is a serious, well-documented attack surface, so we build secure boot and a signed, reversible OTA path in from the start rather than bolting them on after a scare. That is what makes a deployed device both trustworthy (it runs only code you signed), and fixable, so you can close bugs and vulnerabilities across a fleet for years instead of shipping a product whose flaws are permanent.

  • We build both halves, and we operate what we build

    Because we build the firmware and the platform it talks to, the seams where connected products break (protocol, authentication, OTA), are designed jointly by people who own both sides. And because we operate what we build, the engineers making these calls are the ones who would have to answer for a batch of bricked devices in the field, which in a discipline this unforgiving is the strongest possible incentive to build it carefully.

How to engage us

Three ways to work with us on this, chosen to fit the problem, not our margin.

Related services

Part of Digital Transformation. Other work we do alongside this.

Common questions

Do you build the platform and cloud side as well as the firmware on the device?

Yes, and it is one of the reasons to work with us. This service is the firmware. The code that runs on the device itself: drivers, peripheral interfacing, power management, connectivity, secure boot and OTA. The platform the device talks to (connectivity at scale, data ingestion, time-series storage, dashboards and fleet management), is covered by our IoT development service. Most connected products need both halves, and they meet at a few critical seams: the connectivity protocol and message format, the authentication scheme, and the OTA update mechanism. Because we build both sides, we design those contracts jointly rather than assuming them across a boundary, which is exactly where connected products so often break. Where you already have a platform or a firmware team, we own our half and make the seam explicit rather than hoping it lines up.

What happens if a firmware bug ships and devices are already in the field?

This is the question that shapes how firmware should be built, because the honest answer is that it is much harder to deal with than a bug in server software. A device may be physically inaccessible, on a poor connection, or reachable only through an update mechanism that is itself risky, so a bug shipped in firmware can, without the right groundwork, persist for the life of the product. That is precisely why we build a safe update path in from the start: a signed, verified, reversible OTA mechanism, staged to a subset of the fleet before the whole of it, so you can fix problems remotely and a bad update rolls back rather than bricking devices. Without that groundwork, a serious field bug can mean a recall; with it, it means a controlled update. We would rather build the capability early than explain after a scare why it was not there.

Should the firmware be bare-metal or run on an RTOS like FreeRTOS or Zephyr?

It depends on the device, and we decide per project rather than by default. Bare-metal means your code owns the machine directly: a main loop and interrupt handlers, no scheduler in between. It is lean and predictable and entirely right for a device doing a small number of things, where an RTOS would be flash, RAM and complexity you do not need. An RTOS such as FreeRTOS or Zephyr adds a scheduler, tasks and synchronisation, which earn their cost when the device has several concurrent activities with different timing requirements that would be error-prone to interleave by hand. Forcing an RTOS onto a trivial device wastes resources; hand-scheduling a genuinely concurrent one invites the timing bugs an RTOS exists to prevent. So we make the call against your hardware and what it actually has to do.

Do you use Rust for firmware, or only C and C++?

We use all three, chosen on the merits for your device. C remains the lingua franca of firmware and we write a great deal of it: the toolchains, the vendor support and the existing code are all built around it. C++ earns its place where its abstractions help without costing what a constrained device cannot spare. Rust is increasingly compelling because its memory-safety guarantees eliminate, at compile time, a whole category of the bugs that plague firmware written in C: the memory-corruption faults that are notoriously hard to find on a device. Its embedded ecosystem is younger and its toolchain support varies by target, so the choice comes down to your microcontroller, the maturity of the tooling for it, and the team who will maintain the code for years. We will be honest about that trade-off rather than pushing Rust because it is fashionable or C because it is familiar.

Why do you treat firmware security as such a priority?

Because firmware is unusually exposed, for two reasons that compound. First, it is hard to patch: a vulnerability shipped in firmware can persist for the product’s life if the device is inaccessible or has no safe update path. Second, an insecure device is a serious attack surface: deployed devices are small, internet-connected computers, often physically reachable and frequently shipped with weak defaults, which is why insecure firmware has ended up in some of the largest botnets on record and been used as a route into the networks devices sit on. So we design security in from the boot chain up: secure boot so the device runs only firmware you signed, signed and verified OTA so an update cannot become a remote-code-execution hole, per-device identity rather than a shared secret, and validation of the input a device receives rather than blind trust. On a device that lives for years and is hard to reach, these are not extras: they are the difference between a product you can defend and one that becomes a cautionary tale.

Thinking about Firmware Development?

Tell us the problem in your own words, not in requirements. A senior engineer reads it and comes back with a straight view on whether Firmware Development is the right answer here, or what would be.

  1. 01A senior engineer reads it. Not a form queue, and not an account manager.
  2. 02We reply either with questions or with a straight answer that we are not the right fit.
  3. 03If it looks like a fit, a technical call with the person who would actually run the delivery.
  4. 04Then scope, effort and risk in writing, before anyone signs anything.
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