yroByteEmbedded Hardware & Firmware
We don't just write the software that lives next to hardware — we design the hardware itself. Circuit boards engineered in Altium Designer, firmware written in-house, and products carried through prototyping, certification, tooling, and manufacturing. One team owns the board, the firmware, and the path to the factory.
Our work ships under strict NDAs. We show what we know, not who we built it for.
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From Idea to Manufactured Product
Most software firms stop where the hardware begins. We take products across that line: the circuit board, the firmware on it, the enclosure around it, and the factory process that builds thousands of them — explained in plain language at every step.
Circuit Board Design
Schematic capture and PCB layout in Altium Designer, from simple sensor boards to dense multilayer designs.
Firmware Engineering
Bare-metal, RTOS, and embedded Linux firmware written in-house, designed alongside the board it runs on.
Enclosure & Tooling
Industrial design coordination through injection-mold tooling — the physical shell your product ships in.
Manufacturing & Assembly
Design-for-manufacturing reviews, PCB assembly, test fixtures, and production ramp with your contract manufacturer.
The Road from Idea to Production
Every hardware product travels the same road. We've condensed it to eight stages — each one a gate where you can pause, evaluate, and decide before committing to the next.
MVP engagements live at step 1. Full custom programs run steps 2 through 8.
Prototype the Idea
Dev boards and off-the-shelf modules prove the concept works before custom-hardware money is spent.
Schematic & Board Design
The circuit is captured in Altium Designer, then laid out onto a real PCB with the right layer stackup.
Fabrication & Bring-Up
First custom boards come back from the fab; we power them up rail by rail and bring firmware to life.
Validation & Certification
Functional testing, EMC pre-scans, and the FCC/CE/UL path appropriate to your market.
BOM & Sourcing
The bill of materials is locked, priced, lifecycle-checked, and second-sourced.
DFM & Pilot Build
The design is reviewed for manufacturability, panelized, and proven in a small pilot assembly run.
Enclosure & Tooling
Industrial design becomes an injection-mold tool; first shots are checked and the mold is tuned.
Production & Assembly
Volume board fabrication, PCBA, test fixtures, enclosure molding, and final assembly at ramp.
Two Ways to Start
You don't have to commit to a factory run on day one. Most products start small, prove themselves, and graduate.
MVP Prototype
Prove the product idea fast using development boards and off-the-shelf modules — an ESP32-class dev kit, sensor breakouts, a 3D-printed shell. The firmware is real, the data is real, and there's no custom board yet. Ideal for demos, fundraising, and de-risking the concept before any tooling money is spent.
Full Custom Design → Production
A custom schematic and PCB designed in Altium, validated, certified, and manufactured at volume — the full roadmap above. The right path when unit cost, size, power, or reliability targets rule out off-the-shelf modules, or when the prototype has proven the market and it's time to build the real thing.
Most clients start with the MVP and graduate to custom design once the product is proven. The roadmap is the same — you just enter at step 1 or step 2.
Inside the Design Phase
Schematic, Layout, and Stackup
Every board starts as a schematic — the circuit's wiring diagram. Every chip, resistor, and connection is captured and reviewed in Altium Designer before anything physical exists. This is where design mistakes are cheapest to fix.
PCB layout turns that diagram into a physical board: placing components and routing copper traces so signals arrive clean, power stays stable, and heat has somewhere to go.
The stackup — how many copper layers the board has and how they're arranged — is often the difference between a board that works on the bench and one that passes EMC testing.
Prototyping & Bring-Up
When the first boards arrive from the fab, bring-up begins: power rails are checked one at a time, then firmware is brought up peripheral by peripheral, with an oscilloscope and logic analyzer on the bench the entire time.
First-spin issues are a normal part of hardware — that's why prototypes exist. Rigorous design reviews before fabrication keep respins rare, and when one is needed, it's a planned iteration rather than a surprise.
The BOM: Every Part, Priced and Sourced
The bill of materials is the complete parts list for your product — every chip, connector, resistor, and screw, with manufacturer part numbers, quantities, and unit costs. It's the document your factory builds from, and the biggest lever on your unit economics.
Component Sourcing
Parts selected from authorized distributors, with stock and lead times checked at design time — not discovered at order time.
Lifecycle & EOL Risk
Components get discontinued. We check lifecycle status and design in second sources before the board is committed.
Cost-Down
As volume grows, the BOM gets re-quoted and re-engineered — the same product, built for less per unit.
Supply Resilience
Alternate parts qualified up front, so a shortage slows your line down instead of stopping it.
Enclosures & Injection-Mold Tooling
Tooling is the least-understood cost in hardware, and the one that surprises first-time founders most. Here's how it actually works. Industry education
What a Mold Is — and Why It Costs What It Costs
An injection mold is a machined steel or aluminum negative of your enclosure. Molten plastic is injected into it under enormous pressure, cools for a few seconds, and ejects one finished part — a "shot." The mold then does it again, hundreds of thousands of times.
The expense is in the precision: cavities machined to fractions of a millimeter, polished surfaces, cooling channels, and ejector mechanisms — a mold is closer to a precision machine than a simple block of metal.
The key idea is amortization: tooling is a one-time cost spread across every part it produces. A $30,000 tool that produces 100,000 parts adds just $0.30 to each unit. That's why molded enclosures are simultaneously expensive to start and nearly free per part at volume.
Prototype Tooling
Soft aluminum, single cavity. Industry-typical ~$2,000–$8,000. Good for hundreds to low thousands of shots — built for fast, cheap iteration on the design.
Production Tooling
Multi-cavity hardened steel. Industry-typical ~$15,000–$80,000+. Runs for hundreds of thousands of shots and delivers the lowest per-part cost.
What Drives Cost
Number of cavities, steel grade, part size and complexity — undercuts, textures, tight tolerances — and the lifetime shot count the tool must survive.
Firmware & Connected Software
The board is half the product; the firmware is the other half. We write both, so they're designed for each other from the first schematic.
RTOS & Bare-Metal Firmware
FreeRTOS, Zephyr, and embedded Linux targets in C, C++, and Rust — written against tight memory and power budgets.
Buses & Protocols
UART, SPI, I²C, CAN, BLE, and MQTT — with defensive parsing so malformed input never takes a device down.
Device-to-Cloud Pipelines
Telemetry ingestion, offline buffering, and processing paths that carry data from fleets of devices into backend systems.
OTA Updates & Rollback
Over-the-air update orchestration: staged rollouts, integrity checks, and safe rollback paths for whole fleets.
Power-Conscious Design
Duty cycles, sleep states, and wake-aware communication patterns that make battery budgets last in the field.
Bring-Up & Test Rigs
Hardware-in-the-loop test rigs, watchdogs and recovery, and reproducible builds on pinned toolchains.
How to Engage
MVP prototypes typically run as an R&D Partnership — short, focused, and built to answer "does this product work?" Full custom-design-to-production programs run as a Dedicated Team, with phase gates matching the roadmap above so you approve each stage before the next begins.
See How Engagements WorkDesign Reviews at Every Gate
No board goes to fab and no tool gets cut without a review you're part of.
NDA-First Culture
Confidentiality is our default operating mode, not an accommodation.
You Own the Design Files
Altium sources, Gerbers, BOM, and firmware are your IP, delivered as part of the engagement.
No Factory Lock-In
We deliver manufacturing packages any reputable contract manufacturer can build from.
Building a Physical Product?
Whether it's a dev-board prototype or a production run of thousands, tell us what you're making. We'll map it onto the roadmap and propose an engagement.