• Piatra Engineering, Erskineville NSW, AUSTRALIA

Services

Electromechanical

Build low-power, portable and robust devices using the latest micro-processors, micro-computers and frameworks.

Microprocessors

Many available boards and accessories are available on the market. The advantage of the microprocessors is that they are easily expandable and have built in ADC converters allowing analog signal inputs. This is particularly useful for many sensor applications.

The Arduino family of boards are based on the Atmel AT-MEGA family of chips and are built and configured to allow easy stacking of shields to provide inputs, sensor connections, WiFi and other expansions.

The Espressif chipsets are present in many products, such as the M5stack family of microprocessors. There are also many other generic and low-cost development boards that provide easy breakouts of the pins to the chip. For the most part, the ESP8266 chip has been replaced with the ESP32 chip, which comes with more memory. The chip itself is super low cost - only a few dollars - and comes with BlueTooth and WiFi as standard.

  • Arduino Zero
  • Arduino Uno
  • ESP32-WROOM
  • Olimex ESP32 PoE board
  • M5Stack Station ESP32
  • CTEC Wifi Switches
  • Sonoff hardware

Single-board Computers (SBC)

Single board computers are the generic name given to a range of compact and low-cost computer boards. They are incredibly powerful for their size, can be orchestrated to run in a swarm using kubernetes, and are capable of doing most of the task required of a full-sized computer. As a result, they are finding more expansive usage in many industrial and commercial applications.

There are many varieties available on the market, in a range of sizes and power draws. One thing in common is that they are all able to run advanced operating systems. Many also have built-in advanced capabilities - such as BlueTooth, WiFi, SPI, I2C, etc. This makes them the perfect solution to many problems. Options include:

  • Raspberry Pi 4B
  • Raspberry Pi Zero
  • Libre Computer Board AML-S905X-CC (Le Potato)
  • BeagleBone Black (Industrial)
  • Asus TinkerBoard S R2.0
  • UDOO Bolt V3

What we offer

PIATRA is able to help you build a solution to your edge-computing problem using the most appropriate board available.

We will assist you in selecting the right board or chipset for the job, write the code or application to run on the board. We can develop and test your custom application, or integrate sensors into your existing systems.

Or you can leave the development entirely to us and we can implement the best solution to the specifics of your problem.

  • Board or Chip selection.
  • Build and test prototypes.
  • Code custom drivers.
  • Integrate Sensors or Control hardware.
  • Design custom circuit boards.
  • Flashing hardware, JTAG testing, Quality Control.

You Should Know

We outsource.

We have a track-record of designing hardware solutions and working with external fabricators to create custom circuit-boards. We can work with our local sub-contractors and fabricators to design, build, and test custom hardware solutions. However, we do not produce the boards in-house.

Mostly we utilise either Atmel chipsets or Espressif chips based on the ESP32. We can code using chip-native frameworks (ESP-IDF) frameworks or utilise common frameworks like the Arduino, RTOS or MicroPython frameworks. This will cover most micro-processors on the market.

For embedded systems, we work with PlatformIO's extensive list of more than 40 chipsets from manufacturers such as Atmel, Texas Instruments, Intel, Nordic, Silicon Labs, Espressif, etc.

We will typically use off-the-shelf hardware for prototyping. This would be ESP32 development boards, the arduino UNO card, basic RELAY interfaces, and expansion boards.

In most cases, these prototyping implementations will not be robust enough to deploy into the field. This is especially true if any kind of rugged final product is required. In such cases, once the prototype is developed - and tested - a dedicated circuit board and enclosure can be designed and fabricated.

Need our help?

Get a Quote