13 kV RMU Fault Detection
DSP firmware for partial-discharge detection with evidence-rich alerting.
Read case study
Capability
Embedded Firmware Development in Australia
Firmware written by engineers who also lay out the boards it runs on - so the drivers you get were tested against real silicon, not against the reference application. RTOS, bare metal or embedded Linux, chosen for the constraint the product actually meets.
Scope
What firmware development covers - and what it doesn't.
Firmware is the software that runs on the silicon inside your product. It is judged by how it behaves under real timing budgets, real power budgets, and real field conditions - not by feature checklists. We treat firmware as a systems discipline: the interrupt architecture, the update path and the failure modes matter as much as the features.
In scope
- RTOS integration (FreeRTOS, Zephyr, Azure RTOS, NuttX)
- Bare-metal firmware for tight-loop control and ultra-low-power designs
- Embedded Linux systems: Yocto, Buildroot, kernel and device-tree work
- Peripheral drivers: SPI, I2C, CAN, industrial protocols, custom radio ICs
- Secure boot, signed OTA updates, rollback and A/B partitioning
- Production test firmware and factory calibration flows
- Power management: sleep-mode architectures, wake sources, coin-cell budgets
- Firmware brought up on our own PCB designs or on your existing hardware
Honestly out of scope
- Pure application-layer software with no device behind it
- Custom RTOS kernel authoring (we integrate proven ones)
- Silicon validation or IP-core verification
- Ongoing IT/DevOps for cloud services (we hand off to a runtime team)
Outcomes
What you get out of it.
Firmware that gets it right is invisible - the product just works. What makes the difference in the products we ship:
Deterministic timing where it matters
Control loops and inference paths that hit their deadlines every cycle, verified against a scope, not a specification. Our weld-inspection firmware grades every weld inside a 45 ms line window, at rate, on the line.
Update paths that survive the field
Signed OTA with A/B partitioning and automatic rollback, so a bad update never bricks a fleet. We assume brown-outs, split-brain and half-downloaded packages - because the field will produce all three.
Power budgets that hold
For coin-cell and solar-powered nodes, sleep-mode architecture is designed before the feature list, not tacked on afterwards. Wake sources are measured, not assumed.
Code a second team can maintain
HAL boundaries that let a target swap happen without rewriting the application; drivers written to their datasheets, not to the vendor demo; a build system checked into the repo. No secret sauce.
Process
How a firmware program runs here.
Four phases with a real deliverable at each gate - you always know what you paid for and what ships next.
PHASE 01
Discover (paid week)
We start from the constraint that binds - power, latency, thermal, certification - and design backwards from it. You leave with a written architecture, a budget range and the risks named, whether or not we build it.
PHASE 02
Design
Schematics, mechanical and firmware architecture proceed in parallel. High-risk blocks get simulated or breadboarded before the full layout commits.
PHASE 03
Build
Iterative revisions against real bench and field testing. You see every revision, not just the last one. Integration is continuous, not a phase.
PHASE 04
Deploy
Pilot in the field, closure with the contract manufacturer, production test procedures, and a commissioning-grade handover pack.
Technologies
What we build on - chosen per constraint, not per preference.
The platforms we reach for most. If a project needs something not on this list, we say so - the tool is chosen for the constraint, never to fit our habits.
FreeRTOSZephyrAzure RTOS (ThreadX)NuttXSTM32 (Cortex-M0 - H7)Nordic nRF52/nRF53ESP-IDF (ESP32)Embedded Linux (Yocto, Buildroot)MCUboot for OTATF-M (TrustZone)CI: Renode + hardware-in-the-loopStatic analysis (cppcheck, IAR C-STAT)
Industries
Where firmware we ship runs today.
AgriTech
Long-life outdoor sensor firmware with cellular fallbacks and OTA.
Energy
Grid-side instrumentation firmware with hard real-time constraints.
Smart manufacturing
PLC-adjacent firmware for line controllers and inspection cells.
Automotive & fleet
CAN, telematics and edge inference on cellular-connected devices.
Deliverables & IP
What ships to you at handover.
Every firmware program hands over: full source with a documented build system (Make, CMake, PlatformIO or vendor IDE workspace as chosen), CI configuration for reproducible builds, HAL and driver documentation, memory maps, interrupt architecture notes, OTA update tooling and signing keys, production test firmware with factory calibration flows, and a written handover pack a second engineer could pick up cold. All foreground IP transfers on payment.
Case studies
Programs we shipped in this space.
Every entry links to the full case study - constraints, what we built, and what it measured afterwards.
Autonomous Zero-Turn Mower
ROS 2-adjacent embedded stack with hard safety interlocks and RTK GNSS.
Read case study
Cold Chain Integrity Recorder
Ultra-low-power logging firmware for lithium-battery-powered field devices.
Read case study
Compliance
Security and safety built in.
Secure boot, signed OTA and rollback are the baseline for internet-connected devices we design - not options. Where a product must meet a specific standard (IEC 62443 for industrial cyber-security, IEC 61508 for functional safety, medical or automotive derivatives), we design the firmware architecture to line up with those expectations and say clearly where certified assessors need to join.
Australian radio devices require ACMA-compliant firmware that respects the channel plans and duty cycles of the class licence they ship under; we build the transmit stack accordingly and document the compliance case. For battery-powered devices with lithium chemistries, the firmware is written with the safety envelope in view: over-current, over-temperature, over/under-voltage limits enforced in software as backup to the analog protection, and events logged for field forensics.
FAQ
Embedded Firmware Development in Australia - straight answers.
A bounded firmware task on existing hardware: AUD $4,000-$15,000. A full firmware stack for a new product: AUD $15,000-$60,000+. Complex firmware with secure boot, OTA and certification support: AUD $30,000-$100,000+. All quotes come after a scoping call and a paid discovery week for larger programs.
Constraint decides. Hard real-time control loops with tight power budgets - often bare metal. Multi-tasking with modest complexity - RTOS. Rich connectivity, existing Linux drivers, and enough compute headroom - embedded Linux. We pick per project, not per preference.
Yes - the smaller the existing hardware constraint set, the faster the start. We ask for schematics, existing firmware (if any) and the constraint that matters most, and quote a bounded engagement.
Yes, both. We use MCUboot or vendor-secure-boot equivalents, A/B partitioning, and signed images. Key management (HSM vs local signing) is decided per program based on your supply chain.
You do. Source, build system, drivers, HAL, tests, and OTA tooling all transfer on payment. Pre-existing tooling we bring in is licensed to you perpetually.
Yes - we take on paid diagnostic engagements. Send symptoms, logs and schematics; we quote a bounded investigation and hand over a written finding, whether or not you engage us for the fix.
Why Incendio
One team, no seam between vendors.
Firmware written in isolation from the board it runs on tends to work against reference designs and fail against reality. Because we lay out the boards ourselves, our drivers are tested against real silicon in the same rack the firmware compiles on. The seam between hardware and software is where projects fail - we hold both sides.
Related practices: embedded systems development, PCB design, IoT development, edge AI development.
Start
Tell us the constraint that worries you most.
A latency budget, a power budget, a certification date. We reply within one business day - and we’ll say so if we’re not the right team.