Customer wanted a electronics and firmware platform

Problem

A manufacturing company that specializes in industrial equipment needed a new electronics platform that could bridge to interface various sensors and drive low power actuators to their RS-485 gateway. They wanted to be able to reuse hardware designs for their whole portfolio of products to save development time and costs.

Solution

Nubis was contacted to design the platform and decided to use the STMicroelectronics STM32 platform, which is a microcontroller family that offers a wide range of features and performance options, and base the firmware on RTOS and C++.

Using the STM32 platform, Nubis designed a robust and reliable electronics platform, including PCB layouts, that could interface with multiple sensors over I2C, analog, SPI, UART and custom digital interfaces and communicate using RS-485 communication to a gateway and neighboring mesh devices. The firmware facilitated a software platform so the manufacturing company could easily add new devices without changing any hardware components and provide them with more flexibility and compatibility with different types of sensors and actuators.

The STM32 platform allowed much more edge processing which meant that the manufacturing company could have much more complex data handling and filtering on the target, alarm and monitoring systems, and collect metrics and perform on-wire remote firmware updates.

Conclusion

Nubis had the first prototype designed within a week and first version of functional firmware after a month. The solution allowed the manufacturing company to develop a high-performance and versatile electronics platform that met their specific needs with standardized hardware and became a central part in over 50 different products.