Whitepaper · Turnkey hardware · Board and firmware from one team
One team draws the board and writes the firmware — so neither apologises for the other.
Fitting software into someone else's board is how products ship late with a feature crossed out. We design the board and the firmware as one product — sensor, SoC, power, radio, enclosure, and the software that has to live in it.
Our reference camera line, designed by our hardware engineer and shipping under a partner brand; measurements taken on our own boards.
Two quotes, and the schedule falls in the gap between them
You have a product idea and two quotes: a hardware house that will build any board you specify, and a firmware team that will make any board work. Each is right, and the gap between them is where the schedule goes — the sense line nobody routed, the sensor that cannot reach its frame rate on that SoC, the thermal budget the enclosure ate.
We have been the firmware team on that call. One camera bring-up stopped on a single missing sense wire: the USB port could never know it was plugged in, and no software could cover for it. Found late, that is a board spin. Found in schematic review by the engineer who needs the wire, it costs nothing.
The bug was a wire. It was found by the person who needed the wire.
What we bring
Four things, each one measured on the hardware.
A balanced product
Sensor, SoC, radio and power chosen against the software they must run, not the other way round. The firmware engineer sits in the schematic review.
Working firmware on day one
Boards boot an image that already runs on dozens of chip families, with the recovery, update and provisioning paths your fleet will need from the first unit.
Recovery designed in
A blind recovery channel over the card slot and a serviceable update path mean a field unit is never a brick and the factory never needs a debugger.
Measured, not assumed
Power, thermal and frame-rate budgets are measured on the board. One sequencing change was worth 4.5 °C; you only find that with the board and the firmware on the same bench.
What we have built
The reference line
Our reference boards are 38 × 38 mm analogue-video cameras on a low-cost SoC, in three variants, with the pinout at revision 1.4 this September. They exist because board and firmware were drawn together, and they are the pattern for your product.
Bring-up
USB device bring-up on a camera SoC uncovered a hardware gap — a missing sense line — that no firmware could bridge. In review it is a wire; in the field it is a spin. Co-design puts the finding in the review.
Fleet software
The firmware runs on dozens of SoC families and hundreds of sensor pairings, with recovery over serial and card slot for more than 120 chips. Your product inherits the streaming, recovery and update stack and the team that maintains it. What is specific to you stays yours.
What we design
HiSilicon & GokeSigmaStarIngenicRockchipAnalogue · IP · radio-linked video
Camera and edge boards around the SoCs the firmware already runs on, sensors from the catalogue we maintain, analogue, IP and radio-linked video, in small and medium volumes. Design files and firmware source are deliverables, not licences.
How an engagement works
Product definition sprint
Fixed price, ten working days. You send what the product must do: optics, resolution and frame rate, interfaces, link, enclosure, power source, cost target, volume. You get a block diagram, a sensor-and-SoC shortlist with measured frame-rate and power budgets, a bill-of-materials estimate, the risks, and a schedule with a fixed quote for the first prototype run.
The project
Schematic, layout and firmware in one team; prototypes measured on the bench; a pilot run with provisioning and recovery in place before the first unit ships.
Keep
Design files, firmware source and test fixtures are yours, with optional shared maintenance in OpenIPC for the parts that are not specific to you.
Send the product brief. In ten days you will have a board the firmware team already agrees with.
One mail with four lines: what the product does, the sensor and link requirements, the power, enclosure and cost target, and your volume and timeline. An engineer answers with a plan, not a sales script.
Write to business@openipc.org Ask in the chat
Commercial support, OEM licensing and the other services are on the business page.