Embedded Technologies – Outsourced R&D Project

Client location

Sweden, EUROPE

Business area

Embedded technologies

Product

IoT

Delivery center

Bucharest, ROMANIA

Project type

Development & R&D

About the client

Our client, founded in 2001, is a fast-growing, innovative Swedish company. From R&D to industrial implementation, customers use their market-leading, pioneering human-computer interaction technology in consumer electronics, gaming, vehicle safety, medical diagnostics, marketing, and other areas.

With more than 1,000 employees around the world, the company enjoys a global presence with offices in Sweden, the USA, China, Japan, Germany, and Norway and has a worldwide network of resellers.

Technologies used

The challenge

Our experienced team, specializing in embedded technologies, helped the client grow and strengthen their product portfolio during a 6-year collaboration.

From a technical point of view, they were mainly looking for competency in cross-platform optimization for various tasks, including porting. More importantly, the project required all team members to have soft skills in creativity, adaptability, problem-solving and critical thinking. This skillset is fundamental in solving complex and unique problems.

After a targeted advertising campaign, the client selected Pentalog as their provider. To meet customer expectations, the team proved to be autonomous and customer-oriented in a stable, agile environment, delivering excellent software.

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The solution

Pentalog’s delivery center in Bucharest took on this challenging project in 2014. Our 7-member team, experienced in outsourced R&D projects, wrote drivers for a family of USB devices. The goal was to have drivers independent of kernel space and deploy them easily on various operating systems. The team also implemented multiple features on the device’s firmware.

To find the software solution, Pentalog’s engineers used hardware equipment (oscilloscope, measuring device, test bench).
For programming languages, they used C/C++, Python, C#, and many more.

Over the past 6 years, our team has collaborated with the client in several critical areas:

1. Software optimization for image processing on various architectures and platforms

2. Porting of client’s solutions on various operating systems

3. Design and development for a few operating systems

4. Hardware integration for a few sensors on different platforms

5. Porting in-house debuggers

• QA automation
For the QA, we developed a faster and more efficient testing/feature validation process. In Python, we developed wrappers over the native code that allowed the QA team to create and run tests faster and more easily. QA automation helped with efficiency by creating a faster learning curve instead of the QA team having to learn C.

We helped set up a unified automated testing infrastructure for the devices by also having the wrappers integrated into the automated test framework and having them deployed in the continuous integration process.

The results

For more than 6 years, Pentalog has been a loyal partner to this innovative company, providing a dedicated embedded technologies development team ready to tackle all of their challenges. The client appreciated Pentalog’s developers’ expertise and even asked for their opinion regarding future product development.

Our involvement in many R&D projects has moved business forward and also helped our teams gain valuable expertise in different cutting-edge areas where the customer develops new products.

All our work has made the client’s system a reference on the market, and we are pleased to have been able to contribute to sharpening their core technology.