We are taking a well-earned break over the festive season, closing the office from 24th Dec to 1st Jan inclusive. We hope you all have a thoroughly relaxing and enjoyable Christmas and a successful and exciting New Year!

We are always on the lookout for a new IDE (integrated development environment). They are a core tool for developing and debugging software for the embedded control systems we design. As such, new tools can often offer significant time and cost savings, and can help improve the quality of our work. We were therefore rather pleased to come across the CooCox CoIDE CoIDE is a new, free and highly-integrated software development environment for ARM...

You may have spotted a trend in these articles – we like ARM Cortex M0s! A year on from our first post on the subject, with some high-volume designs under our belt, we’re still big fans. Of course there are the obvious things like amazing value for money (a proper 32 bit processor for 50 pence), but there are other things we like as well. Many of our designs require that the processor spends time in low-power sleep modes, for...

Well it has been a busy few months, for which we would like to thank our clients, old and new. That said, we are expanding, so don’t hesitate to contact us if you have a potential project – we’re always interested! We’re taking a well-earned break and closing the office from the 10th to 26th August – woohoo! We will be checking email and voicemail regularly during the break, in case you need to contact us urgently....

It may have been the coldest spring for 50 years, but spring has finally sprung, and how! The grounds around our office are looking amazing…. It seems that the same is happening to UK manufacturing at last. We saw a relatively quiet start to the year, but now have a lot of work on. We have started new design projects for several existing clients, and also have a number of new clients on board, all exciting stuff. There’s more in the...

Not surprisingly, in the current economic climate, late payment is on the rise. Cash-flow is king, and companies can ease cash-flow problems by delaying payments to suppliers, effectively borrowing money from them at 0% interest. This article illustrates the problem nicely:- http://www.businesszone.co.uk/topic/finances/firms-forced-shed-staff-late-payments-bite/50949 We take a dim view on this – I was brought up to avoid debt wherever...