Constellation Labs is a design engineering consulting firm specializing in helping you take your ideas to market. Our engineers have decades of real-world product development experience in electronic, mechanical, industrial, wireless (RF), Internet of Things (IoT), embedded systems, and consumer devices (including software and firmware).

Other services and skills:

• Product development – Consumer, Commercial, Industrial, Medical
• Rapid Prototyping
• Low-power Electronics Design
• Wireless Sensors
• Radio modems
• System Design, Analysis and Optimization
• Rich-client web applications
• User Interface design
• Product Usability
• User Interface and Product Accessibility
• 3-D Enclosure design
• Manufacturing and Production Tooling
• Intellectual Property Generation and Protection
• RF Engineering
• Internet-of-things devices
• Microcontroller-Based Design Hardware and Firmware Design
• LabVIEW Programming Automation and Test
• Graphic Design and Photography
• Linux Systems Administration
• Open-Source Software Projects
• Regulatory Agency Approvals
• Design Expertise in a variety of Crowd-Funded Projects – KickStarter and Indegogo.

Firmware and Software Development Expertise with:

Processors / Instruction sets:

• MOS 6502
• Motorola 6800
• Motorola 680×0
• Microchip (Including PIC)
• Freescale 68HC08
• Motorola 68328 DragonBall
• Freescale Kinetis K60/K64
• Atmel SAM7
• Atmel ATMega
• Atmel ATXMega
• Atmel ATTINY
• Atmel D20
• NXP/Philips LPC2114 and others.
• SiliconLabs / EnergyMicro Gecko EFM32 series
• Motorola PowerPC/G5
• Intel x86
• ARM7TDMI – ARMv4 ARM32, Thumb
• ARM Cortex-M0+, ARMv6-M
• ARM Cortex A7 (Raspberry Pi / B / 2 / 3)
• M3, ARMv7-M,
• M4, ARMv7E-M
• FTDI Vinculum II

IDE (Software Development Environments):

• Apple Xcode
• IAR EWARM IDE
• Freescale/Metrowerks CodeWarrior
• Microsoft Visual studio
• Atmel Studio and Arduino
• Eclipse IDE / arm-none-eabi-gcc
• Green Hills Software / Multi

Languages:

• C/C++
• Python
• Java
• HTML5
• Javascript
• LabVIEW
• AWK
• make

RTOS (Real-Time Operating Systems):

• Green Hills Software Integrity
• Micrium uC/OS-III
• Freescale MQX
• LabVIEW and LabVIEW RT

Wireless Protocols / Equipment / Devices:

• Zigbee (Including Home Automation profile)
• XBee and XBee-PRO (802.15.4, Digimesh, Zigbee Pro)
• 9XStream, 9XCite, 9XTend long-range wireless modems
• Wifi 802.11 a/b/g/n
• Bluetooth and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)
• Cellular modems
• Ubiquiti PtP and PtMP Wireless Microwave Ethernet bridges
• Mikrotik wireless links
• Redundant Internet auto-failover network routers

You have a choice when building a new product.  You can hire your own team, buy the computers, equipment, and software to develop a product, push them hard to get a product out quickly, then hope enough revenue comes in so you don’t have to lay them off.  With our team you only pay for the time and skills you need, when you need them.  Our team works on cutting-edge products every day with the latest cutting-edge tools.

Collectively, with over 60 years of combined experience in real-world wireless product development, decades of experience creating high-volume processes and equipment for cost-optimized electronic manufacturing and test, decades of mechanical and industrial design, and over 100 years of combined technical expertise, Constellation Labs delivers what others can only promise.

Every development project carries with it some uncertainty.  We strive to reduce uncertainly as quickly as possible by rapidly building proof-of-concept prototypes and refining them into the optimal finished product.  We create circuit boards and enclosures at a rapid pace, allowing our clients to see, feel, and interact with the prototypes early in the design process.

We have expertise in taking products into production.  Our experienced staff can guide you as much as you need as you ramp from proof-of-concept into pilot production and through high-volume manufacturing.   We offer test fixture design capabilities that automate manufacturing, improve throughput, increase efficiency and drive down costs – ultimately improving your bottom line.

Are you having difficulty obtaining regulatory agency approval or certification on your product, or you don’t know where to begin?   You have found the right team.  We can help you navigate through the entire regulatory process so that your product can finally receive one or more of the following marks: FCC, IC, UL, ETL, FM, CSA, CE, IECeX, ATEX, INMETRO.  Let us help you avoid or solve problems so that you can get to market quickly.

Do you need a second set of eyes to perform a preliminary design review?  Are you looking to verify and validate your product before you go into production?  We can probably help.   We have performed design reviews and completed verification and validation tests on hundreds of electro-mechanical products and assemblies at all stages of development and production.

The team at Constellation Labs has deployed many “Internet of Things” (embedded remote devices with sensors and actuators) projects and recently added new team members with several decades of combined product development experience.  While many systems we have developed are connected directly to an existing commercial, university, or industrial LAN, some IT departments are (justifiably) wary of allowing any device on their network.

In these cases our team deploys either ISM-radio-band remote network links, to tie into a separate network, or a cellular gateway of some kind.  Cradlepoint manufactures some excellent products for this purpose, providing redundant auto-failover and connectivity to popular cellular data networks (whether 4G, LTE, or something slower) including Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, and others.

During product development and initial testing phases, remote access nodes are used to debug, add features, and log data.  These remote nodes “phone home” over the Internet to a Constellation Labs server, enabling local data collection so nothing is lost if the Internet connection fails.  In most cases, commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware and open-source software make the development more efficient (less expensive and more capable) while providing tools for our customers that they can easily replicate without incurring expensive equipment and software licensing fees.

In the era of smart phones, smart cars, and smart homes, nearly every embedded device imaginable is becoming network-enabled.  The Constellation Labs team has helped many of their clients build extremely cost-effective options to bring the world to a web page.  Whether you already have a cloud solution and are looking for assistance in bringing more endpoints into it, or if you want help with the end-to-end solution, or have already tried integrating a solution but are experiencing problems, we can help.