Industrial and robotics electronics, built to last in the field
Industrial hardware runs for years in heat, dust, vibration and electrical noise, and a failure stops a line or a field crew. Our engineers design boards, enclosures and firmware for those conditions and for a long parts life. Engineered in San Francisco. Prototype builds, DFM and mass production in our own factory in Shenzhen.
What makes industrial electronics different?
Service life and conditions. A consumer product may last two years on a desk. An industrial controller, sensor or robot runs for a decade or more near motors, heat and moisture, and its parts must still be available. That changes the part choices, the board protection, the test plan and how the BOM is managed.
What we engineer for industrial and robotics products
Board protection. Conformal coating to IPC-CC-830 materials (acrylic, silicone or urethane), potting and encapsulation against shock and fluids, and underfill under large BGAs where vibration is high.
Control and automation hardware. Boards for controllers, operator panels, motor drives and I/O modules, with field buses such as Modbus, CANopen and EtherCAT designed and tested on the bench.
Robotics. Robot hands and grippers, robots and teleoperation rigs, and data gloves for robot training: small motors, encoders, touch sensors, embedded Linux and synced data. Motor control is one of our specialties. See product design.
Power stages and motor drives. Industrial boards switch real current. Our engineers size copper, place shunts and gate drivers for clean switching, plan creepage on high-voltage nets and route heat into the enclosure. Power electronics and battery/BMS design is another of our specialties, and heavy-copper boards are checked for heat on DVT units.
Workmanship. Assemblies built to IPC-A-610 Class 3 where the product needs it, with tighter solder joint criteria than the Class 2 standard used for most commercial products.
Rugged enclosures. Die-cast, machined and sheet-metal housings designed for sealing, heat and mounting, and made in the Shenzhen factory. See sheet metal and CNC machining.
Aerospace and drone parts under AS9100
The Shenzhen factory holds AS9100, so aerospace and drone parts run under the quality standard that adds traceability, risk management and configuration control to ISO 9001. Drones combine light structures, motor drives, flex-rigid gimbal boards and cable harnesses, and each part is traced through the build. Configuration control is central here: the golden sample record lists the design revision, the BOM and the firmware release, and a design change is re-measured against the old reference and re-signed before it reaches production.
Firmware for machines and robots
Industrial firmware runs motor loops, field buses, safety stops and logging for years without a reset. Our engineers write it for your board, test it on the demo build and release it with the toolchain version, the build steps and the programming procedure, so your team can rebuild it later. OTA updates, where the product has them, verify each image and fall back to the last good one. See firmware development.
First boards and parts for a pilot line
Early boards and parts come from the portal: Advanced PCB & PCBA for dense or heavy-copper boards and Custom mechatronic parts for gripper fingers, brackets and housings, each after a free engineering review. A full product starts with a call, or with a DFM review of files you already have.
How is industrial hardware tested before it ships?
Through the stage path, with environmental tests added. DVT units go through temperature cycling, vibration and humidity tests and produce a validation report. Production test fixtures are built before PVT. In production, boards pass optical inspection, X-ray on the advanced route, in-circuit and functional test, and burn-in where the product needs it.
Hazardous-location products follow an ATEX or IECEx certification path. Those rules shape the design from the first schematic, so we plan for them in project initiation. Read about testing and inspection.
Industrial products we build
The field also covers operator touch panels, motor drives, rugged handheld computers, controls for mining and energy sites, and boards for automated machines.
- Industrial IoT sensors. Condition monitors and gateways that collect machine and site data for maintenance.
- Robots and teleoperation rigs. Motor drives, high-speed links and safety stops.
- Robot hands and grippers. Small motors, encoders and touch sensors with tough cable routing.
- Chargers and power electronics. Converters and power distribution with heat control.
- Lab and test instruments. Precise analog, FPGA or high-speed ADCs, calibration and motion control.
How do you keep parts available for a long product life?
We check parts availability and alternates before the schematic is drawn, and we pick parts with long availability. During production, our sourcing team watches lifecycle notices across a network of 350 audited suppliers and flags last-time buys early, so you can buy stock or plan a change before a part ends.
Recent work: seals that failed on flat enclosures
An industrial IoT company had its die-cast enclosure, its sensor board and its box build with three vendors. Seal failures came from enclosure flatness, and no vendor owned the problem. We brought casting, board assembly and box build into one program, machined the sealing faces and kept one quality system across all three. Read the case study.
Questions about industrial electronics
Can you take over an older industrial product?
Yes. Send the files, the BOM and the test procedure. Our engineers check which parts are near end of life, run a DFM review against how the Shenzhen factory builds and tests, and plan the first build. Where a part must change, the change is tested before production restarts.
Which field buses can your boards use?
Modbus, CANopen and EtherCAT are the buses we design and test most often. Our engineers pick the bus with you from the machines the product must talk to, design the interface and its isolation, and test it on the demo build. That way the bus works on the bench before the layout is frozen for EVT.
Can you build the enclosure and the board together?
Yes. Board fabrication, SMT, molding, machining, sheet metal, die casting, metal stamping, box build and test run in the Shenzhen factory, so the board, the housing and the final assembly are built and checked side by side. Our engineers attend the EVT, DVT and PVT builds in person, so fit problems between the board and the housing are seen at the line.
Tell us what you are building
- An engineer runs a free engineering review of your files, and nothing is charged when you submit.
- You see the findings first.
- We publish the official quote with an itemized total, lead time and validity window.
- You accept the official quote, and only then does payment open.