Starcom Engineering designs embedded hardware and firmware — including ultra‑wideband radios that locate things to within a handful of centimetres, indoors, where GPS gives up. Concept, schematic, PCB, firmware and bring‑up, taken through to production by one team.
Schematic capture, multi-layer PCB layout and BOM development for RF and mixed-signal designs, through fabrication and bring-up to production ready.
Real-time OS and embedded Linux, down to the register level where vendor drivers stop being enough.
Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, ultra-wideband and 4G/5G cellular, plus the IMU sensors that decide when a battery-powered device is worth waking.
Starcom Engineering brings more than 80 years of combined hardware and embedded software expertise to a product, and can take it from concept to production in a very short time.
More than 40 years in engineering development, and an embedded software development wizard. For 20 years he was Engineering Director at the engineering services company Dr. Design, managing projects from the small to the large for many clients, with a team of hardware and software engineers behind him. He has a track record of getting things done and into production, quickly and accurately.
More than 40 years as an embedded software engineer, much of it at ASIC companies, developing board-level software throughout. He was engineering manager at SAIC, a DoD contractor, leading 50 software, hardware and mechanical engineers on the Comanche helicopter program. At Conexant and Mindspeed he managed the software teams building communications ASICs, and he developed software for the Qualcomm Snapdragon processor used in mobile phones.
The whole path, in house — so a decision made at schematic time is made by someone who knows how it will be laid out, fabricated and brought up.
Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, ultra-wideband and 4G/5G cellular — including the register-level driver work that vendor examples leave out.
IMU and motion sensing, from device bring-up over SPI and I²C to the motion-gating that makes a battery-powered device practical.
Real-time operating systems where timing is the specification, and embedded Linux where the application needs room to grow.
A fault gets characterised and quantified before a fix is proposed — because the cause is regularly not what the error message says it is, and a fix applied to the wrong cause hides the real one.
Radios that enumerate but will not receive. Timing that drifts. A board that works on one unit and not the next. The failures that live between the datasheet and the hardware.
Two ultra‑wideband platforms, both FiRa compatible: a Feather-format wing for rapid development, and a full IoT board that adds radar and cellular.
Both are working prototypes today, and Rev 2 of each is in development. Neither board is in volume production yet.
A FeatherWing-format UWB board for the Adafruit Feather HUZZAH32. The same board acts as either a FiRa Anchor or a Tag — as an Anchor it tracks multiple tags at once, discovering them automatically with no pairing step. An accelerometer IMU is built in, so a tag can run its radio only when it is actually moving.
Built on the DPTechnics Walter, an ESP32‑S3 module with cellular built in. The board takes an HLK‑LD2451 vehicle-detection radar on a connector, alongside FiRa-compatible ultra-wideband, Bluetooth 5.0 and Wi‑Fi — so presence, precise range and a route back to the network all come from one device.
7987.2 MHz, 64-symbol preamble, 6.8 Mbps — aligned to the configuration common on FiRa-compatible mobile devices.
Scrambled timestamp sequence (STS) under IEEE 802.15.4z, so a range cannot be trivially spoofed or replayed by a relay.
Delivered as source. No opaque binary blob sitting between you and the radio when something needs changing.
Knowing where something is matters less than knowing where it is and whether it just moved. Both boards measure position directly, and the FeatherWing senses motion on the board itself — so a tag reports movement as a fact rather than leaving it to be inferred from position that drifts.
Ultra-wideband ranging places a tag to within a handful of centimetres indoors, where GPS gives up. One Anchor tracks many Tags at once and discovers them automatically, with no pairing step to administer.
The LIS2HH12 accelerometer on the FeatherWing distinguishes still from moving on the tag itself. Movement becomes its own signal — useful for tamper and removal alerts, not just for a position trace.
Motion is what makes a battery-powered tag practical: one that ranges only while the asset is actually moving can stay asleep the rest of the time, instead of polling a radio around the clock.
Ultra‑wideband, Wi‑Fi and Bluetooth Low Energy are rarely an either/or. Deployments run them together in hybrid networks — UWB for position measured in centimetres, Wi‑Fi for bandwidth, BLE for battery life. Both boards on this page carry all three, which is the reason they are built the way they are.
Starcom Engineering can design your product from concept to production, or fix and enhance existing hardware or software.
Requirements and architecture, schematic capture, multi-layer PCB layout, BOM and sourcing, fabrication outputs and bring-up — through to a design that is ready to manufacture.
Hardware or software you already have: finding and fixing what is broken, and adding what the product now needs — another radio, a sensor, lower power draw.
C and C++ on ESP32 and ARM Cortex-M. Peripheral drivers, SPI and I²C device bring-up, interrupt and DMA work, real-time OS integration, and embedded Linux where the application calls for it.
Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, 4G/5G cellular and ultra-wideband end to end: radio configuration, two-way ranging protocols, antenna-delay calibration and link budget.
Schematic capture, PCB layout and BOM development, with attention to the things that decide whether a radio works: ground planes, return paths, decoupling, and controlled-impedance routing to the antenna.
First power-on through to a working system. Oscilloscope and logic-analyser work, bus-level fault finding, and the disciplined bisection that separates a firmware bug from a hardware one.
Whether it is one of the boards above, a new product you want designed, or an existing one that needs fixing or extending — tell us what the system has to do and where it stands today. A specific description is worth more than a general one.