Services

We typically offer services which complement the customer’s own team, taking on those project areas which are a well-travelled road for us, but new and high-risk for the customer project team.

The provision of high quality product support and associated services to our customers is Direct Insight’s primary focus. It’s all about using our experience to ensure that the chosen platform architecture is correct, and then offering support or services where needed so that the project can meet cost and time objectives without accruing technical debt.

Whatever the service, our intention is to form partnerships with our customers which are based on the principle that both parties will profit from the relationship, founded on mutual understanding and trust, and designed to be of an enduring nature.

Some “typical” examples of services engagement are:

Driver and BSP development (Linux and QNX)
SoM baseboard development
Secure Boot, OTA updating
Porting to new hardware or OS version

In-depth support

Striving for the best technical support provision to our customers for standard products is a central theme of our business. Most of our support is provided free of charge on the basis of an understanding of a long-term relationship that will result in project success and potential adoption and purchase of production hardware or services. Sometimes however this is formalised in a Supply-and-Support Agreement, or in an enhanced maintenance contract. Some customers choose to pay an hourly rate for in-depth support.

Training by industry experts

We have trained thousands of engineers, at our in-house and on-site courses, on a wide variety of topics from VHDL to Boundary Scan to Windows Embedded to Cyber Resilience.

We are lucky enough to have William White – one of UK Electronics Engineering’s foremost and most prolific trainers – on our staff, and over the years William has stewarded our delivery of training.

Cyber Resilience training is led by David Pashley, who combines his extensive knowledge as an electronic engineer with a career interest in resilience and safety of digital systems.

Many training courses are run in the beautiful rural surroundings of our farm-based Oxfordshire HQ

See our current scheduled courses here.

Project services and consulting

We can manage and execute your engineering project from the standpoint of many years’ experience. One of our key motivations is to save our customers time and money, if possible by leveraging existing expertise, IP and platforms; and we promise to guide you to the best route, without regard to maximising our own involvement. As Professional Engineers we want every project to be the best it can be.

We often work on hardware design (in particular baseboards for SoM customers), and associated firmware and BSPs. We work with Linux, QNX and Windows Embedded. We can work on a fixed-price or time-and-materials basis.

Often working on a confidential basis, we can deliver your project elements on-time and on-budget.

EU Cybersecurity Resilience Act

We are actively helping customers to meet the requirements of CRA. This includes advising on and implementing Secure Boot, encryption, OTA updating and strategies for CVE reporting and mitigation.

JTAG Boundary scan test creation

We provide this service to a number of customers who are involved in the creation of large complex boards. Services are based on the use of Corelis tools, which are the gold standard (though therefore not usually the cheapest) for boundary scan.