How Direct Insight de-risks development
Hardware choices, OS complexity, cybersecurity compliance and many other issues mean that platform choice is a difficult as well as an unfamiliar process. We’re a small, highly experienced team of engineers using our vast experience to help you to make that decision, and provide the technologies, support and – where needed – services to get you over the line, on budget and on time. A tried-and-tested approach, which has been honed over hundreds of projects, over Direct Insight’s 30 year history.
We base our approach in most (but not all) projects on tried and tested system-on-module hardware, enhanced by OS-based firmware that we thoroughly understand and customise as required.
The Right Hardware
Developers often lack the experience needed to make optimal architectural choices. Our thinking goes beyond the idea that every project must need whole solution set. By offering a broad range of products and services, we can be comfortable with a conversation that starts with hardware, but ends up with cybersecurity advice, or vice versa.
That said, we have decades of experience in providing hardware solutions for projects requiring a Rich OS (e.g. Linux, Windows, QNX), based on a system-on-module approach which is usually advisable unless at consumer-product volumes. We work with a broad range of vendors, but in the domain of ARM-based application processors, we are a longstanding partner of Ka-Ro Electronics (based in Aachen), and usually recommend their products for reasons that we are happy to defend. We with other specialist SoM vendors, including MicroSys (of Munich) where requirements demand – e.g. automotive, autonomous robotics.
OS Complexity Challenges
While Yocto Linux is our default OS choice these days, we are also deeply involved in getting customers to market with QNX where the special attributes of that particular OS are required. Understanding, harnessing and being able to fine-tune OS implementation is vital to any project. Being “let loose” with an unfamiliar combination of OS and hardware + OS combination is where most projects are vulnerable to delay and the design-in of cost disadvantage and technical debt.
Connectivity needs to be customised to your project, while at the same time middleware, such as GUI development frameworks or data management tools need to deliver productivity gains, not integration headaches. Decades of working with Windows, Linux and now QNX mean that we have your back when integration issues inevitably arise.
Cybersecurity & Resilience
With a positive attitude to cybersecurity underpinned by serious expertise, we help customers to exploit the opportunity of compliance with CRA and other cyber-regulations through genuine resilience, rather than just seeing a mountain to climb. We can provide secure boot, OTA updating, encryption, SBOM, CRA-ready Linux implementations, vulnerability mitigation and all other requirements for Linux platforms.
We also offer QNX, which is an attractive “out-of-the-box” pre-compliant alternative as mandated by the CRA.
