I am the principal hardware engineer of an electronic hardware/software/mechanical design firm, http://www.GoodmanAssociates.com/. My experience is in medical and commercial instrumentation, though I have also designed several industrial control products. I live in Verona, WI, USA, which is a semi-rural area just a few miles from Madison, WI, a medium-sized city with a large University, many cultural amenities, and a very active high-tech community. In my spare time, I enjoy cycling and prairie restoration.
Our firm designs a mixture of medical and commercial electronic products. The engineers all have 20-30 years of experience in our disciplines, so people tend to contact us to solve harder problems, or to solve simpler problems in more innovative ways. Because of our unique experiences and high level of mutual respect, it is natural for us to operate as a collaborative. Above all, we have a lot of systems experience to suggest approaches for particular problems, lots of fabrication experience to know what can be built and lots of product experience to know what to avoid.
In short, we can do all or any part of the engineering for most electronic products and provide the client a complete set of manufacturing and test documentation. If desired, we can set them up with a contract manufacturer and work with the manufacturer to produce a finished product. For a lot of clients, we supplement their in-house engineering departments by filling in when resources get overcommitted and by doing design reviews to reduce technical risk.
For those who are curious about the details, our areas of expertise include: low-level and low-noise analog design, electro-optical design, digital signal processing, switched-mode power conversion and motor drives, battery-powered systems, high-speed digital design, complex functions in FPGA's, design for board fabrication, assembly and test, advanced PCB technology, electrical safety and EMI compliance, hard real-time software, hardware/software overlap and redundancy for safety critical applications, interface/control of embedded products from .NET or 'Nix platforms, embedded products with TCP/IP, securely updating application code remotely, secure computing and cryptography, molded plastic and cast metal housings and mechanisms, 3-D CAD models for testing moving mechanisms prior to construction, rapid SLA prototypes, IR optical design and lots more.