Industrial Communication and Embedded Engineering Services

AEI Corp supplies industrial communication and embedded engineering services to the companies that build connected industrial products. The service lines below cover the network a device sits on, the data that has to leave it, and the product itself, from technology selection through pre-compliance testing and long-term support.

What do you actually sell?

An engineering layer inside somebody else’s product. Most of our clients build and sell equipment: device manufacturers, machine builders, silicon and module vendors, and the systems integrators delivering into a plant. They own the product, the roadmap and the customer. We supply the specialism a single project cannot justify hiring for, such as a protocol stack on their silicon, a driver under their operating system, an information model over their machine data, or a board and the firmware that runs on it.

That is a different trade from plant automation. We do not commission machines on a factory floor, run FAT or SAT, or maintain installed equipment. What we do deliver is design, development, integration and test at device and network scale, on site with your engineers while it is being integrated and remotely afterwards, with a deployable result handed to whoever commissions it. The commercial shapes are set out on how we engage.

How are the service pages organised?

Three groups, by where in the system the work sits. Every page lives directly under /services/, so the grouping is a reading aid and any page can be entered on its own.

OT Network & Control is the wire and what talks over it: real-time Ethernet and fieldbus stacks brought up on your hardware, migrations from one network to another, and the gateways and interoperability testing that make several devices on several networks behave as one system.

IT/OT Convergence is what happens to that data once it leaves the control layer: OPC UA information modelling, publish-subscribe architecture with DDS or MQTT, edge and cloud integration, and the acquisition side of condition monitoring and automated inspection.

Product & Lifecycle is the product itself: the board and its firmware, the drivers and real-time platform beneath them, the control and test software built on top, and the obsolescence and migration work that keeps a product sellable after a component or a platform ends.

Which page should I start on?

Start from the problem, not the service name. A cycle that is being missed points at real-time Ethernet. A device that has to appear on a network it was never designed for points at protocol migration or device and network integration. Machine data that has to reach an MES, an ERP or a cloud points at OPC UA and IIoT and edge. A part going end-of-life points at obsolescence management.

Most engagements cross two or three of these pages, and you do not have to name the right one before getting in touch. Talk to an engineer with the problem as you have it and we will place it. The industry pages reach the same work from the machine end.