The company

Ant Micro is a company based in Poznan, Poland, specialising in the creation of software for embedded devices for the purposes of control, communication, monitoring and measurement, data collection, analysis and visualisation.

What makes us unique

We are a dynamic, innovative company, taking pride in the fact that we are able to offer advanced software solutions utilizing best practices in programming as well as recent developments in the embedded industry. We view our diversified experience and the knowledge base we built over the years as our most important assets. Originating from and still within the academia, we cannot help but think about innovation and development as natural consequences of the drive towards stability and reliability. We are familiar with and constantly on the lookout for new trends, as we want to convince our clients to invest in technologies with a future so that they can develop together with us. In our work we focus on interoperability and reusability which enables us to pay attention to significant details rather that constantly reinvent the wheel.

Areas of expertise

We have a significant amount of experience in various aspects of embedded computing, including, most notably:

• Industrial process monitoring
• Control algorithms
• Real time operating systems
• OS driver and kernel development
• Wireless sensor networks
• Data acquisition and visualization
• Industrial communication protocols
• Embedded microelectronics
• Embedded systems integration
• Linux applications for embedded devices

Scope of our work

As can be seen from the above profile, our work is not limited to any particular level of an embedded system. We can design and implement a small building block just as well as a whole solution. Experience with different layers of a complete system helps in both cases: even (or perhaps especially) when creating a tiny chunk of a complex system, one has to be acutely aware of the interaction between elements, the limits they impose on one another and how they combine to form a stable and reliable whole.

Hardware

While we acknowledge that hardware is an important part of every embedded system, we also know that in a breakdown of costs for a typical project, the platform itself plays a relatively minor role. It is primarily the software - control algorithms, communication protocols, user interfaces - that determines the end user experience and the reliability of the system as a whole, and software requires a lot of care in its design and maintenance. That is why we are not afraid to view hardware as a tool rather than an end in itself. To find the right tool for the job, we work in close cooperation with an established Polish designer and manufacturer of PCBs and embedded devices - while they perform the necessary prototyping, production and physical testing in tough industrial environments, we focus on delivering a stable, efficient and ergonomic software solution. In this way, we are able to either integrate with the customer's hardware, suggest a third-party platform on which our software will run or, with the help of our affiliate, deliver a complete product tailored in every detail to our customer's needs.

Open source community

The open source community has contributed a lot of tools and building blocks to what we do, and had it not been for initiatives like eCosCentric, Mozilla or the Free Software Foundation, we would probably never have been where we are today. That's why on our blog we try to give back at least a portion of what we have received. Every now and then, when we've solved a problem that we think other software developers may also be struggling with, we post tutorials and pieces of code there, so if you're professionally interested in embedded computing, be sure to check it regularly.