Pi Innovo brings a deep understanding of automotive process, engineering knowledge, regulations and commercial norms to every customer engagement. This ensures that work is not only technically excellent, but delivered appropriately for production or prototype programs. Our engineers have a range of backgrounds, not just in automotive work but also in electronic and controls engineering, computer science, mathematics and physical sciences, providing the knowledge required to really understand engineering problems.

Since our first work on production-related systems, we have maintained a clear focus on engineering quality, applying best practice methods where necessary, yet tailoring process requirements to individual projects to avoid unnecessary cost and timing burden where it is not needed. While Pi Innovo has its own accredited processes, we are equally comfortable working to clients’ process requirements when required. Successful accreditations include: AutomotiveSPICE level 3, CMMI level 3, ISO 9001:2008, and ISO 26262 is now gaining focus. Pi Innovo is comfortable working with multiple clients, strictly maintaining agreed IP and publicity boundaries.

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Systems engineering is the foundation for much of what we do. Our Systems Engineering team ensures that all likely aspects of a project or system are considered and integrated into the whole. The systems engineering process is a discovery process using disciplined tools to identify real problems that need to be solved in order to avoid finding an elegant solution to the wrong problem. Systems engineering often requires contribution from diverse technical disciplines. By providing a systems (holistic) view of the development effort, Pi Innovo's system team helps align all technical contributors in a unified team effort, forming a structured development process that proceeds from concept to production. From Requirements Definition to Architecture Analysis, Safety to Reliability and Calibration, to Testing and Validation, Pi Innovo's Systems Engineering Team can support any portion or all of your needs. Read more about Systems Engineering

In addition to ECU hardware and low-level driver software, Pi implements embedded controls in either C language or model-based Matlab Simulink. Both approaches can achieve modular control logic, architected so that separate principles within a large system can be developed separately.

Software development and architecture design for production is a unique skill apart from regular software development. At Pi Innovo, we know the difference between rapid prototype development and true production software development. For our production software customers, we spend time developing a modular architecture that will grow with the inevitable expansion and refinement of the software. All software will change. Architecting with this in mind to minimize the time spent doing non-value added code development is what we do best.

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In support of custom electronics hardware design projects, Pi Innovo’s software engineering team develops custom platform software that provides everything needed to run an ECU, from the bootloader and factory test code up into the operating system that provides the memory management, communications, I/O management and drivers that the application code and diagnostics require to operate. Pi Innovo has extensive experience with platform software design and development and brings this expertise to our clients’ projects, ensuring that new design hardware and software are integrated in the most efficient manner.  In addition to offering our OpenECU platform software in our products, Pi Innovo has a broad range of engineering service offerings. Details on our OpenECU Developer Platform SIM 32 API and OpenECU Developer Platform C – API can be found here. Read more about Custom Platform Software

Although Pi is best known for the OpenECU product line, a large and growing portion of our business is to provide fully custom electronics hardware designs for clients in multiple markets; automotive, commercial vehicle, aerospace, off-highway, power generation and other niche markets.

Pi Innovo designed products either in production or going to production include:

• Automotive gasoline engine controller
• Heavy truck diesel engine controller
• Piezo injector driver module
• Multi-megawatt natural gas engine controller
• Diesel exhaust aftertreatment controllers
• Unmanned aerial vehicle engine controller
• High performance radio
• Chassis controllers
•  Brushless direct current motor controller
• Specialty Airbag Module
• Other niche applications.

Read more about our Custom Electronics Design Read more about using GaN for advanced power electronics on vehicles

Pi Innovo’s OpenECU products and Engineering Services are ideally suited to support your advanced technology development projects, providing a cost-effective and flexible approach to hardware and software development for immature systems where the requirements, designs and implementation remain in flux as work progresses.  The configurability and scalability of OpenECU hardware supports rapidly-changing systems architectures and variations in component, while the OpenECU software development environment provides for controls development that is abstracted from the hardware in such a manner as to allow development of software and system to progress concurrently without placing undue constraints on either activity.

Pi Innovo’s baseline control strategies (gas/diesel engine, EV, etc) are targeted at developers of novel techniques, systems and components in related fields, giving engineers a starting point for advanced development projects that minimizes the time spent on creating baseline control models.

The scalability of the OpenECU product offering allows for an easy transition from one-off prototyping and proof-of-concept activities into controlled testing and fleet trials and on to low-volume production deployment without the need to change either hardware or software.

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Process Development Services:

Pi Innovo’s Business Management System (BMS) is based around the requirements of ISO9001-2008, CMMI for Development v1.3 and ISO15504 Automotive SPICE and provides a full suite of operational and project-level processes serving the Organization as a whole, Quality Assurance, Project/Program Management and Engineering departments. These processes have been developed to deliver efficient and effective methods of planning and executing tasks in a controlled, repeatable and measureable manner, providing the ability to objectively track progress against a set of business and/or project goals. Through tailoring, continuous process evaluations and ongoing improvement activities Pi Innovo strives to maintain an optimized set of processes that can be easily adapted to meet changing business and project needs. Drawing from Pi Innovo’s extensive experience in this area, we offer process development and improvement services to our customers via Process Engineering consulting services. Typical activities range from process evaluations and gap analyses through process improvement support to process development and assistance with process implementation and ongoing maintenance. These services have been provided for electronics hardware, software and systems development customers in the automotive and aerospace electronics industries.

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