Firmware and embedded engineering consultancy, Amsterdam
Your device dies in three days instead of a month. The BLE link drops. A sensor driver does not work and nobody left on the team wrote it. Olivabot B.V. (Amsterdam) is hired to fix exactly that. Assessment €500. Working firmware from €5,000. All excluding VAT. Email services@olivabot.com.
How we charge
Assessment €500 — email, or a call if you ask, plus a written diagnosis and plan. Working firmware from €5,000, in milestones. Larger jobs from €10,000. All excluding VAT. No day rate, no timesheet. Each step is quoted in writing before it starts. You check, pay, and continue — or stop.
What we actually do
- Battery life. Sleep states, duty cycling, when to wake the radio, what to stop doing on the chip. The most common reason people call.
- Radios. BLE, Wi-Fi, and LoRaWAN in software — pairing that fails, ranges that disappoint, always-on outdoor nodes that have to survive a Dutch winter.
- Drivers and integration. I2C, SPI, UART, CAN. Getting a new sensor to talk, or an old one to stop lying.
- On-device machine learning. Small models on the microcontroller — see edge AI when inference is the job, not a side effect of the firmware.
- Debugging somebody else's firmware. JTAG and SWD, an oscilloscope, and patience. We are comfortable inheriting an undocumented codebase.
- Code review and a second opinion. A read of the design before you commit to it — the assessment exists for exactly this.
Stack: C, C++, ARM Cortex-M, ESP32, nRF, FreeRTOS and bare metal, Zephyr where it fits, Git, and whatever your build system already is.
CAD, when the code needs somewhere to live
Firmware work usually runs into a physical problem: the board needs a case, the sensor needs a mount, the thing needs to survive outdoors. We design parts, mounts, and enclosures as files you own — print them yourself or send them to a manufacturer. A simple enclosure is a small quoted fee, often in the same week as the firmware.
We will also sit in design-for-manufacturing calls with your supplier if your team is not technical. What we do not do is run the printer or assemble the devices.
Where this has been proven
We put a battery, a microcontroller, and a sensor onto a finger ring for Madglove without disturbing the mechanics of a medical device. We built always-on LoRaWAN soil probes for Mycofarming that sit outdoors in water streams. And we write firmware and battery budgets for Gibbon Bot, our own experimental arboreal prototype — still in the lab, not a working farm robot.
How to start
Email the chip, the stack, and what is going wrong. Two or three sentences is enough — "nRF52, runs on a CR2032, supposed to last six months, lasts nine days" is a perfect brief.
You get a reply within two working days. We work remote and autonomously toward the agreed milestone, hardest risks first. A call or a video call if you ask. If it is not worth hiring anyone for, we will tell you that instead.
Email the chip and the problem
To services@olivabot.com. Under NDA if you prefer — just ask first.