If you've ever tried to get a complex instrument built by a traditional engineering firm, you know the problem. The electronics company sends you to a firmware contractor. The firmware contractor sends you to a mechanical shop. The mechanical shop sends you back to the electronics company because "the enclosure doesn't fit your board." Your optics specialist doesn't talk to the security auditor. And somewhere in the middle, your project is late, over budget, and nobody owns the gaps between the disciplines.

We've watched this happen to enough clients that we built Jupiter Electronics around the opposite principle: one team that covers the full stack, from the photon to the cloud. That's not just a tagline. It's a specific set of combined capabilities that lets us take on projects that single-discipline shops have to refuse.

What "full stack" actually means here

When we say full stack, we mean all of the following, under one roof:

Electronics & PCB design

Schematic capture, multi-layer PCB layout, analogue and digital mixed-signal design, power supplies, EMC-compliant boards. The kind of work that turns a sensor datasheet into a production-ready instrument. STM32, ESP32, custom SoCs, low-noise front-ends, laser driver circuits. See our services page for the full capability list.

Embedded firmware

Bare-metal C, FreeRTOS, Zephyr, Arduino/ESP-IDF, MicroPython. Sensor drivers, communication stacks (MQTT, LoRa, BLE, Wi-Fi, RS485, I²C, SPI), bootloaders, secure OTA updates, real-time control loops at kHz rates. Firmware that can pass functional safety reviews without being rewritten.

Photonics and optics

Laser driver electronics, beam steering, optical measurement systems, photodetector front-ends, spectrometers, interferometers, thermal management for diode lasers. We know the physics AND we know how to turn it into a reliable instrument that a student can operate at 11 PM without breaking it. Our photonics capabilities cover the full stack from driver board to measurement software.

Mechatronics

Motor control (BLDC, stepper, servo), precision actuators, robotic subsystems, flight controllers, motion control with real-time feedback loops. The meeting point of electronics, firmware and physical movement - where most "pure software" teams hit a wall.

Networks & protocols

VPN protocols (WireGuard, OpenVPN), secure tunneling, industrial protocols, cloud backends, MQTT brokers, custom telemetry pipelines. Proven at 400M+ user scale through our team's years at Avast and Jamf.

Cybersecurity & compliance

Secure boot, firmware signing, hardened communication, identity management, anti-tamper, data-at-rest encryption. Engineering for adversarial environments where "it works on my bench" is not enough.

Cross-platform software

Java, Kotlin, C#, JavaScript, Python - for Android, iOS, Windows, Mac and Linux. The control software, the dashboards, the data pipelines, the integration layer that makes your hardware usable.

AI & ML integration

RAG pipelines, vector databases, LLM integration, computer vision (YOLO, OpenCV, Roboflow), predictive maintenance. Not AI-as-a-buzzword - AI as a practical layer on top of physical systems that already work.

Why the combination matters

The reason this mix is unusual is that most engineering careers specialize downward. You start broad, then go deep in one area, and stay there. That's efficient for big teams where specialists hand off cleanly to each other. It's terrible for real-world systems that need all the disciplines talking to each other in tight feedback loops.

Consider a concrete example. Imagine you need a custom laser control system that:

  • Drives a diode laser with microsecond-precision pulse timing (firmware + electronics)
  • Maintains optical output stability over temperature (photonics + thermal engineering)
  • Talks to a motion stage for beam steering (mechatronics)
  • Sends telemetry to a secure cloud dashboard (networks + software + security)
  • Ships with a user-facing control app on Windows and Mac (cross-platform software)
  • Passes CE / EMC certification (regulatory experience)
  • Includes anti-tamper and secure firmware update (cybersecurity)

A single-discipline shop would need to coordinate with four or five vendors. Each handoff is a risk. Each interface is a place where something gets lost in translation. Each vendor has their own timeline, their own scope, their own excuses when the whole thing doesn't work together.

We do all of it in one team, in one shared design conversation. The firmware engineer is sitting next to the photonics engineer who is sitting next to the security architect. Decisions that used to take two weeks of email ping-pong happen in a coffee break.

Certification, regulatory, and audit experience

Technical skills alone aren't enough for the applications we work on. Scientific instruments, industrial control systems, and defense-adjacent projects all run into regulatory and compliance requirements that can kill a project if they're treated as an afterthought.

Our team has hands-on experience with:

  • CE marking and EMC compliance - we design with certification in mind, not as a last-minute scramble
  • Functional safety reviews - firmware and hardware architectures that can survive a formal audit
  • EU AI Act and GDPR compliance - critical for any connected system collecting data in Europe
  • Enterprise security audits - proven at global security vendors where audit culture is routine
  • Documentation and traceability - the kind that holds up when a regulator asks "how did you verify this?"

This experience matters because it changes how you design before you build. A team that has never been through a CE audit will draw schematics that look fine and then fail EMC testing. A team that has sat through formal code reviews knows to structure their firmware so it can be verified. You can't retrofit that kind of discipline onto a finished product.

Three sectors we serve well

Science

Research labs, universities, spectroscopy groups, particle physics experiments, photonics labs. These customers need custom instruments that don't exist on the shelf, and they need them to be trustworthy at the measurement level. Our combination of precision electronics, careful firmware, and real understanding of lab environments makes us a natural fit. Examples from our own work: diffusion cloud chambers, thermal control systems for spectroscopy, custom data acquisition, laser drivers for research rigs. See the projects section for more.

Industry

Manufacturing, automation, process control, environmental monitoring, agriculture. These customers need reliability at scale, clean integration with existing infrastructure, and hardware that survives 24/7 operation in non-lab conditions. We bring industrial-grade design practices, robust communication stacks, and the security mindset that comes from years at SaaS and security companies. OrcaTron and our IoT platform work are direct examples.

Defense and defense-adjacent

Custom sensors, signal processing platforms, laser systems, hardened communications, secure telemetry, counter-UAS hardware, and specialized instruments where off-the-shelf commercial products are either too expensive, too limited, or too vulnerable to be trusted. This sector demands the combination of precision engineering, rigorous security, certification readiness, and discretion - all of which we practice by default.

The thread across all three sectors is the same: complex systems where multiple disciplines have to work together, where "good enough" isn't good enough, and where the cost of a mistake is high. That's where our combined skill set earns its keep.

What this means for you

If you're building something that touches more than one discipline - electronics and firmware, firmware and optics, hardware and cloud, sensors and security - you don't have to glue five vendors together. You can work with one team that speaks all the languages and owns the whole system.

And if your project has to survive a certification audit, a security review, or a regulatory submission, you're working with people who've been through all of them before. No surprises at the final hurdle.

Have a project that's been sitting on the "too complicated for a single vendor" shelf? That's exactly the kind of work we take on. Let's talk.