Electronic Design for Smart Building Products

Nobody commissions your product twice. It gets installed once and then it has to work untouched, potentially a decade or more behind a wall, ceiling tile or exposed to the elements.

Ignys – Smarter Solutions for Smart Buildings

We design the electronics inside building management, HVAC, air quality, security and access control products
Low power sensing, controls, building protocols, wireless that works through concrete, and product security
We design for PSTI, RED and Cyber Security obligations from the start
Your IP is yours
ISO 27001, ISO 9001 and ISO 14001 certified

Ready to Go?

Smart Building Electronics for devices robust enough to be installed once and then forgotten

At Ignys we design the electronics inside building management and performance monitoring products, HVAC and refrigeration controls, indoor air quality sensing, and security, access control and AV hardware.

We aren’t your typical run-of-the-mill consultancy with layers between you and the engineers. We’re a specialist embedded electronics team who work hands on with Product Leads, R&D Managers, Innovation Managers and Heads of Engineering in organisations who need additional expertise to get to the job done, quickly, professionally and with confidence.

Building products fail commercially in a particular way. They rarely fail at launch. They fail eighteen months in, when the battery life turns out to be a third of the datasheet figure, the sensor has drifted past the point of usefulness, or the wireless that worked in the office doesn’t reach through a plant room wall. By then you have an installed base.

What we mean by smart building electronic design

It’s the electronics that let a building sense itself, control itself and be trusted to report what it’s doing. That covers:

Low power sensor design and sensor selection
Analogue front ends for environmental and electrical measurement
Control electronics, actuator drive and safety interlocks
Embedded firmware, control loops and commissioning behaviour
Building automation protocol implementation
Low power wireless and mesh networking
Energy budgeting for multi-year battery life
Product security, secure update and vulnerability handling
Safety, EMC and construction product compliance
Design for installation, for manufacture and for a ten year service life

Some of that applies to any electronic hardware design programme. The parts specific to buildings are where these products get into trouble.

Sensing and measurement

We design the sensing that building products live or die on: indoor air quality, meaning CO₂, TVOC, particulate and CO or NO₂, plus environmental and electrical measurement front ends. The part that matters is what happens over years, not on day one, so we design the calibration and drift management that keeps a reading honest for the life of the product. There is no performance standard for an air quality monitor, so the accuracy on your datasheet is yours to defend. We make sure it holds, and we tell you what you can credibly claim before you print it.

Control, protocols and firmware

We design the control electronics, actuator drive and embedded firmware, and we implement the building protocols your customers expect, meaning BACnet, KNX, Modbus, DALI and M-Bus. Implemented properly, which is the part that gets skipped: a BMS integrator can commission the product without a bespoke driver, and it behaves predictably when the network is absent, not only when it works.

Low-power wireless and battery life

We design wireless that works where the product is actually fitted, through concrete, foil-backed insulation and plant-room walls, across Matter, Thread, Zigbee, Bluetooth LE, Wi-SUN and LoRaWAN, chosen for your product rather than for fashion. The reliability comes from antenna design in the real enclosure, an honest link budget and coexistence in a crowded band, not from the protocol.

And we model battery life against your real duty cycle and temperature range, so the figure on the box survives the first winter. A ten-year claim is credible for a contact, temperature or occupancy sensor and rarely for an air quality monitor. We will tell you which you have before you commit to it.

Product security and compliance

We build in the product security that is now law rather than good practice, meaning unique credentials, secure boot, signed updates and a defined support period, satisfying the PSTI Act, the Radio Equipment Directive and the EU Cyber Resilience Act in one set of decisions rather than three retro-fits. And we navigate the wider compliance picture, which in this sector is unusually fragmented and changing fast, from electrical safety and EMC to construction products and the third-party certification that security and fire products need. We scope the route at the start, when it is cheap to get right, and carry the evidence as the programme runs. Detail sits on our electronic product compliance page.

Across the building estate

Every product in this sector is built on the same electronics core: low-power sensing, control and actuator drive, connectivity, functional safety and embedded firmware.

That is our day-to-day work, and it applies whether the product is a building management controller, an HVAC or refrigeration control, a security or access system, a water or sanitaryware appliance, a lift, an automated door or an assistive technology device.

What changes between them is the sector-specific safety regime sitting on top: PESSRAL for lift safety electronics, EN 16005 and EN 12453 for powered doors, Regulation 4 for water fittings, EN 50134 for telecare. We scope the applicable regime into the programme from the start, exactly as we scope the compliance route for any product. That is how a design partner earns its keep, and it is why the engineering underneath stays in safe hands.

Recovering a programme that has stalled

A proportion of our building product work is remedial. These failures are rarely dramatic, which is exactly why they are hard to catch before there is an installed base.

Some common situations:

Battery life in the field is a fraction of the modelled figure
Sensor readings drift out of usefulness within months
The wireless link is fine on the bench and marginal through a real wall
The product fails EMC, or fails only in the alarm and security product family tests
PSTI or RED cybersecurity requirements have landed on a design that wasn’t architected for them
An analogue signalling path needs replacing before the PSTN switch-off
A BMS integrator can’t commission the device without bespoke work
The product works but the installer return rate is too high

We instrument and reproduce before proposing anything. On a drift or battery problem that usually means logging in the real environment for long enough to see the effect, which is slower than guessing and considerably cheaper than a re-spin that fixes the wrong thing.

Is this you?

You produce building management or performance monitoring products, HVAC, heating, cooling or ventilation controls, indoor air quality sensing, or security, access control or AV hardware
Low power sensing, wireless, embedded product security or building protocol implementation capability isn’t currently available in-house
You sit in an innovation, product development or R&D function with an approved business case and a deadline
You need a partner your internal stakeholders can be confident with, not an individual contractor
You want the risk in the programme managed, not the hours filled

We’re probably not right for you if you want to buy engineering hours to direct yourself, or if the concept has no commercial case behind it yet. If you’re earlier than that, we’d suggest reaching out to us for a Discovery Workshop or Feasibility Study first.

What we offer

Smart building product architecture and technical specification
Low power sensor design and sensor technology selection
Indoor air quality sensing, calibration architecture and drift management
Environmental and electrical measurement front ends
Control electronics, actuator drive and safety interlocks
Automatic controls design to EN 60730 requirements
BACnet, KNX, Modbus, DALI and M-Bus protocol implementation
Low power wireless design including Matter, Thread, Zigbee, Bluetooth LE, Wi-SUN and LoRaWAN
Antenna design, link budget and in-enclosure RF performance
Energy budgeting and multi-year battery life modelling
Embedded firmware, RTOS and commissioning behaviour
Cellular and IP signalling paths for PSTN replacement
Secure boot, signed update and unique credential provisioning
EMC design and pre-compliance testing, including EN 50130-4
CE and UKCA compliance support and Technical File development
Multilayer and mixed signal PCB design
Design for installation, manufacture and test
Component obsolescence, end of life migration and redesign
Design review, technical audit and fault diagnosis
Full design handover with manufacturing outputs

Ready to cut risk and start progress?

A building product problem is easier to fix on a bench than it is once it is behind a ceiling tile in four hundred buildings.

Caught at architecture it’s a conversation, at a prototype it’s a re-spin…

Caught after rollout it’s a field replacement programme and a conversation with the board.

Use the form below, let’s move your product development project forward with he confidence you deserve.