As head of development you carry the risk: schedules, quality, costs and – very visibly – drive behaviour in front of customers. Most of the time your own team can handle it. But there are phases where external motor controller consulting removes bottlenecks, de-risks decisions and lets your engineers focus on the right work. This checklist helps you spot those points.
Who this checklist is for
- Heads of development and CTOs responsible for electric drive systems and motor controllers.
- Project leads facing critical milestones with limited internal bandwidth or experience.
- Companies building STM32-based drives, inverters or application-specific controllers.
We use “motor controller consulting” broadly: from focused FOC tuning on STM32 (real-time optimisation, control loop integration, start-up & low-speed tuning) to full drive system and product development.
Typical situations where heads of development consider external help
You do not need consulting for every project. But patterns repeat across companies:
- A flagship product is late because motor control behaviour is still not stable enough.
- Key experts are fully booked – new drive variants compete for the same two engineers.
- Protective functions and safety cases are under-documented and hard to validate.
- There is a long wish list (HIL, secure boot, field logging, diagnostics) but no clear path.
- Customer complaints or field failures hint at deeper issues you cannot easily reproduce.
The question is not “could we solve this ourselves eventually?”, but “is this the best use of our team’s time and risk budget right now?”.
Checklist – should we keep this in-house or bring in external support?
Use this table as a quick self-assessment. When you see many checks in the “external help likely useful” column, it is at least worth a conversation.
Quick self-check for heads of development
| Question | Mostly “yes” → keep in-house | Mostly “no” → consider external help |
|---|---|---|
| Do we have at least one person who has done this successfully before? | Yes, and they have time to mentor others. | No, or our expert is overloaded / leaving. |
| Is the risk of delay or field issues acceptable if we learn by trial and error? | Yes, impact of problems is limited. | No, delays or failures would be very costly. |
| Do we have clear requirements and test cases for the drive behaviour? | Yes, and they are linked to tests. | No, we mostly rely on “it feels OK” in the lab. |
| Can we realistically create the missing expertise within this project’s timeline? | Yes, we have buffer and training time. | No, we are already sliding on milestones. |
| Is the topic central to our long-term differentiation? | Yes, we want to build deep in-house expertise. | Partly – implementation quality matters more than owning every detail. |
External support is usually most valuable when impact is high, timing is tight and your team would otherwise have to learn under fire.
Areas where external motor controller consulting creates the most leverage
You don’t have to outsource everything. In practice, external support tends to pay off strongest in a few focused areas:
- Real-time and FOC fundamentals: getting timing, interrupts, DMA and FOC loops on STM32 into a robust shape early (real-time optimisation, control loop integration).
- Start-up & low-speed behaviour: when drives “work in the lab” but customers see rough or unreliable behaviour (start-up & low-speed tuning).
- Protection & fault handling: defining a clean concept and validating it systematically, including corner cases (protection & testing).
- Drive-system integration: aligning motor control with mechanics, drop robustness, fatigue and packaging (drive systems, drop test simulation, fatigue life prediction, mechanical CAD).
- Architecture & lifecycle topics: secure boot, dual-slot & rollback, field logging, HIL strategy and update concepts (engineering & firmware, STM32 motor control consulting).
How to scope a first engagement as head of development
The goal of an initial engagement is not to “hand over the project” but to de-risk it and give your team leverage. Typical first steps:
- Focused review: 1–2 days on architecture, code and measurements to identify biggest risks.
- Pilot tuning or concept sprint: e.g. get one tricky motor variant stable, or define a protection concept.
- Template & checklist creation: FOC tuning guides, protection checklists, maturity models for your drives.
After this, you can decide whether you want more coaching, co-development or just a periodic review cadence.
Questions to ask any potential consulting partner
As head of development, you want to avoid generic “we can do everything” offers. Useful questions include:
- Which microcontroller families and toolchains do you work with regularly (e.g. STM32)?
- Can you show examples where you improved an existing drive, not just built a new one?
- How do you work with in-house teams – coaching, code contributions, joint lab sessions?
- How do you document decisions so they remain useful after you leave?
- Can you help both on control/firmware and on mechanics / system-level topics if needed?
The goal is not just a functioning drive, but knowledge that stays with your organisation. That is a core focus in our engineering & firmware consulting and drive systems work.
FAQ: External motor controller consulting from a management perspective
Isn’t this what we hired our engineers for?
Yes – and they remain central. External consulting is not a replacement for your team, but a way to give them patterns, architectures and tools that would otherwise take years and several projects to develop. The result is a stronger team, not a dependency.
Won’t external experts try to “take over” the design?
They shouldn’t. A healthy engagement has clear boundaries: where external experts propose and implement patterns, and where your team owns decisions and long-term maintenance. You can make this explicit in the initial scoping and governance.
How do I justify consulting spend internally?
Link it directly to reduced risk and time-to-market: fewer iterations, fewer field issues, faster validation, reuse of patterns across product lines. It often helps to compare consulting cost with the cost of one significant delay or a recall in a key market.
When is it “too late” to bring in external help?
Earlier is usually better, but even late projects can benefit – for example, by stabilising protection behaviour before release, or by analysing field issues and planning a robust next generation. The main difference is how much freedom there is to change architecture vs. fine-tuning parameters.
How to use this checklist in your organisation
You can use this article in three simple ways:
- As a talking point with project leads who ask for external help or feel stuck.
- As an input to your internal “make vs. buy” or “build vs. partner” guidelines.
- As a template when scoping the next generation of drive systems.
If you would like a structured assessment of one of your current projects, a short engagement via engineering & firmware consulting or STM32 motor control consulting is often enough to clarify where external support can help – and where your own team is already in a good place.
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