Embedded Device Drivers for a Liquid Cooling Product

Strategic Thermal Labs was building a rear door heat exchanger for high-density computing environments. The control board for the product brought together a dense mix of sensors and actuators across several embedded buses: power supplies, fan banks, analog and digital I/O, environmental sensors, and pressure and temperature instrumentation.

STL needed a complete set of embedded device drivers for that hardware — one per device family, structured cleanly enough that the team building the product's control logic on top of them could move fast without having to learn the quirks of every datasheet.

OEG developed the embedded device-driver layer for the product, organized behind a hardware abstraction. A base-driver class per device family defines the protocol-level interface — ADCs, DACs, GPIO expanders, PWM controllers, thermocouples, temperature and humidity sensors, differential pressure sensors, power supplies, and on-board memory — and each concrete driver implements that interface for the specific part STL had designed in.

To let STL's engineers develop and test against the driver layer without physical hardware on their desk, OEG delivered a parallel set of mock drivers that implement the same interfaces in software. A single configuration flag swaps the real driver set for the mock set, so the same product code can run on a developer laptop or on the live hardware.

Around the driver layer, OEG delivered the supporting infrastructure the team needed to use it: per-device test harnesses for bringing up each device on real hardware, runtime observability, and a packaged build for deployment to the control board.