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Engineering High-Performance Products from the Inside-Out

Expert engineering & design solutions for your next product

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Deliver insightful and innovative solutions to technical challenges

Launch breakthrough products into highly competitive markets

Collaborate with our experienced team of designers & engineers

What does Bluefin Innovations bring to your toughest projects?

A close-knit team of resourceful and creative designers and engineers

Our passion for product development drives agility and responsiveness to sophisticated requirements for rugged and high-performance embedded systems. 

Deep knowledge in design, engineering, manufacturing and scaling 

We are builders at heart, as comfortable with CAD as we are on the shop floor soldering, fabricating, machining, assembling and debugging. Design for manufacturing is part of the engineering culture.

Our team brings experience from multiple industries

We develop solutions across defense and commercial, scientific and consumer, telecom and automotive. Cross-pollination and lateral thinking combines the best of each.

Bluefin is an employee-owned company with a simple and focused mission. Most members of our team have worked together for 10+ years throughout careers in various industries in the DC, Maryland, Virginia business community. We built this company in 2016 to stay focused on the work we love.

Responsive and agile engagements, skip the red tape  

We understand the how barriers to innovation can grow within larger companies. 

Engaging Bluefin is easy. We deliver phased projects with straightforward, plain-English proposals and flexible contracting approaches that fit your company’s procurement style for immediate action and time-to-market.

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Work process

Here’s How Our Process Works…

Let’s talk.

Schedule a consultation so we can dive into your goals and requirements to determine if we’re the right fit for you.

Let’s make a plan together.

We’ll listen, learn, and create a custom roadmap to fit your goals and challenges.

Build your vision

From the initial sketches through pilot production, we’ll design, test, and refine your prototype until it meets all your goals.

See your completed vision

You’ll have everything you need to launch it into production, so you can begin to make revenue.

Let’s Schedule a consultation

Full Suite of In-House Engineering Capabilities

Our team brings education, industry experience, and lots of hands-on time on the bench and in the shop. We thrive on the interaction between design, engineering, and manufacturing disciplines to deliver cohesive, innovative, and cost-effective solutions that bring together fully integrated designs.

Industrial Design

  • Needs discovery and core functionality development
  • Form design with an eye towards producible and practical detailing
  • User experience, ergonomics and human factors
  • Material, color, finish, graphics
  • Brand and family product identity
  • Modular and scalable designs
  • Mockups through cosmetic protos, group assessment and refinement 
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Systems Engineering

  • Full turnkey product design including modular families of products
  • Commercial and military experience including COTS and cross-pollination across both industries
  • Low-SWaP, portable handhelds  and benchtop devices from very small to complex scientific instruments
  • Top-down and bottom-up approach to full system design for performance, DFM, manufacturability and cost
  • Trade studies and spiral development with quick iteration cycles for early verification and validation
  • TRL increase with client designs coming to us at various levels of maturity
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Electrical Engineering

  • Circuit design for analog, digital, power, RF, and communications
  • High density and rugged applications
  • Component engineering with performance, DFM and supply chain focus
  • Breadboarding and circuit design verification
  • DFM verification in collaboration with contract manufacturing
  • PCB design from schematic capture through layout including high speed bus, power, thermal management and optimization for DFM and fabrication
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Embedded Engineering

  • The vast majority of our designs are in the embedded, connected, edge computing and AI space
  • Complete architecture including power and performance trades
  • Full range of processors, microcontroller, FPGA, System-on-Chip and System-on-Modules
  • Digital communications including WiFi, Bluetooth and PAN, mesh, cellular and satellite
  • Firmware design and implementation with embedded Linux, FreeRTOS for real-time, high reliability control
  • FPGA and signal processing, particularly small, high density and low-power
  • Data collection, video and geolocation including embedded mapping & COP for the DoD and IC
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Mechanical Engineering

  • Enclosures and structures for rugged, light weight and high performance
  • Mechanisms, kinematics, motion and positioning
  • Thermal management, environmental control, submersion and chemical compatibility
  • Machined parts, sheet metal, shielding, environmental coatings and cosmetic finishes 
  • Injection molded designs with full moldability, overmolding, draft, texture, and parting approach
  • Cost and manufacturability considerations, right from the beginning
  • Pioneers in additive manufacturing & 3D printing for low-rate production with deep knowledge in processes and materials
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Prototyping

Our approach takes full advantage of hands-on activities. Our team is proud to have dirt under our fingernails. Prototypes take many forms, running the gamut: 

  • Early breadboarding to reduce risk on a new circuit design
  • Interconnected development kits to prove function and interfaces
  • Scale and full-size appearance models including color, material, and finish
  • Mechanisms and metalwork including modular features so decisions can be made quickly
  • Full-fidelity prototypes with complete functionality, suitable for tradeshows and stakeholder focus groups
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RF Engineering

Connected, embedded projects typically include communication across a range of frequencies. Most of our team knows radio and antenna integration with our more senior members:

  • Designing circuits and PCBs capable of handling both the digital and analog aspects of communication
  • Extensive experience up to 6 GHz with some projects up to 30 GHz
  • Unique antenna designs for a variety of applications including direction-finding
  • Practical knowledge, how to tune and iterate to minimize the “art” often involved with developing RF systems
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1st Detector
adaptive
aglab
Boeing
breathTech
idemia
nexgen
T worx
raytheon
asi
blueskies
fedtech
floret
plaels
vehitronics
nantrak
synovision
roboting
APL
astrotech
dashbam
zeteotech
smarthpower
biotech
hyperware
fowl out
race keeper
sensics
velocity systems
altrix medical
ixi
gogo band

With the Bluefin team, their diversity of expertise is a key factor in their success for our company. We need mechanical engineering and electrical engineering down to the system board level. We needed a partner that knew how to integrate diverse product development services to develop successful products. As a company, we could piece it together on our side, but the management increases exponentially when that happens. Bluefin has been a one-stop shop for us – and it works well.

Thomas B. Pickens, III CEO & CTO, Astrotech

Our company hired the Bluefin team to execute on a challenging electro-mechanical soldier weapon product that needed to integrate with the soldier network, but also be extremely robust and lightweight. Their work exceeded the military's stringent requirements and passed all the tests needed for fielding. I will look to them again for any needed engineering or product design work. I highly recommend the Bluefin team and give them an A++.

Don McLaughlin Former CEO, T-Worx

Our work at CC Biotech developing next-generation separation technologies simply would not be where it is today without Bluefin Innovations. Their engineers designed and built two of our core systems—the Rotify® and the Spiral CCC—and these prototypes continue to drive new applications and improvements. Bluefin took our technology from a low-level lab concept into a marketable and proven instrument. Along the way, our partnership has helped CC Biotech secure additional funding. The Bluefin Innovations team has a rare ability to turn complex scientific concepts into reliable working instruments, and it has genuinely been a pleasure working with them.

Martha Knight, PhD Executive. Director,CC Biotech

TESTIMONIALS

What our clients have to say about us