ACETECH develops embedded vehicle intelligence solutions for mission-critical public safety and emergency service environments. Its engineering teams work across embedded firmware, hardware, cloud systems, and vehicle communications platforms.
With a substantial legacy codebase spanning multiple product generations and engineering teams, ACETECH needs to understand existing code, identify design intent, and assess the impact of changes. The team uses Embedder across its development workflow to make that work more efficient.
Understanding Legacy Firmware
ACETECH engineers use Embedder to analyse unfamiliar firmware, understand module interactions, infer design intent, and explain unexpected system behaviour. They also generate technical documentation directly from the codebase, making existing implementations easier to understand and maintain.
"This has significantly reduced the time required to understand complex firmware and has made working with mature products considerably more efficient."
— Jaco Olivier, Hardware Engineering Manager, ACETECH
Helping New Engineers Become Productive
Embedder has become part of ACETECH’s onboarding process for firmware engineers. New team members use our platform to learn system architecture and module relationships, explore code independently, and understand frameworks and design patterns. They also use it to generate documentation and knowledge-transfer material, review code, and identify potential risks.
"By allowing engineers to self-serve much of their initial learning, the burden on senior engineers has been reduced while accelerating time-to-productivity for new team members."
— Jaco Olivier, Hardware Engineering Manager, ACETECH
Supporting Engineering Decisions
ACETECH routinely uses Embedder to analyse existing implementations, plan design changes before coding begins, and assess the impact of modifications. Engineers also use it to generate initial implementation concepts and review architecture decisions.
"Rather than replacing engineering judgement, the tool enables engineers to spend less time navigating code and more time solving engineering problems."
— Jaco Olivier, Hardware Engineering Manager, ACETECH
That support extends to code review. The team has incorporated Embedder-assisted reviews into its normal workflow to assess code quality, identify risks and edge cases, review standards compliance, and validate implementations. For testing, engineers use Embedder to generate unit tests, expand coverage, identify corner cases, and prepare validation plans and User Acceptance Tests (UAT). These activities help ACETECH improve confidence in firmware changes before deployment.
Accelerating a Complex Production Investigation
A production firmware issue provided a clear example of Embedder’s value. ACETECH was investigating a behavioural anomaly reported from deployed systems. It occurred only under specific operating conditions and involved logic buried within a mature legacy codebase.
Initial investigation through logs and conventional code inspection had not provided a clear explanation for the symptoms.
Using Embedder, the team rapidly analysed the relevant firmware paths and gained a deeper understanding of how data, state information, and timing-related logic interacted throughout the system. That context helped engineers understand why the firmware behaved as it did under certain conditions.
"This significantly accelerated the investigation and allowed the team to focus on the most likely areas of concern rather than manually tracing large portions of the codebase."
— Jaco Olivier, Hardware Engineering Manager, ACETECH