The Buyer’s Guide to Pictorus

Technologists face a tough challenge in choosing the correct software toolchain to empower their team and ensure efficient code delivery. In some cases, minimal tooling may be sufficient—ie a small IoT product with just 100 lines of code, where complex developer tools aren't necessary.

However, when it comes to most modern, complex hardware products, the story changes. These devices often run sophisticated algorithms, spanning thousands or millions of lines of code, potentially dealing with numerous regulatory hurdles. In these scenarios, under-tooling becomes a significant risk, delaying timelines. Speed to market is crucial, and investing in tools that streamline the process and mitigate risks is typically worth it.

Why Pictorus?

Pictorus was created for engineering teams dealing with complex, high-stakes projects—typically in aerospace, automotive, or robotics—where rigorous simulation, testing, validation, and coding standards are essential. However, efficiency is critical, and teams are always looking to streamline processes. Once crucial, legacy tools can often be replaced with modern solutions that meet multiple needs simultaneously.

Below is a checklist of use cases where Pictorus can provide significant value. If any of these resonates with your team's needs, we'd happily schedule a call to explore whether Pictorus is the right fit.

The Multi-Disciplinary Hardware/Software Team

Developing highly engineered products requires diverse technical expertise—electrical engineers, battery pack designers, controls specialists, firmware developers, sensor experts, and more. Despite their varied backgrounds, these teams—often consisting of dozens or even hundreds of engineers—must collaborate to produce a cohesive software deliverable.

Naturally, the software proficiency within such a group varies widely. A PhD astrophysicist may excel at writing Python scripts to calculate orbital trajectories but struggle with porting that code to an embedded processor. An electrical engineer might be adept at using LabView or MATLAB to control an oscilloscope but may not venture further into software development. You might even have control and computer vision engineers highly skilled in C++ yet overwhelmed by the software certification process.

Pictorus helps bridge these gaps. With our platform, production software benefits from a uniform coding style and pre-templated, highly optimized build pipeline. Any algorithm built using our foundational blocks inherits robust safety and performance characteristics, minimizing the risk of manual coding errors.

Our visual programming interface is a game changer for non-software engineers. It allows them to drag, drop, and connect functionality to create simple (or highly complex) algorithms without worrying about how the underlying code comes together.

For those who prefer writing their code by hand, Pictorus offers a Rust IDE for integrating custom code into applications. Thanks to Rust's strict type-checking and our integration of industry-specific linters and qualified compilers, we can provide stronger safety assurances for hand-written code than traditional C-based approaches.

The Scrappy Startup

Getting your initial prototype off the ground is a challenging feat. With a small team of 2-5 people, you're faced with multiple layers of tooling decisions, beyond just an IDE for embedded software development. You need to figure out how to deploy software to hardware, collect telemetry from devices in development and production, store and visualize that data for engineers, clients, and leadership, and ensure your code is thoroughly tested—all while supporting multiple hardware targets.

Typically, teams end up cobbling together a patchwork of tools they've used in the past, often under tight deadlines. This makeshift workflow usually leads to frustration and regret, and those who push through frequently spend the next few years painstakingly replacing and upgrading their tools.

Pictorus offers a way to bypass this headache entirely and focus on what matters—your product's value. From day one, you can compile and store software in the cloud, deploy it instantly to any device, pull telemetry from across your fleet, and visualize everything in real time through a web browser.

Since our workflow has been tested and refined over the years, you'll spend less time fixing a patchy toolchain and more time delivering your product.

The Rapidly Scaling Team

Teams will do whatever it takes to move from MVP to product-market fit. Once they reach that milestone, the focus shifts from "just get it to work" to "make it work at 100x scale."

It's at this stage that poor early tooling decisions start to surface. What worked for a team of 2-3 engineers suddenly needs to scale for a team of 20-30, all while finance scrutinizes the budget. Engineering teams often begin looking for exit strategies from the tools that got them through prototyping. For instance, they may have purchased a $5k Matlab+Simulink license because it was well-integrated with their hardware vendor. They did not realize those costs would balloon into hundreds of thousands as the fleet scaled. Worse yet, the desktop license model common in legacy tools can create efficiency bottlenecks, with engineers waiting in line to use special desktop software, hindering the team's ability to debug issues, develop new code, and deploy products to clients.

This is where Pictorus steps in. We offer a more flexible pricing model and a cloud-based development and deployment system, enabling team-wide collaboration instead of resource competition. If you're feeling buyer's remorse about your MathWorks licenses, we make it easy to port your existing models into our platform—painlessly. And we'll even help you ensure everything runs smoothly.

Teams with Diverse Simulation Ecosystems

Global engineering teams often face the challenge of harmonizing a patchwork of tools, each chosen by a regional decision-maker who may have left the company long ago. For instance, the team in Boston might use Simulink for modeling, while their counterparts in San Francisco rely on a homegrown Python simulator. Meanwhile, the Seattle office uses Gazebo, and in Berlin, they're sticking with a defunct open-source tool that local engineers insist outperforms the American alternatives.

Testing production software across such varied environments can be complicated. With Pictorus, we accommodate any simulation tool you use. You could even build your simulator within Pictorus using our Python integration.

Let's say you're using a custom Python simulation that needs to interface with production software. Pictorus offers several flexible options: You can call our APIs to obtain the latest pre-compiled executable to run alongside your simulator, making it easy if the simulator communicates directly with the controller. This process can also be automated through GitHub Actions or other CI/CD tools.

Suppose you need to compile your simulator and controller code together. In that case, our APIs can deliver the latest source code or static library and instructions for integration into your local compile. We also provide guidance for calling critical controller functions from other languages, like C.

Alternatively, you can embed your Python simulator directly into your Pictorus project. Pictorus handles the simulation for you with this setup, utilizing our scalable cloud infrastructure to return pass/fail results and simulation output via APIs. We provide tokens to query results later for long-running simulations, enabling automated overnight testing with your existing CI system.

The Rust-Forward Team

It's becoming increasingly evident that Rust is the future of systems programming. With the Linux Foundation and tech giants like Google, Facebook, and Amazon rushing to port their legacy C code to Rust for its memory safety and high performance, a new wave of software teams are emerging as day-one Rust shops.

In some cases, this shift is driven by recruitment dynamics—embedded C engineers tend to be later in their careers. At the same time, university CS programs produce growing numbers of Rust-proficient graduates every year.

In other cases, it's a deliberate decision by CTOs and software leads who see Rust as a way to preempt safety issues, banning C code from the start and enjoying the productivity boost of a team that spends less time chasing segfaults and undefined behaviors.

At larger, more established enterprises, software leads are often tasked with planning for the next decade of innovation. For them, moving away from C towards Rust is a challenge, especially when they need to maintain decades of legacy Simulink models.

The Rust tooling ecosystem is still catching up for teams in both scenarios. If your product involves traditional aerospace or automotive systems, you'll likely need control engineers familiar with Model-Based Design (MBD), often using tools like Simulink. However, Simulink generates notoriously unreadable C code. Pictorus presents a compelling opportunity to bring Rust's safety guarantees into the fold while preserving the advantages of model-based design.

Hardware Designers

Hardware designers usually dread dealing with software complexities, but their success heavily depends on how easily their hardware integrates with other systems. Clients may choose a less capable—or significantly more expensive—solution simply because it offers better software integration. That's why well-designed software interfaces are essential.

You have a few options. You could build an in-house embedded engineering team to develop and maintain your software APIs. But it's challenging to attract top-tier talent for this work, and maintaining such a team is costly. Alternatively, you could outsource to cheaper international labor, which often leads to quality issues and the headaches of managing remote teams, especially when things go awry.

This is where solutions like Pictorus shine. We can help you design and maintain a custom software interface that's easier to manage and appeals to a broader range of your customers. Software purists get the interface spec they need, while those less inclined toward software get a simple drag-and-drop solution that minimizes friction and keeps things running smoothly.

Highly Regulated Industries

For teams developing hardware in highly regulated industries like automotive and aerospace, time is often the most valuable asset. Code compliance and certification frequently take far longer in these sectors than in designing and optimizing the software. Anything that speeds up the certification process can be a game changer.

Many newer teams are moving away from legacy MathWorks toolchains, preferring in-house solutions for simulation and control development. Some do this because traditional tools feel outdated and cumbersome, while others believe owning their entire tool stack enables faster iteration. However, this approach comes with significant risks unless you invest tens of millions of dollars into internal tooling—à la SpaceX. Experienced engineers know that "rolling your own" often introduces substantial technical debt, and buying proven solutions is usually the more intelligent choice for these projects.

That's why we're partnering with industry leaders in the emerging Rust ecosystem, an open-source initiative of software experts specialized in code certification for the automotive and aerospace sectors. These collaborations will allow our users to leverage trusted, qualified compilers that are compliant with industry standards like ISO-26262 and DO-178C. Available to enterprise clients, this feature lets you choose the correct certification standard for your project and access the certified compiler and the necessary certification documentation. We're continually enhancing functionality to support requirements traceability and auto-documentation, making compliance smoother and faster.

In Summary

Pictorus is a powerful tool for teams at the intersection of hardware and software. If any of these scenarios sound familiar or if you have a unique use case, don't hesitate to contact our sales team today to see how we can help.