Something has been missing from the Northern tech scene for a long time. Not ambition, there’s plenty of that. Not talent, the universities here produce exceptional engineers every year. What’s been missing is a place where embedded systems expertise and edge AI capability actually live together, accessible to the businesses that need them most.
That’s what Manchester Edge AI Lab is.
What the lab actually is
We’re an embedded systems and edge AI lab operated in partnership with Resolutis Ltd. The work we do sits at the intersection of two disciplines that rarely meet: deploying trained AI models onto real, constrained hardware, Jetson Orin, NXP i.MX 9x, microcontrollers, at the latency and power budgets that industrial products actually require.
That means Linux BSP and Yocto integration, TensorRT and eIQ inference optimisation, Rust systems programming, NFC cryptographic authentication, and edge-to-cloud pipelines. From BSP to inference. Real silicon, not just eval boards.
Who this is for
Northern hardware founders who need embedded expertise without a full-time hire. Manufacturers looking to add AI-driven quality inspection or predictive maintenance to factory floors. Scale-ups who need to integrate edge intelligence into existing products. University spin-outs bridging the gap from academic prototype to commercial deployment.
If you’ve ever been told “we don’t do hardware” by a software agency, or found that the engineers who understand embedded systems have never deployed a model, this lab exists because of that gap.
What we’ll publish here
This blog will document real work. Benchmark results, deployment write-ups, hardware teardowns, and honest post-mortems from projects in the lab. The first technical post will cover our YOLOv8n TensorRT benchmark on the Jetson Orin, 3.51ms mean latency, 285 FPS at FP16 in MAXN_SUPER mode, and what it actually took to get there from a clean flash.
Everything we build gets published under the manchester-edgeai-lab GitHub organisation. Open source by default.
The community mission
We’re a private limited company with a community mission. The aim is to provide Free lab days every month for early-stage Northern hardware founders. Monthly open sessions for embedded engineers and IoT teams across the region. University partnerships keeping Northern engineers in the North.
The goal is simple: build world-class embedded and edge AI capability here, make it accessible to Northern businesses, and publish everything we learn along the way.
If that sounds like something you need, get in touch at john@resolutis.com.