About Us

The Company

Crownhill is a privately held, independent company founded in 1994 by the current Managing Director, Lester Wilson and his wife Beryl.

Building on the deep and broad experience of the founder and the loyal employees, Crownhill pioneered in focusing its attention on embedded PIC® microcontroller development tools and smart card design in the small and medium enterprise sector, well before both PIC® Micro's and Smart Cards became fashionable.

Our Location

Crownhill's offices and R&D facilities are based 15 miles north of Cambridge City, England, just outside of the small city of Ely. Our facility is located in a rural setting, in the heart of the Fen Land. The area has become known as Silicon Fen due to the amount of new hi-tech and IT companies arriving in the Fen region giving it similarities to the Silicon Valley in California. The term 'Fen' is given due to the area of boggy marshland to the North of Cambridge, which is kept dry through sophisticated drainage systems introduced by the


What we do

PCB Manufacturing

Crownhill is now based at purpose built facilities in Cambridge, England allowing us to facilitate design and building of prototypes through to final assembly of finished items, in-house. This includes design and manufacture of printed circuit boards and CNC automated assembly. Our capabilities extend to custom IC design and engineering to Silicon level. More information is available by visiting our PCB Manufacturing service pages.

PICBASIC® Compiler and Development Boards

We manufacture and sell PICmicro® Development tools, such as the Pic® Basic pro Compiler produced by micro engineering labs USA designed for PICBASIC® code development. Our PICBASIC® development systems even extend to Ethernet and Wi-Fi!

Online Sales

Our e-commerce site sells a whole plethora of electronic products and components, including meLabs picbasic® compiler, PICmicros®, Graphic LCDs and Device programmers.

Smart Cards

Crownhill have been working with smart cards since the early 90's and the company has a detailed understanding of the processes involved in the areas of card manufacture, operating systems developing and Smart Card design. Crownhill can supply Smart Cards incorporating microcontrollers from any of the major manufactures in the market place, e.g. Atmel, Microchip, Thompson, Siemens to name just a few, in addition Crownhill stock many "off the shelf" cards for applications ranging from door access, credit/debit cards, loyalty cards and electronic purse applications. Crownhill has developed its own exclusive OPEN ARCHITECTURE Smart Cards, allowing clients to develop their own unique operating systems. Crownhill have also developed the worlds first 1Mbyte GSM phase 2+ SIM card. Crownhill offer design services for both Smart Card manufacture and Smart Card operating systems.

Crownhill also have experience in the design of 125Kz and 13.5 Mhz contactless smart card systems, utilising cards, tags and self adhesive labels, and and supplies a range of readers writers and development systems.

Crownhill appreciate the difficulties involved in learning about the different types of Smart card systems, uses and applications. Crownhill supply several low cost full function Smart Card development systems covering virtually every type of card currently available including high security cards and Contactless Smart Cards.

Component Supply

Crownhill specialise in bringing you the latest Eprom, EEprom and Microcontroller devices at the very lowest prices! Crownhill use highly developed order consolidation techniques to pass on the massive discounts offered by manufacturers for bulk orders. Crownhill typically offers the 1000 off price for single component orders, and it's much better than that for large orders!

Our Customers

We have had the privilege of building strong relationships with our clients in several areas, allowing us to develop comprehensive solutions for, amongst others:

• Universites and colleges in the UK and overseas.
• UK government bodies and international government departments.
• The ARRP and The RSGB.
• Volvo, Ford Research, GPT, Philips, Orange, Vodaphone, 1-2-1, Ericsson, Kenwood, Marconi, Motorola.
• Knowledge-intensive industries including professional services companies.
• Publishers and media