Product Design Blog

HomeBlog

Our product design and development blog focuses on sharing our experience and knowledge across a wide range of technologies and industries including hardware and software design, audio, video, internet of things, mobile application and signal processing technologies.

Howdy Pierce The Internet of Things — and How Those Things Phone Home Connected Devices and IoT By Howdy Pierce There’s a lot of buzz about the Internet of Things — a catchphrase designed to encompass a range of embedded devices that connect to cloud servers to act more intelligently than they could on their own. One problem that comes up is how to design the Thing to connect back to the Cloud Server — how does the Thing phone home? It’s tricky, because, usually, we are trying to balance several factors. Details
Boulder Tech Job Fair is September 11 Outsourced Engineering By Randy Bockrath Looking for a challenging new opportunity? Don’t miss the chance to learn about nearly 100 available tech positions at 13 technology companies in Boulder on Wednesday, Sept. 11. The Boulder Tech Job Fair, hosted by Cardinal Peak and the Boulder Chamber, will take place from 3-7 p.m. on Sept. 11 at the Boulder Chamber, located… View Article Details
Regression Testing, the Lazy Way Quality Assurance By John Black Regression testing is a simple (and wonderful) idea. The idea is that once you have working software, you should easily be able to ensure it keeps working after further changes are made. This is achieved by constructing a set of tests along with their known-correct outputs, and then re-running these tests after any modifications to ensure the known-correct outputs are still obtained. Details
Howdy Pierce Choosing Between Outsourced and In-House Engineering Outsourced Engineering By Howdy Pierce Discover the value of outsourced engineering with “5 Questions to Consider.” Read the article and share your thoughts on choosing between outsourced or in-house engineering. Details
Howdy Pierce Understanding Code You Didn’t Write Outsourced Engineering By Howdy Pierce I’ve been thinking recently about skills I wish were taught better in computer science curricula. (Previously I discussed the ability to write.) Here’s another skill that we often need: The ability to quickly understand code you didn’t write. As open source is used more and more, we increasingly ask engineers to drop into a large… View Article Details
Howdy Pierce Mobile App “Clips” Radio Ads to Smartphone Outsourced Engineering By Howdy Pierce The Boulder County Business Report did a nice article about a recent project we did with a local Boulder startup, Clip Interactive: Local inventor Jeff Thramann hatched the idea and started Clip Interactive, originally contracting with Cardinal Peak for working space as well as help developing the technology. Cardinal Peak specializes in digital video and… View Article Details
Equalized Video Latency Is Often More Important Than Absolute Latency Video By Tho Autruong When is low latency not that important? Answer: When the application is not real time, which is the case for the vast majority of video that we consume. Details
Five Questions With Howdy Pierce Outsourced Engineering By Chad Scates Howdy was interviewed in the Boulder Daily Camera today: Cardinal Peak specializes in developing embedded devices, mobile and set-top applications and digital video products for original equipment manufacturers. What type of competition is your firm facing? In our field, of course the big trend in the last 10 years is offshore outsourcing. … So for… View Article Details
Howdy Pierce Converting Between Data Rates and Storage Networking By Howdy Pierce Bordering on the line of “too embarrassingly simple for a blog post,” here is an Excel data rate converter. Details
Asian Manufacturing Strategy: How Much Is Your IP Worth to You? Outsourced Engineering By Mike Deeds I’ve had several discussions with potential clients that go something like this: “We currently manufacture our product in China and we’d like more control over the hardware design and software source code.” When these firms try to get the design files, they realize that they don’t have full access to what they thought was their own intellectual property. Details
Inter-Thread Communication Without a Mutex Software Development By Ben Mesander A simple way to avoid mutex-locking issues is to not use mutexes. This post describes a simple technique for passing objects between threads in a thread-safe manner without mutexes, which makes the entire class of possible mutex-related errors impossible to implement! Details
Bernard Vachon With TI, Hard Is Good Outsourced Engineering By Bernard Vachon Texas Instruments DaVinci™ series offers a range of processors optimized for digital video processing. Although not appropriate for broadcast video, they are well suited for a number of other video applications. TI offers evaluation modules (EVMs), software development kits (SDKs) and reference DVR design kits (RDKs) that allow a company to jumpstart its development effort…. View Article Details
26 pages of results