Our 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.
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 ArticleDetails
The Continuing Devaluation of “k”
Video
By Howdy Pierce
The digital video industry seems destined to make resolution confusing. I just got back from NAB last week, where “4k video” was everywhere, and I want to tell you a story about video resolutions. (This is all using the resolutions that are common in the NTSC world, which basically means in the U.S. and Canada…. View ArticleDetails
Google Is Feeling Creepy
Outsourced Engineering
By Ben Mesander
When you enable location access, Android says Allow Google’s location service to collect anonymous location data. Some data may be stored on your device. Collection may occur even when no apps are running. This seems both fair and harmless, so I didn’t think too much about it. But it turns out to be a little creepier than you might think.
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I Wish More Engineers Could Write
Outsourced Engineering
By Howdy Pierce
Over a year ago, a computer science faculty member asked me what skills I wished CS programs would teach their graduates. I’m sure he expected a response along the lines of “teach Node.js” or “teach more networking” or “teach operating system theory.” (And for the record, I do think they should teach those topics.) It’s… View ArticleDetails
Beating Your Internal Estimate
Outsourced Engineering
By Chad Scates
Recently, we’ve had two potential customers say to us, in so many words, “My internal engineering team has estimated this project to take X months, and I think that’s too long — can you do it faster?” There are two ways to interpret this… Details
How Low Can You Go?
Video
By Mike Perkins
Last night I went to the Denver IEEE meeting of the Signal Processing Society. I was particularly interested in this talk because it was given by Gary Sullivan, the co-chair of the recent international standardization effort to create the High Efficiency Video Coding Standard (HEVC). Details
TI’s Video SoC Dilemma
Outsourced Engineering
By Mike Deeds
We’ve had the pleasure to work with Texas Instruments’ high-end video processor families (DM8168 and DM8148) over the past few years on a number of different projects. These are highly integrated Systems-on-Chip (SoC) that contain many independent subsystems such as an ARM Cortex CPU, a DSP, video compression/decompression engines, a 3D graphics accelerator, and a… View ArticleDetails
My Threads Question
Outsourced Engineering
By Howdy Pierce
If we interview you here at Cardinal Peak, we’re going to assume you’re competent to use Google, and we’ll give you the benefit of the doubt that you can look up answers to weird corner cases. What we really want to know is how deeply you understand how a computer works. Details
I Want Widgets that Come With an API
Software Development
By Howdy Pierce
Aside from the glut of “UltraHD” televisions at CES this year, I saw two other trends that seem noteworthy to me but that have not been highly reported in the tech press: There is a huge number of Internet-connected home sensors of all kinds, and also a much large concentration of smart or connected fitness… View ArticleDetails
Cardinal Peak Develops Blockbuster App
Software Development
By Chad Scates
I’m proud to announce the release of the Blockbuster app for Android, developed by Cardinal Peak. The app launched this week in the Google Play store. It allows subscribers to manage their Blockbuster By Mail queue as well as find nearby stores, check a title’s availability in a store, and more. Check it out! Details
Computing Primes in Python and C++
Software Development
By Howdy Pierce
I recently had the opportunity to implement a Python program to compute prime numbers. After I was done, I wondered how the Python implementation compared to doing the same exact thing in C++, so I decided to do a comparison. First, the Python program. I computed prime numbers using the Sieve of Eratosthenes. (No, I… View ArticleDetails
