Outsourced Engineering

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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 Article

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...

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 Article

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.

When it comes to bringing a brand new product to market, keep it simple. The important thing is to get to market quickly, with low development costs, and get feedback from your customers about how to make the product better.

If you’re looking to predict what technologies will be obsolete soon, visiting the Kodak booth at CES is not a bad place to start. I came to this realization as I was watching a demo from one of Kodak’s partners, Unibind. Unibind is demonstrating a new machine at CES that allows retailers to create a... View Article