How To: Cardinal Peak’s Amazon Alexa Design Guide Voice By Bernard Vachon March 10, 2021 Adding Alexa functionality to your product is no simple task. From connectivity, acoustics and mechanical design to power, UX and the environment in which the device will be used, there are myriad steps and considerations in the Amazon Alexa design process.
Did You Say COBOL? It’s Time to Recruit Cardinal Peak Culture By Bernard Vachon June 8, 2020 With a significantly high demand for COBOL programmers, engineering organizations should focus on hiring for talent and not as much for skills.
Why Should You Use a Third-Party IoT Platform? Connected Devices and IoT By Bernard Vachon October 19, 2017 These days many companies are looking to IoT to enable their products. In the case of commoditized items, some see an opportunity to differentiate themselves and increase their margins; and with the help of some good marketing, may convince people that they need a smart kettle to get the water boiling 5 minutes before they… View Article
The SSL/TLS Handshake Connected Devices and IoT By Bernard Vachon January 14, 2015 I was asked by ECN magazine to contribute an article about how SSL/TLS works: It doesn’t seem like too long ago when embedded devices were, by their very nature, somewhat immune to security treats. As we scatter embedded devices everywhere and connect them to the all mighty cloud, we not only increase our exposure to… View Article
Joy’s Law and the Problem of Engineering Design Outsourced Engineering By Bernard Vachon March 12, 2014 One meme that has been making the rounds recently is Joy’s Law, supposedly named after Bill Joy, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems: “No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else.” It’s a cute aphorism, one that I hadn’t heard six months ago (although the Wikipedia page linked… View Article
With TI, Hard Is Good Outsourced Engineering By Bernard Vachon May 9, 2013 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