Blog

Three Keys to Embedded Software Success Software Development By Stefanie Diesi Writing software on an embedded device can be difficult for any number of reasons, but smart design choices up front can help mitigate some of the pain down the road. There are entire books and college courses devoted to this topic. However, I think the following three items are a good place to start. Layered… View Article Details

Where There Is No Vision… Connected Devices and IoT By Howdy Pierce I was disappointed in CES this year. Aside from minor tweaks, virtually everything on display in 2018 was also on display in 2017. Although I did see the world’s first “mixed reality dimensional guidance device,” I’m not sure what it is, but with that name I want it! Evidently, I’m not the only one whose… View Article Details

Amazon Web Services re:Invent 2017 AWS By Kevin Courter Amazon Web Services’ re:Invent is a massive and fast-growing event. Estimates for this year’s attendance range between 40,000 and 50,000 people, and it was sold out nearly two weeks before the first day. This year there are over 1000 breakout sessions covering a dozen or more tracks, as well as workshops, certification classes, hands-on labs,… View Article Details

Innovating With iZotope Audio By Cardinal Peak Staff We recently completed a really cool project with our friends at iZotope. For those who have never picked up a guitar and dreamed of being the next Tom Petty, iZotope designs award-winning audio products and technologies for musicians, music producers and audio post engineers around the world. In a nutshell, they develop the software that… View Article Details

Teaching in Africa: Part 1 Cardinal Peak Culture By Mike Perkins I’m on sabbatical from Cardinal Peak right now, teaching at Carnegie Mellon’s Africa campus in Kigali, Rwanda. Aside from the fun I’ve had being in another culture and in an academic environment, it’s been great to see how a world class university like CMU educates graduate students in ECE and IT overseas. CMU’s Rwanda program… View Article Details

Negative Zero Signal Processing By Howdy Pierce My wife brings up the following story any time she wants to make the point that I’m pedantic: When one of my daughters was in second grade, her math teacher told the class that any number divided by zero was one. I dashed off an impassioned email to the teacher, insisting that the result had… View Article Details

Why Should You Use a Third-Party IoT Platform? Connected Devices and IoT By Bernard Vachon 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 Details

IoT in the Medical Device Industry Connected Devices and IoT By James Bockrath Cardinal Peak works with a range of medical devices and technologies and is increasingly engaged in IoT initiatives for major health care companies. We have built ultrasound systems, surgical device energy generators, Fitbit-like health monitors, medical information memory cards, and RFID tagging systems for configuring and tracking medical devices. Details

Google I/O Rundown Connected Devices and IoT By Thomson Comer Here’s a quick rundown from a tech perspective of what Google announced last week at its I/O conference: Google.ai Google bases most of its service model on artificial intelligence (AI). In this year’s I/O, they announced some really cool new data-center clusters called Tensor Processing Units (TPUs): huge, heavy-duty number-crunching machines that each provide up… View Article Details

Amazon Releases New Alexa SSML Tags Connected Devices and IoT By Thomson Comer One small step for man, one giant leap for robot-kind? Well, sort of. After years, we are starting to see AI technology become more enjoyable to interact with. Amazon released five new language nuance enhancements to the Alexa API last week. The Semantic Syntax Markup Language (SSML) is what Amazon has defined for performing text-to-speech… View Article Details

Yes, You Do Need to Document Your Open Source Code Software Development By Dave Beal I’ve recently had the experience of working with two pieces of open source code. Both implement a standard wireless communication stack in Linux. Names are omitted to protect the guilty. In one case, the code has been around since 2001 and has been part of the Linux kernel since version 2.4.6. It has now been… View Article Details

So, You Want to Add Alexa Control to Your Thing… Connected Devices and IoT By Kevin Courter Amazon’s Alexa was the darling of CES, and it’s easy to see why. The Echo and Echo Dot devices that run Alexa are relatively inexpensive, and a tremendous number were sold over the Christmas holiday period helped along, no doubt, by an aggressive marketing campaign and widespread markdowns. But, beyond being well marketed, Alexa has… View Article Details