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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 Providing Indemnification for Patent Infringement Outsourced Engineering By Howdy Pierce Discover why Cardinal Peak chose to walk away from an engineering engagement for the first time. Learn about our stance on indemnification and why it matters in high-stakes engineering contracts. Details
Writing Defensive Code to Automatically Find Memory Leaks Software Development By Ben Mesander In an earlier post, I suggested making all your memory allocations go through a single routine, and deletions through another. When you centralize allocation and deallocation like this, you gain a couple of benefits. First of all, you make the memory allocation more explicit, which will tend to make programmers more careful. Second, you can… View Article Details
Mike Perkins Delta Sigma Converters: Filtering, Decimation and Simulations Signal Processing By Mike Perkins In my first post on ΔΣ converters I presented an intuitive way to derive the modulator portion of the converter. Now we need to look at what comes after the modulator — namely, the digital filter and the decimator. The high-level structure of the converter looks like this: The analog input voltage, v(t), is assumed… View Article Details
How To Find a Memory Leak Security By Ben Mesander Finding memory leaks and other problems in your code can be challenging, but there are tools available to help simplify that process. Remember to add time to your schedule so that you can apply the available tools for finding memory leaks and other problems. Details
Mike Perkins Delta Sigma Converters: Modulation Signal Processing By Mike Perkins Discover the essence of Delta Sigma modulation with clear insights and a practical approach. Learn how to implement and understand this vital technology intuitively. Details
Ben’s Golden Rule for Preventing Memory Leaks Software Development By Ben Mesander Learn how to prevent memory leaks in C/C++ with Ben’s Golden Rule. Follow these steps for effective memory management and ensure your embedded systems run smoothly! Details
Howdy Pierce The Cost of an Engineer-Hour Outsourced Engineering By Howdy Pierce As all good project managers know, there are three dimensions to any engineering effort: The features of the product: What does the product do and how does it look? (For sake of simplicity, let’s include “quality” as a product feature.) The schedule on which the product is produced: How fast does it get to market?… View Article Details
Mike Perkins The Math Behind Analog Video Resolution Signal Processing By Mike Perkins NTSC video signals remain vital for many applications due to their affordability and sufficient resolution for security needs. Learn why NTSC still matters today! Details
Howdy Pierce On the Importance of Encrypting Video Video By Howdy Pierce This morning brought a front-page Wall St. Journal article that’s a bit of a jaw-dropper: Militants in Iraq have used $26 off-the-shelf software to intercept live video feeds from U.S. Predator drones, potentially providing them with information they need to evade or monitor U.S. military operations. … The potential drone vulnerability lies in an unencrypted… View Article Details
Howdy Pierce Outsourcing Just the 1.0 Outsourced Engineering By Howdy Pierce Consider outsourcing just the 1.0 version of your product for a quick market entry, then bring maintenance and enhancements in-house. Learn more about this strategic approach here! Details
Detecting Well-Focused Images Image Processing By Ben Mesander Our expert discusses how to write a program to automatically determine which photo in a group of pictures of the same scene is in the best focus. The trick is to use a contrast measurement in the passive autofocus algorithm. Details
Mike Perkins Noise Floor Signal Processing By Mike Perkins As shown in a previous post, for samples taken from a zero mean i.i.d noise signal, the expected power of the k’th DFT coefficient is given by     As discussed in that post, when plotting the power of the k’th coefficient as a function of frequency, the “noise floor” will decrease as N increases… View Article Details
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