Tag: Blog

We recently became aware of another contract engineering firm that had appropriated our Why Contract Engineering page for their own website. This other firm (and no, I’m not going to link to them) claims on their home page that they “operate in an honest, ethical and professional manner,” so I guess they’ve got that going... View Article

Discover the controversy of Auto-Tune in jazz vocals. Can you detect its subtle use in Manhattan Transfer's latest album?

Based on a Slashdot link, I read a blog post today about the Oracle/Google lawsuit over Java virtual machine patents. Among the list of software patents that Oracle has decided to sue Google with are two that I’m fairly certain that I wrote prior art for. This was in 1983 or 1984 while I was... View Article

A recent project for a customer was to implement a transport for a real-time signal processing application over Gigabit Ethernet (GbE). The project was especially interesting because our customer’s requirement was for extremely low latency: The transport needed to be able to send replies to incoming packets with a custom EtherType within 74.4 μsec. This... View Article

I just saw this news about research that says you notice compression artifacts less if you like the content of a particular video clip: Using four studies, Kortum, along with co-author Marc Sullivan of AT&T Labs, showed 100 study participants 180 movie clips encoded at nine different levels, from 550 kilobits per second up to... View Article

Create high-quality photo-video hybrids effortlessly using ffmpeg! Optimize your AVI or MP4 files for flawless playback on any platform. Boost your media game today!

Automate the dreamy Orton effect in Gimp for stunning landscape and flower photography. Enhance your images effortlessly with our Gimp script.

One of our clients is heavily involved in 3D video and has been for several years. However, several are just now starting to think about it because of the uptick of interest in the consumer electronics world. Enough questions have been posed to us recently that it seemed worthwhile to me to pull together a... View Article

My last post suggested ways to reduce parts costs in a low- to mid-volume product. This post explores ways to keep development costs low while still creating a cost-effective product. You can’t escape the fact that it takes money to create a low-cost product. It is estimated that the first version of the iPhone had... View Article

I just returned from this year’s NAB show, where I was bombarded with 3D demos in virtually every booth. Most of the factors driving this 3D superabundance originate outside of the broadcast industry itself. First, TV manufacturers are hot on 3D as a way to get everyone who just bought an HDTV to upgrade to... View Article

Our engineering expert details how to capture and analyze all the network traffic flowing to and from a Wi-Fi-enabled device using a network sniffer.

I take it as a given that when a client approaches us with a new embedded product idea, they will require a very demanding set of features and a minimal price tag. The “minimal price tag” part always applies to the development effort required. For products with a hardware component, it also applies to the... View Article