Tech Talk: Electronics, Software and Beyond
Blog & News
UPDATE: These positions are now closed.
Currently, we have three open engineering positions on our careers page. These are great opportunities for an experienced Embedded Design Engineer, Electronics Design Engineer and an Embedded Software Engineer to join a growing design consultancy where you will play an integral part in the business utilising both your electronic design and embedded software experience.
We have a great opportunity for a junior Embedded Design Engineer to join a new and growing design consultancy where you will play an integral part in the business utilising both your electronic design and embedded software experience.
Now Ripcord Designs is the sponsor and host of the group, Hertfordshire Tech Meetup. We hope anyone interested in building the tech community in Hertfordshire will come and join us for a relaxed, informal meetup and talk a bit about tech.
We are excited to announce that we have now moved into fresh new offices on Barnet Road in St Albans. The new office is just a couple of miles from our old location. It provides more space, excellent access to the M25 and local amenities and there are three pubs within a stones throw of our door! The additional space will enable us to expand our services and take on additional staff as our business grows
I'm sure that everyone reading this will be familiar with the fact that in a television system, the camera scans an image using a scan pattern known as a raster. (A quick Google search for “raster scan” readily returns images such as the following to illustrate my point):
It would be easy to fall into the trap of thinking we could simply replace our SD equipment with HD or Ultra HD equivalents and keep all our cabling infrastructure the same, but in practice it is not always so simple. As video resolution has increased from SD to HD to UltraHD, the SDI bit rate has increased dramatically from 270 Mb/s to 11.88 Gb/s, which in turn places increased demands on the cabling infrastructure that we use. In practical terms this greatly reduces the cable lengths that can be used, and some older or lower cost cables may not be usable at all.
I often find myself writing blocks of VHDL code (aka VHDL “components”) to process and manipulate MPEG transport streams. Once the component code is written, the next step is to simulate it to be sure it is functioning as intended. The usual approach is to write a “testbench” which is a further block of VHDL code that forms a “wrapper” around the component under test and feeds it with a variety of known and pre-programmed input stimuli.
Over the last few years I have been involved in the design of several digital television (DTV) transmitters and receivers. As you might expect. the bulk of the design effort on these projects is taken up in designing electronics, writing firmware and software and getting the mechanical packaging right. What may be less obvious however, is the huge effort involved in verifying that the design meets all the DTV standards and specifications.
Choosing the right product design partner can be key to your success when building a new electronic product. Here we highlight 10 things you should consider when selecting a designer to help develop your product.