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TL;DR; I'm an impoverished small scale serial arsonist of expensive components remembering that software means never having to leave physical proof of your boo

TL;DR; I'm an impoverished small scale serial arsonist of expensive components remembering that software means never having to leave physical proof of your boo boos, most of the time. OK, I'm actually a software engineer back into hardware engineering after 20 some years cause I need to build custom cameras for machine vision projects. Major recovered sills are CAD (Eagle), more geometry (layout), exercising credit cards due to I'm still bad a spice, lazily using standard cap and resistor values even when they're wrong for >this< circuit, and excessive shining about stray capacitance - since I need to work at 3.3V and I'm in my 50's, I can't see the parts so well and my motor skills aren't what they once were, so thats even more expensive crap I need (rework station, reflow oven)

fest 10y ago
Having just deployed a machine vision system (using GigE machine vision cameras): why exactly are you building custom cameras? If you don't mind/are allowed to share this information, of course.
- MarkMMullin 10y ago
  I do hardware engineering because I started my career when it and heavy math were required to get into software courses (and you first computer came as a bag of parts) - the camera itself is spherical build, wedging 26 cameras, 4 beagleboneblacks, a netswitch,IMUs,GPS, and batteries for the souls sucking multiamp drain into a 5" ball (OK, I gave up on the batteries for the moment :-) My primary "actual engineering" has been the control distribution circuits across 8 paired I2C/SPI busses at 4-8MHz and trying not to corrupt the bits in the process (a little bit of whining on Wolfram Alpha with the theoreticals, a lot of being very neat and tidy with the layout - the power distro itself with its various internal taps because power is analog and analog is proof that God hates us, the various passives and actives involved in everybody actually powering up in some more or less controlled fashion, etc - technically for the camera I use the Arducam FPGA against OV2640's and OV5640s, cause that gives me a nice (slower) pure I2C/SPI interface - the real goal is to feed the tensorflow stuff in the cloud, the camera geometry, imu, and gps provide enough correlations for the system to lock onto pretty easily, i.e. stationary spherical image reconstruction and spatial analysis is a no brainer (relatively speaking :-) ), and the back end system is now getting more betterer at using the IMU data stream as a primary assist when the camera is in motion (oh, and then there was the pesky little issue of delivering the GPS clock to 4 linux based computers to establish a common timebase cause we all know that linux is an awesome RTOS)

fest 10y ago

Having just deployed a machine vision system (using GigE machine vision cameras): why exactly are you building custom cameras? If you don't mind/are allowed to share this information, of course.

MarkMMullin 10y ago
I do hardware engineering because I started my career when it and heavy math were required to get into software courses (and you first computer came as a bag of parts) - the camera itself is spherical build, wedging 26 cameras, 4 beagleboneblacks, a netswitch,IMUs,GPS, and batteries for the souls sucking multiamp drain into a 5" ball (OK, I gave up on the batteries for the moment :-) My primary "actual engineering" has been the control distribution circuits across 8 paired I2C/SPI busses at 4-8MHz and trying not to corrupt the bits in the process (a little bit of whining on Wolfram Alpha with the theoreticals, a lot of being very neat and tidy with the layout - the power distro itself with its various internal taps because power is analog and analog is proof that God hates us, the various passives and actives involved in everybody actually powering up in some more or less controlled fashion, etc - technically for the camera I use the Arducam FPGA against OV2640's and OV5640s, cause that gives me a nice (slower) pure I2C/SPI interface - the real goal is to feed the tensorflow stuff in the cloud, the camera geometry, imu, and gps provide enough correlations for the system to lock onto pretty easily, i.e. stationary spherical image reconstruction and spatial analysis is a no brainer (relatively speaking :-) ), and the back end system is now getting more betterer at using the IMU data stream as a primary assist when the camera is in motion (oh, and then there was the pesky little issue of delivering the GPS clock to 4 linux based computers to establish a common timebase cause we all know that linux is an awesome RTOS)