Comment by jurschreuder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jurschreuder | Hacker News Reader

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We build our own cameras and write our own drivers here in Amsterdam, and sometimes get requests from other companies here that rather pay more than trying to explain their projects to Chinese manufacturers. Some industrial cameras we buy from Basler and the guy who builds them lives right around the block in a village close to Amsterdam. So maybe it's coming back around.

As an engineer I have a really strong opinion about only finance being left in Europe and all the engineering being outsourced to cheaper countries.

I personally think in tech the ladder to the top is made so you have to switch to management at some point in order to promote any further. I see managers and people that actually want to volunteer to become a manager instead of an engineer as the root of this problem. At my company we organize the hierarchy more like a hospital or a law firm, with the best engineers having the highest positions, just like partners at a law firm.

I work at a product design firm here in the US, we're also organized like this. Engineers that can deliver end up getting more clients, so it does end up somewhat like a law firm (their hourly rates are still higher, which IMHO is crazy..).

We also make cameras, I've become the MIPI expert.

Our bread and butter includes mechanical design, PCB design and firmware / FPGA design. This maybe sounds like basic stuff, but includes things like RF and COMSOL / ANSYS physical and mechanical modeling and simulation.

A startup company in India hired us: they had plenty of software developers, but wanted experts to de-risk the hardware and low level firmware.

https://www.nklabs.com/

Our experience with Basler was pretty bad. We got a few daA1280-54uc and all of them had insane noise levels. Their German support never took us seriously and just argued that our 10% noise level was normal.

Basler Vision Beijing later confirmed that it's a firmware issue and indeed switching from RGB to YUV reduced the noise to less than 1%, but it left a very sour taste that the support team in their supposed headquarter didn't recognize a noise issue when we sent them test pictures, like this: https://www.dropbox.com/s/ahht53ht6moa40g/Image__2021-04-07_...

Also, the marketing photos of dart Cameras had a "Made in Germany" sticker on the back. Ours shipped from the US (to Germany) and didn't have a "Made in Germany" sticker.

In the end, our client then decided to go with a custom camera. They wanted full control over the FPGA firmware to avoid future issues like this.

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