Ask HN: Marketplaces for Embedded/FPGA Developers

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41580252

by ckemere • 2 years ago

43 33 2 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I have what I imagine to be a fairly simple project for a talented FPGA coder. While I know of some marketplaces for finding generic software developers, I don't know whether there are any good ones in the embedded space. Any suggestions? Thanks in advance.

brudgers• 2 years ago

Do you have a budget that isn't based on your imagination?

ckemere10• 2 years ago

Maybe $5-10k?

gaudat• 2 years ago

Do you need latency measured in nanoseconds or multiplexing hundreds of sensors? Otherwise it makes a lot more sense to use a Cortex-M or Cortex-A.

gchadwick• 2 years ago

Does depend upon the project but I suspect this is far too low. Only thing you're likely to get in this price range is a small addition / tweak to an existing design.

A very minimal design from scratch that uses existing off the shelf hardware with no interfacing to anything remotely complex and no follow on support (pretty much developer hands it over showing some smoke test works and you're on your own from there) could also fit into this budget.

toast0• 2 years ago

Here's your engineering plan for that budget.

Make up some design documents and put up a splashy crowdsourcing campaign. Collect, but don't spend the deposits. Trickle out some progress content over about a year. Look for knock offs on aliexpress, return deposits.

bcrl4• 2 years ago

So you want to pay for less than 1 week of dev time? Almost nothing can be done on an FPGA for that little amount of money beyond the smallest of changes to an existing design. Heck, the cost of simply getting your completed circuit board with the FPGA tested by an engineering firm that gives you the required FCC certification before you can ship your product starts at $10k. Realistically you need a bare minimum of $50k to bring a simple commercial hardware project to market when you understand the niche and already have the ability to deliver the firmware and software without significant external (paid) effort.

I took the time (and it takes time) to learn a bit about FPGAs (playing around with 1Gbps and 10Gbps ethernet as well as PCIe 1.0 x1 and 3.0 x4), and if you want to actually do something new, there is a lot of time to spend on learning the various protocols a given design will touch or implement. Most of the sample code on $vendor's website is shoddily thrown together and breaks as soon as you breath on it wrong. When you do anything interesting with networking protocols the constraints of clock speed and bandwidth make things extremely complicated with oodles of corner cases as you do things like use wide busses at low clock speeds where packets can start at multiple offsets in the bus. You can build on top of something like the NetFPGA project, but that only works if what you're building is close to an existing well known niche. But if you're just flinging packets, there are far less costly (especially in time) frameworks to play around with things.

I'd say away from building custom FPGA based hardware until the performance benefit will increase sales a factor of 100-1000x (depending on complexity) to cover the cost of the hardware. But keep in mind that it's harder and harder to compete with commodity x86 servers. In the past, every cell phone base station used FPGAs to do the signal processing. Today's 5G networks do most of the signal processing on servers because you can do cool things like noise cancellation across nearby antennas when all the data is in the same place, and the software developers to produce those changes are going to cost far less than a team of the size needed to support the same rate of change on an FPGA.

mmdesignsldn22• 2 years ago

Would you be open to send more than $10k? I have few talented engineers within my dev shop.

jononor3• 2 years ago

Can you provide some details about the problem to be solved?

ckemere10• 2 years ago

Just posted a parent response! Semi-custom SPI to petalinux...

jononor3• 2 years ago

Arrow Electronics has been involved with freelancer.com for many years, so it might be ok for FPGA. I think an old colleague used it for some embedded stuff (not FPGA) and was pretty happy with it. Upwork also has FPGA category, but I know even less about it.

svnt• 2 years ago

The marketplace for this, as compared with generic software developers, would be so small and infrequently used as to be basically nonfunctional.

I would recommend searching for terms of art such as vhdl and verilog in normal freelancer sites.

Most embedded folks don’t do FPGAs, the subset that do is mostly employed in situations that don’t permit freelancing.

transpute• 2 years ago

Fairly simple project for a talented FPGA coder

The open hardware community (e.g. https://fossi-foundation.org/events/archive and http://www.enjoy-digital.fr) works with FPGAs. Contributors can be found on social media and video playlists from past conferences. If your project can be done by modification of existing open hardware, there would be less cost and risk.

jaeckel• 2 years ago

If you give a short description of what you need and contact details, your search is maybe already over, as on this site are also some freelancers with FPGA&|Embedded experience.

ckemere10• 2 years ago

I just posted some details. Super cool that people have replied.

synthos• 2 years ago

You could probably post it on http://fpgajobs.com/

p1esk• 2 years ago

You can post an ad at your local uni ECE department and hope some grad student would have enough FPGA experience to handle a “simple” project.

ckemere10• 2 years ago

Totally. But I fear that my local grad students are too pricey for me!

fragmede• 2 years ago

Do you know how little they pay TAs?

suarezvictor• 2 years ago

I can do the job. Reach me at suarezvictor at gmail dot com (to know more about me check Linkedin, X and github, user suarezvictor in all)

ckemere10• 2 years ago

Many great comments that I appreciate! Just as a bit of extra data, here is my design problem:

My lab uses an existing OpalKelly solution which translates a semi-custom SPI interface to USB. We've built some open-source closed-loop software on top of this DAQ system, and I'd like to lower the USB latency by implementing the same interface on a Zynq dev board to stream via UDP/GigE. The boards I've looked at have SYZYGY interfaces, and I'm happy to spin the adaptor PCBS myself, as well as write the streaming code (which I'm hoping will run in userspace on Linux).

The custom bit of the SPI makes the standard SPI interface for Petalinux not work, and so I basically want to mimic the standard SPI interface but with the needed tweaks. What are the issues:

(1) 2 MISO lines rather than 1 (2) "Double data rate" (meaning MISO data are transmitted on both edges of the clock) (3) I need to compensate for arbitrary cable lengths. The issue here is that the cable is long enough that we can get delays of up to 8-16 clock cycles between when the clock edge is sent and when the corresponding data from the device finally gets back to us. So the data in clocking needs to be able to be delayed from the data out clocking.

For (3), I almost convinced myself that I could do this in SW, but implementing it in hardware would make my life much easier.

Anyway, I realize that this is probably more than a week of work for someone talented, but I have the sense its closer to 1 week than 1 month, definitely less than 1 year. I also am hoping for code that I can share freely, so I'd obviously prefer to start with something well thought out on that front.

thanks again to everyone!

Ask HN: Marketplaces for Embedded/FPGA Developers

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