This Cheap High Speed Camera is Made in Canada!!
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2018-05-06
·
2,305 words · ~11 min read
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would you believe looking at this sign that it was only seven months ago that
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cron technologies having raised over half a million dollars for their kronos
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1.4 affordable high-speed camera on kickstarter moved from the founder's
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garage into what could probably be best described as the
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founders much more bigger much more
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better garage well it was so things are a little rough around the edges in this
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group of seven or eight somehow they weren't exactly
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sure when i asked them of big
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nerds basically
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hey it's true it's true and you know it
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as i was saying this group of big nerds hasn't got the place
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fully set up yet in a conventional sense but
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in some ways that's what's really exciting about it
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come with me and take a peek behind the curtain of a real startup the silicon
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valley vibe is definitely real and this place is seriously cool
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if you're into that sort of thing speaking of being into that sort of
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the place looks like a typical office that is at least until you actually poke
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your head into any of the actual workspaces so this is
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loyal's cubicle where in addition to a
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laptop on a stand and an extra monitor he's got
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another extra monitor and he's got an oscilloscope for measuring
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electrical signals off of probes as well as a gorgeous piece of microscopery here
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that he uses to hand solder badges which are
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sort of last minute quick fixes to bad boards or
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bad batches of boards or the very very delicate leads that you
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see on a board like this which are required to probe CPU functionality or
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RAM signaling so it was actually through this board here that cron technologies
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was able to get two sticks of memory working bumping their maximum capacity
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to 32 gigs that is double what similar
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competitors can offer but how did we get here
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to enter that we're going to take a look at the museum a collection of
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development board pcbs screwed to pieces of plywood sitting on a boardroom table
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that was clearly along with the chairs around it acquired from some other
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company's bankruptcy auction so this this is the first chronos it was
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built and programmed single-handedly by cron technologies founder david
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kronstein he loved the cool stuff that
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mythbusters was doing back in the mid 2000s but as a student he couldn't
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afford even the inexpensive olympus that he found on
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ebay for 3 500 bucks so he went
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you know what screw it imma make my own
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so this first iteration here completed in 2008 was made of
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off-the-shelf development kits that were relatively limited compared to what's
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available in the maker scene today it was only capable of 640 by 480
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resolution at 240 frames per second max
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so not game-changing but
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it worked and it only cost him 500 bucks
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that is to say if you don't count time the second gen refined the original
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design it wasn't more compact but
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it could record at 1280x1024
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and add up to 500 frames per second
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so now we're getting somewhere by the third gen it was 2012 or 2015
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depending on how you count and thanks to
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a foldable board design the pcb along
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with all of the other components could be fitted into a custom 3d printed abs
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housing so this was the first one that was capable of looking like
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an actual camera then we've got some kind of prototype
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looking things 3d printed metal
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wood this was apparently for designing the feel of the grip
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and then finally the chronos 1.4 so this is the actual
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camera that shipped to kickstarter backers back in mid-summer last year
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it's not that cheap in fact i'm sure the irony of a price tag that his 2006 self
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wouldn't have been able to afford isn't lost on david but the capabilities of
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the chronos 1.4 far exceed that camera
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he saw on ebay it's got a form factor that is very similar to a
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normal stills picture camera it takes standard c-mount lenses and it can
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capture burst shots and video either raw
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or converted to mp4 at resolutions of up
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to 1280x1024 and frame rates of up to 38
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500 frames per second if you wanted something comparable from one of the big
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guys in the space you could get that and it would probably
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have more features so david's team knows that they need to continue to add
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functionality through firmware updates going into the future but it would cost
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you four to five times as much
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or more so knowing that price is one of their
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advantages david's team is building their cameras
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in this workshop here behind me right here in canada around standard commodity
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parts with careful attention to whether they or their users
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really need something fancier especially if it comes at the cost of creating or
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buying something proprietary the ARM cortex a8 based CPU that runs the user
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interface is actually about nine years old
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but in general h.264 encoders haven't
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really changed that much in that time outside of the very high end so they're
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sticking with it for now and there are a ton of examples of this kind of thing
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a lot of work was put into making it possible to pull data off the sensor at
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high speed into the RAM with a 35
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fpga by contrast the analogous fpgas in
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a phantom camera could cost thousands of
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dollars the uh the touchscreen is actually from
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a chinese manufacturer i think that yep there's one here off of digi-key or
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mouse or something like that and the RAM
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this is what actually holds the buffered video because the data rates are so high
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is just standard notebook ddr3 sodium RAM off of
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like newegg and this philosophy of openness continues in the user
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accessories so you can just use off-the-shelf laptop adapters to power
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it if you want a battery pack you just need to pick up a nikon en el4a battery
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pack and in terms of storage so once you dump off of the RAM onto something more
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permanent you can use a standard sd card you can just use a usb device you can
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use powerd SATA and coming soon they've even got Ethernet so what we end up with
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is a finished product that is surprisingly robust thanks to the thick
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aluminum machined chassis so this one
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right here actually got hit by a 300 kilometer per
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hour ice ball and survived and then this
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one was actually pulled into an industrial
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filing machine and now obviously the lcd didn't make it but the
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rest of the internals actually did survive with only minimal damage to the
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outside of the chassis so behind me here david is actually
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capturing colored water droplets at 1500
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frames per second and this
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is absolutely incredible
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now the monochrome version does give you a
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little bit higher effective resolution
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and it requires only half as much light
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which is really really important for high speed videography
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but it doesn't have quite the wow factor
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of the color one okay we gotta go find some more cool
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stuff to do so this one right here is a lot of fun this is called a caboose
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caboose kaboosh so this was actually
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uh how they created the effect in the
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stargate portals let's go have a look at it
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oh that's beautiful cool
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okay so we're all set up uh david's running at uh 1500 frames per second
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there uh sean's got 6 000 and then we've
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got a third camera here at 6 000 moment of truth time
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all right let's have a look dang that's beautiful
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of course we're not done yet though what slo-mo video would be complete without
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some destruction for that we will need what they call the
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mohammed room so in here you will find not one not two not three not four but
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five of their kronos 1.4 cameras
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a flipped over lawn mower that you can
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drop stuff in a reinforced plywood
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whatever that means cage as well as a
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mesh roof and the world's most technologically advanced
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dropping mechanism a dowel with a piece
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of string this can be fun
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oh right one last thing hit the lights
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four one thousand watt leds
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water cooled with about one third of the brightness
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of the sun so we don't miss any of the action
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let's drop them how do i turn this on
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wow is there anything protecting those cameras no not really all right next up
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we've got a fujifilm uh tape tape drive
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tape like a backup tape three two one
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something hit this door pretty freaking hard
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wow what the hell it looks like there was a
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party in here and everyone was invited
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and for our last trick the guys who put spray foam into our
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warehouse expansion destroyed
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all of our cardboard cutouts from ltx last year see they're all stained and
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stuff so i'm gonna let you the viewers vote leave
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a comment with who you want to see shredded because we're only going to do
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one Linus taryn
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dennis or luke and don't cheat
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leave a comment it really works really
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oh all right
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let's see if we can figure out how to put me into the lawnmower here
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all right i think i'd rather go in head first end
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the suffering so i'm finding your uh your workplace
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um very hightest
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i'm finding this to be a heightest workplace
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okay all right you know what i'm just going to rip this ARM off
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so that was a lot of fun and at three to four thousand dollars a pop depending on
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how long of a record buffer you want these things are actually within the
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reach of affluent hobbyists who want to load up
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an air cannon with bouncy balls and record the hilarity or whatever else
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but the main market for these and they're apparently shipping upwards of
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400 of these devices per year now at the
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current rate and this is ignoring kickstarter our research institutions
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universities the manufacturing sector i
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mean you can imagine it would be a lot easier to you know debug a faulty robot
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ARM that screws on bottle caps if you can really see what it's doing
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as well as armorers and trigger manufacturers and even rocket thrust
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researchers because they're so much
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lower cost than the other options available that you could have several of
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them giving you multiple angles on it at a time something that's absolutely
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invaluable they even support synchronizing the cameras so you can
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record stereo 3d of what's going on 6
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000 plus frames per second so i'm really excited about what these
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guys are doing i was absolutely thrilled to find out that they're in my backyard
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in burnaby british columbia and i wish them all the best apparently they're
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hiring right now what was it software and hardware engineers
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so sorry yeah software engineers with Linux kernel experience and hardware
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with fpga experience fpga experience is the big one so
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uh yeah these guys have got big plans wish you guys the best of luck because
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what you're doing here is awesome
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and speaking of plans that are awesome
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