Livestream is looking for an electrical engineer (or student with appropriate level of competency) to assist in the development of a control surface product for it’s line of live video switchers. We’re looking to engage in a consultancy/retainer fashion for a limited period of time (i.e.. a month or two) to begin but are also very interested in discussing future opportunities around growing a hardware development team within the company here in New York.
Render of control surface product for reference:
The control surface will be a modular USB controller (expandable via daisy-chaining USB) containing displays, motorised faders and a range of buttons and rotary encoders. Ideally it will communicate with our software via a real-time protocol like OSC over UDP. We’re currently at a pre-production phase and would like to conduct a little R&D before moving to the next step
The goal is to conduct some preliminary tests using bread boards, sample components and a connection to some form of prototyping software, so you should have experience in all these areas. The exact toolset is open for discussion (ie. we could use Arduinos and Processing if that’s going to give us fast development time and reasonably ‘real-world’ insight). We have two fairly specific tests outlined already, but depending on how things go we may well expand on this.
Test #1:
Physical controller selection:
The feeling of the components we select is critical to this product. We’d like to build a test-bed for experimenting with various buttons, knobs, sliders, displays etc. (i.e. easily insert/remove) with the aim of selecting possible off-the-shelf components from suppliers here and overseas. As part of this we’d like your help to source and order these components, as well as any associated micro controllers.
Test #2:
Data round-trip response rates:
The final product will have a fairly demanding realtime data throughput and we’d like to test feasibility. We’d like to take control input from a physical component, send this (ideally via OSC protocol) to a prototyping software, which would in turn send back multiple elements of control data (ideally also OSC), including driving multiple displays and motorised faders, at as high a refresh frequency as possible (an example target would be driving 10 displays and 40 faders at 30fps). Obviously we welcome thoughts on any aspect of protocol choice or feasibility of such a task.
Retainer fees are open for discussion based on level of expertise so if you already have a something in mind this would be useful to share at the outset. Otherwise some indication of prior experience will be helpful for our discussions.
We are work gin to an aggressive timeline and are looking to engage immediately.
Interested candidates should contact me directly at phil@livestream.com
