From Concept to Concrete

This talk offers a very basic tour of the hardware design process which so few of Debian's contributors will be familiar with. It offers a little insight into what goes into designing and building some of the more funky bits of embedded hardware which we all love so much.

Hardware design is, in fact, a non-trivial process which even the most experienced hardware engineer will always find a challenge. A lot of software engineers have a habit of waving their hand and saying "pah, it's only hardware" so this talk will be offering an insight into the immense amount of work which actually goes into a typical single board computer, covering everything from the initial concept through to product-sized manufacturing.