[Ground-station] Del Mar Electronics and Manufacturing Show report

[Michelle Thompson]

I wasn't expecting to get access to a major industry survey that directly
addresses open source adoption and utilization at the Del Mar Electronics
and Manufacturing Show, but I did.

My volunteer job at this show was to rep IEEE and the Consultants Network,
and I did. In my few off hours I intended to go to the Nordic talk to see
what new SoCs they have. We used their SoCs for our Transionospheric badges
and we want to make a new version.

Transionospheric was a fundraising and team-building hackable conference
badges you can find out more about here
https://www.openresearch.institute/badge/

Because the signage was pretty bad I ended up in a completely different
talk about digital literacy of engineers from EEtech.

https://eetech.com/survey/

You can get the survey by giving up some contact information, but here's
the highlights I wrote down from a talk from one of the principals.

First, we have a real problem with not enough hardware engineers. Software
and computing have attracted so many people, and hardware/fpga/rf are low
inventory, if you know what I mean. Almost all of the folks doing it are
well into their careers and there are relatively few junior engineers. This
means two things.

1) RF/Hardware/FPGA is producing excellent senior level work
2) it will suddenly collapse some small years in the future when all these
people retire.

The first tends to cover up the second, since it looks like things are
great but there's less replacement going on.

Second, newish engineers are freaked out by too many projects and the huge
enormous undeniably bad effect of the supply chain crisis.

Survey respondents report being deeply upset about project disruption in
industry. 90% of all projects reported about were delayed, had to be
canceled, or had to be redesigned. Only 10% are unaffected. This is as of
2022. Is it getting better in 2023? Sort of, but not fast enough.

65% of face to face meetings with engineers were with manufacturing reps.

Pressing challenges?

"Tools are crap!"
"Too many projects"
"Staffing is way way too low"
"No opportunities for advancement"
"Quality control is a fantasy"

Third, open source.

Does your company use open source on your project?

47.4% Yes
21.7% No
30.91% Depends

Why use open source?

"Cost, accessibility, ability to tailor to exact needs"

No survey questions on "what does your company give back to open source
products" but I'm going to ask EEtech if they can include this question for
next year!

More soon - there's another full day of the show and I will be looking for
more presentations like this.

-Michelle Thompson
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