RidgeRun Professional Services

RidgeRun Professional Services An Introduction

RidgeRun, LLC is an embedded Linux product and service business founded in 2006. We are a high-touch company with +88 engineers focused on reducing our customer's time-to-market and product quality by providing embedded software services. We specialize in streaming media products and applications and are experts in GStreamer based on technology. RidgeRun's focus is to provide the software infrastructure for custom hardware designs and streaming media based product development. We have products and services to handle all components of the product development life-cycle. RidgeRun has a long history of helping our customers build successful, enduring product lines across a range of system-on-chips hardware platforms. RidgeRun's services include the following:

Embedded Linux camera sensor, ISP and peripheral drivers.
GStreamer-based video and audio software solutions.
Embedded application / product software development.
Computer vision
Video-based FPGA development
Artificial Intelligence based on video processing.

RidgeRun Services

RidgeRun can work on any embedded Linux/GStreamer task that you would like to assign to our team or just providing support to your engineers. Most popular requests include:

Linux Support

Embedded Software services for BSP customization for different SoCs, including help during hardware bring up of custom hardware designs.
Driver creation for cameras and displays often exposed through frameworks like GStreamer.
UVC camera development.
Decrease system boot time.

GStreamer Support

Creating GStreamer elements implementing custom algorithms on coprocessors like CUDA, DSP, GPUs, and FPGAs using APIs like OpenCL and OpenCV.
Engineering Software services for GStreamer pipeline analysis and tuning to improve framerates, decrease ARM load, and avoid memory copies or color space conversions.
Creation of zero memcopy video processing pipelines.
Design and implementation of media servers based on GStreamer. Includes remote control support from iOS or Android apks, internal web server, or direct implementation on smartphones or tablets.
Creation of GStreamer media servers on systems running Android.
Creation of all the GStreamer elements accelerated by hardware for a specific SoC. For this, the hardware vendor normally provides RidgeRun access to the layer that controls the codecs (OMX, V4L2, DMAI, codec engine for instance) and RidgeRun creates the GStreamer elements allowing users to take advantage of functions available in the GStreamer framework as well as the SoC coprocessors.
Debug and tuning GStreamer pipeline, including improving elements provided by the hardware (SoC) vendor.

GUI Support

Development of GUIs based on frameworks like Qt.

Standard Protocol Support

Enhance or extend some of the software packages provided by RidgeRun in order to meet your custom needs. Some of these packages are rtspsink, GstShark, GstCuda, GstWebRTC, V4L2 drivers, SDKs, among others. RidgeRun tries to create modular solutions such that these modules could be reused later and in order to make the testing easier.

For some SoCs, RidgeRun offers SDKs providing infrastructure support so the customer's engineering team can focus on what makes the product unique. However, RidgeRun can also support you if you decide to not use the SDK and instead use frameworks like Jetpack or Yocto.

RidgeRun Team

RidgeRun team has +88 engineers specialized in embedded Linux, digital signal processing, digital image processing and analysis, CUDA, WebRTC, Android, iOS, GStreamer, FPGA amongst others. RidgeRun is a software-only company but our team members are Electronic and Computer Engineers with MSc in fields related to digital signal processing and computer science.

Support can be remote or on-site, please ask for our on-site rates through our contact us portal

We normally set up weekly calls with our customers to set priorities and inform them about the progress, the customer controls the task list and can change it at any time.

RidgeRun Project Management Style

For single project efforts, most customers use Professional Support Hours ($135/h). It is simplest to think of the engineers working on your project as an extension of your engineering team. You provide the requirements, you control the task list and you set the priorities; any of which you can change at any time.
- At any time during normal business hours you can directly interact with the engineers working on your project. We typically use email or slack for engineer to engineer communication. We prefer written communication as there will be a handful of engineers and technical leads on the distribution list. Widening the communication means you will get an answer more quickly and from someone most familiar with the part of the system in question.
- Weekly 45 minute calls provide you the opportunity to update RidgeRun on changes in requirements/tasks/priorities/schedule. During the call, RidgeRun will give an update on the progress/challenges for the past week and indicate what progress is expected for the coming week.
- Internally, RidgeRun uses Scrum to develop the projects with daily stand-up meetings and a backlog created during the project definition. The customer is involved only once a week on the weekly call. From the customer's point of view is like having 1-week sprints.
For long-term multi-project efforts or long-term support, RidgeRun offers dedicated engineering services. The price depends on the engineer's experience level (Range 1 - from 0 to 1-year experience, Range 2 - from 1 to 3 years of experience, Range 3 - for +3 years of experience).
- For a dedicated team, you would be responsible for overall management. Some customers have one of the dedicated resources responsible for the day-to-day management with the customer setting the bigger objectives.
- The engineers on the dedicated team still work closely with the rest of the RidgeRun team, thus having access to all sorts of expertise in the various areas of embedded Linux-based audio/video streaming technologies.

Time Zone

From March to November our team is 1 hour ahead of PST (California time), i.e, Central Time aligned
From November to March our team is 2 hours ahead of PST (California time), i.e, MDT aligned.

Source Code Management

RidgeRun always provides the source code except for binaries that are given by the SoC vendor. Delivery of the source code can be done directly on the customer's repositories or private Github/GitLab repositories if approved by the customer.

Next steps

Contact RidgeRun and provide the details of your project to see how RidgeRun could help you. Please provide NDA if needed.
Once you and RidgeRun verified that the project is a good match provide a Statement of Work or similar.
RidgeRun creates a task list and provides a rough estimate for it - Have a call with RidgeRun engineers to explain each of the tasks.
Get PO in place - You can get our minimum PO directly from RidgeRun Store. Hardware is sent back once RidgeRun is done with the project. For new customers, you need to pre-purchase professional support hours. Once we have established a working relationship, RidgeRun bills at the end of each month for the services provided, a Net30 invoice is created.
Send Hardware (if needed). RidgeRun has access to several EVM boards that could be used for your project.
Schedule weekly call and start date

At the end of the month, a report generated by our hour tracking system is provided. When your project reaches 95% of the approved budget this is informed to the customer in order to let them decide how to proceed according to the existing task list.

RidgeRun Professional Services