Vacancy: Video wall demonstrator

Do you like to be challenged and work independent in an innovative environment. Do you want to be able to reach out to the expertise of more than 130 smart colleagues, experienced in high-tech and state of the art development from edge-to-cloud? Do you like to join various Tech and Fun events like weekly Friday afternoon drinks, TechTalks, sports activities and celebrations? And most important; do you want to be able to develop and grow as a professional?   

Then join us at TOPIC! 

“Graduating at TOPIC has been a very fun and educational experience for me. The complex challenges I have encountered during my graduation internship have provided me with lots of great technical and non-technical experience that I will forever take with me during my career.” 

Mike Huisman | Hardware Engineer at TOPIC

Your role as graduate student 

TOPIC develops embedded systems that are essential for products manufactured by renowned high-tech companies around the world.  Our projects involve edge to cloud solutions; from PCB design and FPGA to low level embedded software and application software for UI, Web, Mobile and cloud. We like to apply innovative technologies such as object tracking, Ultra-Wideband, Lidar, generating/rendering 2D to 3D medical images and Photonics.    

As a graduate student at TOPIC you will have the opportunity to work on innovative R&D subjects that will bring value to our organization. There are always subjects we have in mind, but we are also open for your suggestions and can customize them to a suitable assignment. 

About the assignment 

TOPIC created a video wall control platform based on 16 full-HD video outputs in a 4x4 matrix, driven by 4 video manipulation boxes, each containing 4 System-on-Modules. Each System-on-Module contains a Cortex A9 dual-core processor running Linux and a lot of FPGA fabric. There are several video sources which need to collaborate to form a comprehensive application. The system was initially developed for a customer involved in flight simulators. 

The aim of the assignment is to demonstrate the ability to have 4 individual processing systems working together to perform a specific function. Video sources are a professional full-HD camera, a PC able to generate 4 full-HD HDMI video streams and the 4 embedded Linux processors providing their framebuffers. On the Linux processors XFCE is running as a desktop environment, facilitating functionality you see in e.g. Ubuntu. 

Although the actual implementation is negotiable, the idea is to implement a cockpit environment, with on the bottom row displays instrumentation, the two middle rows with video projections with overlays for augmentation, object detection/recognition/projection and the top row display t.b.d. functionality. This is a combination of distributed multi-core processor programming and FPGA image processing. A desire is to add audio to the system, but that is not the most important aspect. The assignment works best when working with two students on this project due to complexity and amount of work. 

As a graduate student at TOPIC 

• You are graduating from University or HBO in Electronics, (applied) Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Embedded Systems, Physics, Mathematics or similar field; 
• You are pro-active, able to think outside the box, a problem solver and are capable of communicating with and retrieving information from different stakeholders. 
• You have the ability to self-steer, a drive to deliver but also like to have fun while reaching your goals!