[pitterpatter]

>Could they have purchased the hardware instead? Probably

Uh, from the article:

>We use many off-the-shelf development boards and even provide support for a number of these boards in Hubris. These are great for many use-cases, but less great when we are trying to model specific circuits or subsystems of our product designs. Second, we have numerous examples of custom boards that were built simply because we could find no useful OTS (off-the-shelf) alternative.

[svnt]

Yes but here the author mixes tool-making and product de-risking. I was talking about tool-making which seemed to be the unique part of the article. Everyone designing hardware products designs some hardware.

You can almost always make tools and test equipment with general-purpose hardware. There are companies that design hardware intended to be used like that. People tend to (understandably) try to drag problems into domains where they are comfortable solving them. In this case they tended to draw solutions from hardware but a software team probably would have solved them a different way.