I like keeping busy. I want to do something at least part time. Something that involves more getting out of the house rather than sitting at home.
I'm mostly just saying this because it's a field that I'm interested in but virtual fencing for cattle, sheep, and goats seems like it's going to be a pretty big thing. One of the companies that's doing it just got a round of funding from Peter Thiel's company. I don't know if their coders ever get to go out in the field but they might. Probably not something you'd be into but it's an interesting new field and with my background with cattle and electrical engineering I'd be looking into it if things went tits up with the ranch. I'm probably a lot more likely to be a customer than an employee though.
Just saw this, but most of the work that I do as an integrator involves planning out some kind of system-of-system and then executing. So we may have a task like displaying a manned ISR feed on some TV's that are side mounted to the wall of a helicopter (this is a simple but recent example). So you go the airfield, have the dudes in the ISR bird explain to you their processes, figure out the type of encoding and encryption and all that crap, have them make the necessary settings adjustments or whatever. Then in the helo, mount all the hardware and setup your receiver which will likely be some kind of archaic Harris radio. That's the easy part. Next you figure out the best way to make this happen reliably and repeatedly. I like to use Raspberry Pi's but you could use any kind of small form factor compute capable of decoding video. Programming skills come in handy because a lot of times you want to transcode and transmit the video to some kind of RTSP server for wide distribution. Most aircraft have SATCOM these days so you can create a VPN to pump it out and allow people on the ground to pull the feed but also for admins to remotely access the compute. I also went the extra mile and created a small web interface to allow power users to tweak settings relatively easily both on the compute and the radios in the network.
