It's not the hardware which is "remote" but the team, i.e. a set of people working from home in different places rather than lab workbenches.
It’s clear to me oxide are having fun, and while you could do some of this in software, you clearly couldn’t do that without some hardware. Could they have purchased the hardware instead? Probably. Would it have been as cost-effective or fun? Probably not cost effective, without shifting their staffing. Does anyone have fun purchasing OTS development hardware? You’re just gambling on what systems and complexity in their own stuff they’ve really tested.
Changing staffing is hard, expensive and painful. Repurposing apparently excess hardware development folks to fill the gap here is interesting, not the way hardware is “usually done” and seems to be working.
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.
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.