9 ms·

I'd be interested to hear more about which specific features of maker-grade hardware are particularly problematic for taking things to production.

howard941 9y ago
Provisioning more than one ethernet PHY is an issue. There aren't a lot of choices for two or more PHYs at a reasonable (singe $ digits in medium quantities) cost
avs733 9y ago
to what others are mentioning I will add: -stability -recoverability / error handling -quality of construction -documentation -ease of use/support/baked in features
- dsacco 9y ago
  Can you be a bit more specific, maybe with an example issue?
ianhowson 9y ago
* Cost. Maker-grade stuff costs 10-100x what a production embedded does. You're leaving a lot of money on the table. * There's no guarantee of long-term support; RPi and Arduino both regularly change form factors. They make no guarantees that they will continue manufacturing what you're already committed to. * Maker vs. production system architectures are totally different. Linux is rare among production systems. It just needs too much hardware (see Cost). So you have to rebuild the thing anyway when cost-reduction time comes. 'Production' means different things to different people, of course. I'm thinking of a world where you want to ship 10k+ units of a device. If you're only shipping 100 units, your concerns are very different.
- fhood 9y ago
  Big one for me is shape. A lot of the stuff that I work on has to fit in pressure cases that are already pretty cramped. That means that there is no room for a bunch of breakout boards and whatnot.
- moolcool 9y ago
  The Arduino itself might cost 10-100x of something that could go into production, but couldn't you prototype with an Arduino and use cheap Atmel chips with the bootloader installed in production?
  - LeifCarrotson 9y ago
    You absolutely could. But many, many startups suck at this step, and get stuck at the "systems integration" phase, able to connect purchased components like Arduinos to other purchased components with wires, but unable to transition to purchasing the raw parts and connecting them using printed circuit boards.
    - pjc50 9y ago
      That seems to me rather basic - like being a software startup but not being able to get beyond "hello world" in node.js. Yes, it's a skill, but surely you hire people or contractors who can actually do it properly?
      - nerfhammer 9y ago
        I'm also pretty confused here. Are the "startups" in the ancestor threads more like college hackathon projects? Like I put a raspberry pi in my toaster and know nothing else about embedded systems, now how can I sell a million of these?
        pjc50 9y ago
        Kickstarter! You can easily pre-sell a million of them. Actually shipping them turns out to be harder, but by that time you've got the money.
        rfrank 9y ago
        (I work at an EMS provider) Yes, that tends to be how startups come off - even the "sophisticated" ones. They tend to have minimal knowledge of the steps necessary to turn their prototype into a mass produced thing: DFM/DFF, supply chain management, identifying/negotiating with component/bare board suppliers, etc. Generally speaking, they need lots of hand holding through the entire process, and that makes it take way longer for everyone. The nature of stateside electronics manufacturing doesn't help startups much in that regard, in that shops are kinda either set up for NPI and rapid prototyping or not. Sierra Circuits is good for that, but idk how well they'd fit with a startup budget. Beyond that, the low-complexity nature of most IoT products means they're more cost effectively manufactured in China, as most US shops focus on low to mid volume runs of high complexity boards, as opposed to high volume low complexity runs. Figuring out how to manufacture in China can be a big obstacle for any company, especially smaller ones.
- thom_nic 9y ago
  I would have said form factor. Commercial has all signals routed to high pitch headers, with few or no on-board jacks, also many times surface mount. Also there are places where Linux is appropriate and affordable at volume, depending on the application.
  - blacksmith_tb 9y ago
    Some Arduino IDE-compatible boards are pretty small, like the Teensy[1] line - though if you needed to cram other boards in with one it'd still be cozy I imagine. 1: https://www.pjrc.com/store/teensy.html https://www.pjrc.com/store/teensy.html
    - thom_nic 9y ago
      In the case of teensy you've pretty much got just a chip with breakout (and maybe an FTDI chip) - it's pretty much a reference design. At that point you'd just board-down that entire layout, there's little benefit to buying a module with a mini USB connector that might or might not be in a usable position and high-pitch headers that take up a lot of space.
- detaro 9y ago
  But if you start off on something like an Arduino, you'd "just" convert it to a custom board running an AVR (or ARM with the newer ones?) on the way to production, or are those that bad to use in serious designs?
  - ianhowson 9y ago
    Right. This is a good path to take. It's more a problem if you start on something big like Artik/RPi/Edison and try to downsize later. You'll find yourself locked in to that vendor's software stack. Or if you try to ship 10k devices with whole RPis inside.
- jldugger 9y ago
  These are mostly true, but it's pretty trivial to design your own Atmel AVR board. > Linux is rare among production systems. AFAIK, Arduino has no OS, let alone Linux. It's a giant wrapper around "setup(); while (true) loop();" Which is itself a gigantic problem for power savings. Fortunately there exist alternative platforms, and some even run on the same Arduino platform: https://github.com/jmattsson/tinyos-arduino https://github.com/jmattsson/tinyos-arduino
  - dekhn 9y ago
    Personally, I like FreeRTOS. I got an ESP8266 and starting writing programs right away. There's no VMM, no true multitasking, but it's better than raw arduino. I managed to port Zork in an afternoon.
    - pjmlp 9y ago
      I think ESP32 is even better for playing around, given the 512 KB.
  - nerfhammer 9y ago
    re: power savings, use interrupts and sleep modes. You should be able to get power < 1µA
    - abritinthebay 9y ago
      Could you expand on that a little for interested but not totally proficient users?
      - nerfhammer 9y ago
        An arduino is a microcontroller with a few conveniences added. There are plenty of microcontrollers inside of devices that last for years on tiny coin cell batteries. You can program it to go into an ultra low power sleep mode and wake the instant you press a button or on a predefined schedule, do whatever business you want it to do for a few moments, then go back into ultra low power sleep. Some microcontrollers are more optimized for this use case than others, but plenty of ordinary ones are and they've gotten incredibly good at it.
- patrickg_zill 9y ago
  A lot of maker stuff is either bog-standard parts that you can buy in quantity off AliExpress, or open source with all designs and layouts freely available. Software'sopen source also. Using a whole Rpi 3 as part of a solution? Yes I agree that there's a risk in supply; but if making 10k devices, you are talking about a raw cost of at least 300k USD, right? So spending 30k for a few months of engineering time to make it production ready (idea: make sure that the OrangePi knockoffs also work, so you have 2 sources of supply) is feasible in the case you mention.
  - tesseract 9y ago
    Linux SoC based designs are fairly complex in terms of engineering cost - if you're only building 10k of something, you might in fact be better off using something like the RPi Zero or Compute Module (or another system-on-module, like Variscite or etc.) rather than trying to integrate the Broadcom part yourself. Not to mention that RPi is getting much better prices on things like the SoC and the HDI PCB than a startup producing 10k of something is likely to get, so it may even be a wash on unit cost. And the supply risk is likely manageable; 10k is a high enough volume that it would be foolish to rely on distributor stock/spot prices for components, so you're already worrying about leadtimes; I don't see why a wholesale contract with RPi would be that much riskier. (Yes, it's true that the leadtime would increase a bit since RPi needs to purchase components themselves and convert them into modules.) Now if your product is Arduino based (or another microcontroller platform) the barriers to doing a fully custom design are a lot lower, the markups on the Arduino board are a lot higher, and so the cutoff volume for where it makes sense to do a custom design is going to be much lower than 10k.
- dividuum 9y ago
  > There's no guarantee of long-term support; [...] They make no guarantees that they will continue manufacturing what you're already committed to. The Pi foundation guarantees the availability for the Compute Module 1 and 3 until at least 2023. See https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/computemodule/RPI-CM-DATASHEET-V1_0.pdf https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/computemo... (Section 11. Availability).
pjc50 9y ago
I'm a little confused here too; obviously an arduino-inna-box is not a proper solution and for production run you should design your own board with an Atmega328 on it, so what's unsuitable about the Atmega?

howard941 9y ago

Provisioning more than one ethernet PHY is an issue. There aren't a lot of choices for two or more PHYs at a reasonable (singe $ digits in medium quantities) cost

avs733 9y ago

to what others are mentioning I will add: -stability -recoverability / error handling -quality of construction -documentation -ease of use/support/baked in features

dsacco 9y ago
Can you be a bit more specific, maybe with an example issue?

ianhowson 9y ago

* Cost. Maker-grade stuff costs 10-100x what a production embedded does. You're leaving a lot of money on the table. * There's no guarantee of long-term support; RPi and Arduino both regularly change form factors. They make no guarantees that they will continue manufacturing what you're already committed to. * Maker vs. production system architectures are totally different. Linux is rare among production systems. It just needs too much hardware (see Cost). So you have to rebuild the thing anyway when cost-reduction time comes. 'Production' means different things to different people, of course. I'm thinking of a world where you want to ship 10k+ units of a device. If you're only shipping 100 units, your concerns are very different.

fhood 9y ago
Big one for me is shape. A lot of the stuff that I work on has to fit in pressure cases that are already pretty cramped. That means that there is no room for a bunch of breakout boards and whatnot.
moolcool 9y ago
The Arduino itself might cost 10-100x of something that could go into production, but couldn't you prototype with an Arduino and use cheap Atmel chips with the bootloader installed in production?
- LeifCarrotson 9y ago
  You absolutely could. But many, many startups suck at this step, and get stuck at the "systems integration" phase, able to connect purchased components like Arduinos to other purchased components with wires, but unable to transition to purchasing the raw parts and connecting them using printed circuit boards.
  - pjc50 9y ago
    That seems to me rather basic - like being a software startup but not being able to get beyond "hello world" in node.js. Yes, it's a skill, but surely you hire people or contractors who can actually do it properly?
    - nerfhammer 9y ago
      I'm also pretty confused here. Are the "startups" in the ancestor threads more like college hackathon projects? Like I put a raspberry pi in my toaster and know nothing else about embedded systems, now how can I sell a million of these?
      - pjc50 9y ago
        Kickstarter! You can easily pre-sell a million of them. Actually shipping them turns out to be harder, but by that time you've got the money.
      - rfrank 9y ago
        (I work at an EMS provider) Yes, that tends to be how startups come off - even the "sophisticated" ones. They tend to have minimal knowledge of the steps necessary to turn their prototype into a mass produced thing: DFM/DFF, supply chain management, identifying/negotiating with component/bare board suppliers, etc. Generally speaking, they need lots of hand holding through the entire process, and that makes it take way longer for everyone. The nature of stateside electronics manufacturing doesn't help startups much in that regard, in that shops are kinda either set up for NPI and rapid prototyping or not. Sierra Circuits is good for that, but idk how well they'd fit with a startup budget. Beyond that, the low-complexity nature of most IoT products means they're more cost effectively manufactured in China, as most US shops focus on low to mid volume runs of high complexity boards, as opposed to high volume low complexity runs. Figuring out how to manufacture in China can be a big obstacle for any company, especially smaller ones.
thom_nic 9y ago
I would have said form factor. Commercial has all signals routed to high pitch headers, with few or no on-board jacks, also many times surface mount. Also there are places where Linux is appropriate and affordable at volume, depending on the application.
- blacksmith_tb 9y ago
  Some Arduino IDE-compatible boards are pretty small, like the Teensy[1] line - though if you needed to cram other boards in with one it'd still be cozy I imagine. 1: https://www.pjrc.com/store/teensy.html https://www.pjrc.com/store/teensy.html
  - thom_nic 9y ago
    In the case of teensy you've pretty much got just a chip with breakout (and maybe an FTDI chip) - it's pretty much a reference design. At that point you'd just board-down that entire layout, there's little benefit to buying a module with a mini USB connector that might or might not be in a usable position and high-pitch headers that take up a lot of space.
detaro 9y ago
But if you start off on something like an Arduino, you'd "just" convert it to a custom board running an AVR (or ARM with the newer ones?) on the way to production, or are those that bad to use in serious designs?
- ianhowson 9y ago
  Right. This is a good path to take. It's more a problem if you start on something big like Artik/RPi/Edison and try to downsize later. You'll find yourself locked in to that vendor's software stack. Or if you try to ship 10k devices with whole RPis inside.
jldugger 9y ago
These are mostly true, but it's pretty trivial to design your own Atmel AVR board. > Linux is rare among production systems. AFAIK, Arduino has no OS, let alone Linux. It's a giant wrapper around "setup(); while (true) loop();" Which is itself a gigantic problem for power savings. Fortunately there exist alternative platforms, and some even run on the same Arduino platform: https://github.com/jmattsson/tinyos-arduino https://github.com/jmattsson/tinyos-arduino
- dekhn 9y ago
  Personally, I like FreeRTOS. I got an ESP8266 and starting writing programs right away. There's no VMM, no true multitasking, but it's better than raw arduino. I managed to port Zork in an afternoon.
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    I think ESP32 is even better for playing around, given the 512 KB.
- nerfhammer 9y ago
  re: power savings, use interrupts and sleep modes. You should be able to get power < 1µA
  - abritinthebay 9y ago
    Could you expand on that a little for interested but not totally proficient users?
    - nerfhammer 9y ago
      An arduino is a microcontroller with a few conveniences added. There are plenty of microcontrollers inside of devices that last for years on tiny coin cell batteries. You can program it to go into an ultra low power sleep mode and wake the instant you press a button or on a predefined schedule, do whatever business you want it to do for a few moments, then go back into ultra low power sleep. Some microcontrollers are more optimized for this use case than others, but plenty of ordinary ones are and they've gotten incredibly good at it.
patrickg_zill 9y ago
A lot of maker stuff is either bog-standard parts that you can buy in quantity off AliExpress, or open source with all designs and layouts freely available. Software'sopen source also. Using a whole Rpi 3 as part of a solution? Yes I agree that there's a risk in supply; but if making 10k devices, you are talking about a raw cost of at least 300k USD, right? So spending 30k for a few months of engineering time to make it production ready (idea: make sure that the OrangePi knockoffs also work, so you have 2 sources of supply) is feasible in the case you mention.
- tesseract 9y ago
  Linux SoC based designs are fairly complex in terms of engineering cost - if you're only building 10k of something, you might in fact be better off using something like the RPi Zero or Compute Module (or another system-on-module, like Variscite or etc.) rather than trying to integrate the Broadcom part yourself. Not to mention that RPi is getting much better prices on things like the SoC and the HDI PCB than a startup producing 10k of something is likely to get, so it may even be a wash on unit cost. And the supply risk is likely manageable; 10k is a high enough volume that it would be foolish to rely on distributor stock/spot prices for components, so you're already worrying about leadtimes; I don't see why a wholesale contract with RPi would be that much riskier. (Yes, it's true that the leadtime would increase a bit since RPi needs to purchase components themselves and convert them into modules.) Now if your product is Arduino based (or another microcontroller platform) the barriers to doing a fully custom design are a lot lower, the markups on the Arduino board are a lot higher, and so the cutoff volume for where it makes sense to do a custom design is going to be much lower than 10k.
dividuum 9y ago
> There's no guarantee of long-term support; [...] They make no guarantees that they will continue manufacturing what you're already committed to. The Pi foundation guarantees the availability for the Compute Module 1 and 3 until at least 2023. See https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/computemodule/RPI-CM-DATASHEET-V1_0.pdf https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/computemo... (Section 11. Availability).

pjc50 9y ago

I'm a little confused here too; obviously an arduino-inna-box is not a proper solution and for production run you should design your own board with an Atmega328 on it, so what's unsuitable about the Atmega?