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This is really cool and impressive, but doing a kickstarter seems rather ambitious. To go from your first ever embedded project and two hand-made watches to de

This is really cool and impressive, but doing a kickstarter seems rather ambitious. To go from your first ever embedded project and two hand-made watches to delivering 179+ watches by November? That's a tall order. And there's not a whole lot of details on the campaign page of how he's planning to pull this all off. By all means, keep making them, but I would start small, taking just a few orders a time, before opening it up to mass production. Clearly he's a pretty capable and resourceful guy, I'm just worried he's biting off more than he can chew.

giarc 9y ago
Once you have the PCB design and the CNC path files, there's not much more to it (being slightly facetious here). It's not like parts are hard to source.
- yitchelle 9y ago
  I imagine scaling it from 3 watches to 179+ watches would be the main problem here. Is he going to build all 179+ units by himself?
  - giarc 9y ago
    Will probably elicit some help from friends. I think he was charging $200+ on Kickstarter. The laser cutting and CNC is probably free from his school. The PCB and LEDs are fairly cheap as are the rest of the materials. Probably quite a bit of profit built into each. Also a great learning experience.
jacknews 9y ago
The last word-clock kickstarter I was interested in was cancelled due to unspecified reasons: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/252714519/clockfour-chronogram-a-full-color-word-clock https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/252714519/clockfour-chr... I'd like to know more, perhaps it was a supposed IP violation of the qlocktwo guys?
Iv 9y ago
I would normally agree but if this guy learned CAD, PCB layout, embedded programming and design just for this project, I say he can pull it out. This is very impressive.
- StavrosK 9y ago
  As someone who did the same, I share the grandparent's apprehension. These skills are fantastic to have and very fun to acquire, but shipping products requires more skill than that. Maybe I'm intimidated by the unknown unknowns (I was intimidated by learning all these skills in the first place, but it was much easier than I thought), but I think shipping a product at scale is rather hard if you haven't done it before. At least, he'll have to deal with flaky suppliers, parts not fitting properly with each other, unforeseen costs, etc. I would feel much more comfortable if he had used a PCBA service to produce assembled PCBs (pretty cheap even if you don't want to do bulk orders) and a fabrication service for the face (harder to do if not in bulk?). Best of luck to him, though, it seems like a fun project, and I want to make my own wall clock now.
  - Iv 9y ago
    Well, I think you are indeed afraid of the unknown unknows. There are more skills to acquire for him to achieve this, but he proved that he can acquire them, so godspeed! By suggestion for him would be to check a few videos about how to manufacture small scale things in Shenzhen, spend a week or two there, and roll with a factory that specializes in low volumes.
the-dude 9y ago
Do things that don't scale : http://paulgraham.com/ds.html http://paulgraham.com/ds.html There is value in keeping it in-house for the first few iterations, I think the Pebble guys did that too.
jamesmattis 9y ago
100% agreed to your advice. Starting small and maintaining the best quality is the most appropriate way to start. I hope this guys has patented this thing.

giarc 9y ago

Once you have the PCB design and the CNC path files, there's not much more to it (being slightly facetious here). It's not like parts are hard to source.

yitchelle 9y ago
I imagine scaling it from 3 watches to 179+ watches would be the main problem here. Is he going to build all 179+ units by himself?
- giarc 9y ago
  Will probably elicit some help from friends. I think he was charging $200+ on Kickstarter. The laser cutting and CNC is probably free from his school. The PCB and LEDs are fairly cheap as are the rest of the materials. Probably quite a bit of profit built into each. Also a great learning experience.

jacknews 9y ago

The last word-clock kickstarter I was interested in was cancelled due to unspecified reasons: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/252714519/clockfour-chronogram-a-full-color-word-clock https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/252714519/clockfour-chr... I'd like to know more, perhaps it was a supposed IP violation of the qlocktwo guys?

Iv 9y ago

I would normally agree but if this guy learned CAD, PCB layout, embedded programming and design just for this project, I say he can pull it out. This is very impressive.

StavrosK 9y ago
As someone who did the same, I share the grandparent's apprehension. These skills are fantastic to have and very fun to acquire, but shipping products requires more skill than that. Maybe I'm intimidated by the unknown unknowns (I was intimidated by learning all these skills in the first place, but it was much easier than I thought), but I think shipping a product at scale is rather hard if you haven't done it before. At least, he'll have to deal with flaky suppliers, parts not fitting properly with each other, unforeseen costs, etc. I would feel much more comfortable if he had used a PCBA service to produce assembled PCBs (pretty cheap even if you don't want to do bulk orders) and a fabrication service for the face (harder to do if not in bulk?). Best of luck to him, though, it seems like a fun project, and I want to make my own wall clock now.
- Iv 9y ago
  Well, I think you are indeed afraid of the unknown unknows. There are more skills to acquire for him to achieve this, but he proved that he can acquire them, so godspeed! By suggestion for him would be to check a few videos about how to manufacture small scale things in Shenzhen, spend a week or two there, and roll with a factory that specializes in low volumes.

the-dude 9y ago

Do things that don't scale : http://paulgraham.com/ds.html http://paulgraham.com/ds.html There is value in keeping it in-house for the first few iterations, I think the Pebble guys did that too.

jamesmattis 9y ago

100% agreed to your advice. Starting small and maintaining the best quality is the most appropriate way to start. I hope this guys has patented this thing.