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How much does it cost to develop and manufacture an electronic product? (2022)
- 55555 3y agoYou can reduce upfront costs for plastic injection mold making to zero by 3d printing parts at scale, but does anyone know a scalable low-cost way to polish/sand these pieces so they are nicely finished?
- stephen_g 3y agoYou’d have to come up with some way of doing that with machine tools, and in the process of spending all that time, money and difficulty you’d work out why people tend not to do that at any decent volumes! Excepting of course where there are very specific reasons to, such as some of the metal printing done in jet and rocket engines where the geometry would be impossible to do in single parts with casting and machining. But again that’s not exactly low cost, volume manufacture.
- lvl102 3y ago3D print -> Silicone mold or salt method -> Bake You might be better off printing MJF.
- Mengkudulangsat 3y agoYou don't. It's part of the charm. Example: https://www.azeron.eu/ https://www.azeron.eu/
- turnsout 3y agoYep, embrace the material. Otherwise it becomes so expensive you may as well make an injection mold.
- fragmede 3y agothe right concentration of acetone vapor will melt them slightly, giving them a polished look. Also, resin printers don't have that problem and some can print in color.
- siriaan 3y agoParts printed in ABS can be smoothed with acetone vapor - https://all3dp.com/2/abs-acetone-smoothing-3d-print-vapor-smoothing/ https://all3dp.com/2/abs-acetone-smoothing-3d-print-vapor-sm...
- 542458 3y agoDoes anybody do this at scale though? Also vapor smoothing can mess with your tolerances (I.e., small edges will unevenly “pull back”, making split enclosures no longer mate properly), so I’m not sure it’s a great idea for enclosure parts.
- amelius 3y agoPerhaps you can compensate for it?
- kennywinker 3y agoI've heard about painting as a way to smooth over 3d printed parts, but I'm not sure how well that'd scale.
- iancmceachern 3y agoYes, vapor smoothing, Fictiv offers it as a finishing option on their prints. Also shapeways has some good bulk finishing, dying, etc. options
- artemonster 3y agothe article outlines "what are the cost factors involved" but does not answer the question with even ballpark numbers.
- pjc50 3y agoThey are so very much "it depends" that there's not much point. You have a million possible choices to make all of which will move the number around. Very roughly for feasibility I would say the sale price should be four to five times the oneoff BOM cost, plus allocate $50k upfront for NRE including certifications. Experienced hardware developers can do better than that, but if you've not done one of these before you need to budget for errors.
- tyingq 3y agoI've done some of this on a small scale, and the number of potential surprises is just really high. Things like your aluminum frame being subject to US anti-dumping regulations. Or the supplier sending you power supplies with fake UL marks, and now the whole shipment gets seized...not just the power supplies, but the other stuff in the container too. Or your mold is off by just enough to make the already bought-and-paid for aluminum end pieces not fit. PCB oopsies that can't be jumpered around, etc. Or, one of your suppliers likes your idea and copies it and undercuts you on the finished products. Or that terrific, low-cost/high-quality supplier just disappears overnight, and you can't find a suitable substitute. Hard to translate into numbers, but generally plan on some amount of throw-away work, get some experienced advice if you can, and grow slowly until you understand the risks.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- utopcell 3y agoIt seems like you've been burned too many times with these issues. I'd be curious to know what you have built / brought to market and what you think about this rule of the retail price being 3 ton 4x the BOM.
- rkangel 3y agoThere's misleading stuff on the internet about the options with injection moulding tools (terminology: the moulds are called tools) and this article doesn't help clear that up much. For a normal hard plastic like ABS, you basically have two options: a "soft" tool or a "hard" tool. These are both usually made of steel, even aluminium can be too soft at temperature and pressure for good parts. The difference is that a soft tool is a fairly normal steel that can be milled on a standard 3D CNC machine. This makes it maybe $10k and a few weeks to make, given a suitable design. You can make probably 1000 parts with a tool like this (maybe more depending on the part and the tolerance needs). A hard tool is made from a very hard "tool steel". There are some different alloys in use but there all extremely difficult to machine - the main method f is Electro-discharge machining. This is a rather involved process, usually involving milling heads that can then spark erode metal to he same shape (look up EDM if you haven't seen it, it's cool). This whole process is more like $300k and takes 3-6 months for a 1-2 action tool. It's likely to be the biggest capex line item for setting up mass manufacture. For prototyping and low volume manufacture, I strongly recommend Model Solutions in South Korea (https://www.model-solution.com/en/m/main https://www.model-solution.com/en/m/main). For us they used to turn around injection moulded parts in quantities of 1k+ in 2 weeks (including postage), at very reasonable prices (used to because I haven't needed them for a couple of years).
- taneq 3y agoSurely that $10k figure for 'soft' tooling includes the iteration and engineering time required to get the mould right? I can't imagine that it'd cost $10k to produce another set of tooling if it can be done on a standard CNC machine once you have the CAD/CAM files created and tested.
- rkangel 3y agoThere's kind of two parts to the design: design a part that is suitable for injection moulding, and then designing the tool itself - where are the inlets, dividing points etc. If it's multi-action, how do the action mechanisms work. Similarly making the tool isn't just "CNC a block of metal and then you're done", you've got to make and assemble the mechanisms and there's things like acid washing the mould surface to control what the resulting plastic surface will look like. It adds up.
- baybal2 3y ago[dead]
- amelius 3y agoIt may be tempting to develop your own physical product, but if you can build it in software and run it on an existing platform (e.g. iOS), then that is much preferable considering the waste of natural resources.
- the__alchemist 3y agoThis is a narrow view of physical products. I encourage you to look around where you're sitting now. Observe the electronics devices, and assess how many should be written as software for your phone etc.
- amelius 3y agoWhy is what I wrote incompatible with what you say?
- the__alchemist 3y agoWhat's your answer? Mine is almost none. Oven, microwave, dishwasher, wristwatch, drones, 3d printer, soldering iron, wrist gyro with LEDs, oscilloscope, thermostat, router, smart light bulbs, game controller, headphones, microphone, power brick for laptop etc.
- _Microft 3y agoIn that case you might even want to ask yourself if it is worth building it at all.
- haliskerbas 3y agoThen how will VCs convince others to spend money on it, then profit off of projected growth which never materializes?
- turnsout 3y agoProbably not, which would be a gift! Move on to the next idea.
- winstonprivacy 3y agoAfter you have a detailed cost estimate, triple it to account for inevitable cost overruns due to various "unanticipated" reasons, which always materialize, eg: tooling error, parts out of stock, incorrect tolerance, Chinese new year, or manufacturer just doesn't deliver. Quadruple that number again to estimate your retail price.
- sokoloff 3y agoJohn puts out a bunch of good information and I don't want to fail to acknowledge that while sharing the following. A few years ago, when he was launching Hardware Academy, he advertised somewhere (probably on EEVBlog) for people to join at a reduced price to help get it off the ground. I signed up, only to receive the following a few days later. > Thank you so much for applying to be a Founding Member at the Hardware Academy. > There were only 20 slots available for the first batch of Founding Members, yet within just 24 hours I had 130 people apply. > Although you were not selected as one of the first Founding Members, you will still be given a great discount and early access to the Academy. You will only pay $35/month or $309/year. As far as I recall, there was no disclosure of a limit on the number (only on time). They say people don't remember what you say, but they never forget how they made you feel. I felt like this was some combination of deception to pump up his email list and/or bait and switch on the offering.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- kennywinker 3y agoSorry that happened, but this really seems like a hanlon's razor situation - i.e. never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. It's easy to mess up messaging, or even omit a limit you thought you had put in there. How you handle it after the fact matters, and you're perfectly entitled to be annoyed by the mistake and the mishandling after - but rounding it up to scammy behaviour doesn't really track for me. This is all just my opinion - take it as you will. :)
- the__alchemist 3y agoDepending on use case, you can dodge the enclosure part by using premade enclosures that come with a machining service to make cutouts for ports etc. Eg Hammond, or Polycase. OOM cheaper at small to moderate runs than injection molding; ie $100 set up fees vice $10k+. This is notable because the enclosure costs for injection molding can dominate costs otherwise. Eg, getting a PCB manufacturered and assembled from places like JLC is cost effective at any volume. There's no comparable option for injection molding. This is interesting to me, and the article implicitly touches on it; the parts that seem most important: PCB design and firmware writing, other than the time costs, are dwarfed once you introduce injection molded enclosures. Or if you need certification for an intentional radiator.
- kennywinker 3y agoAnother technique I've seen a bunch in the synthesizer world is to use PCBs to construct a case. Some examples: https://www.modernsounds.co/pluto https://www.modernsounds.co/pluto https://reverb.com/ca/item/67880740-krischer-micro-3340-analog-synth-plug-n-play https://reverb.com/ca/item/67880740-krischer-micro-3340-anal... https://chompiclub.com/ https://chompiclub.com/ Another variation is to use a combination of a PCB or metal for the top panel, and wood for the rest of the enclosure. Examples: https://www.landscape.fm/noon https://www.landscape.fm/noon https://crowselectromusic.com/products/ovum/ https://crowselectromusic.com/products/ovum/ https://koma-elektronik.com/?product=field-kit https://koma-elektronik.com/?product=field-kit
- amelius 3y agoNice idea. You could even use a solder-stencil for a metallic look on the top facing panel :)
- the__alchemist 3y agoNeat. You could do this with aluminum PCBs too. Intended for LED arrays etc, but...
- kennywinker 3y ago
- hesdeadjim 3y agoMy wife does product lifecycle management and development, and it’s been fascinating watching just how hard it is to actually make and sell something physical. Her company’s products aren’t even electrical, but require complex textile work that has its own set of challenges. Concept to sales in stores can be a multi-year cycle. There are late night meetings with factories in China. Patent issues that can require workarounds that seem absurd to those of us in software. Iteration time of product concepts that require a physical prototype can take months of work between a designer and the manufacturer. And then there is one of the most important final steps of having the product end up in stores across the world: shipping! Pre-COVID a shipping container ran between $6-9k, during COVID it ballooned up to $36k. Margins suddenly got waaaay smaller and that had a trickle down effect where even retailers were then pushing for higher margin to compensate —- squeezing her company on both ends. Don’t even get me started on Amazon….
- kennywinker 3y agoHardware products have a missing-middle problem when it comes to enclosures and packaging. For expensive, custom, one-off products, the costs are manageable and expectations around customization (printed logos, die-cut packaging inserts) are lower. For large scale productions (+10k) injection molded plastic or custom metal cases are relatively easy and cheap to produce, and the tooling cost of cardboard dies is easily spread over all those units. But for something you plan to sell 50-1000 of, minimum orders and tooling costs are a pretty large concern. As an example: packaging companies have minimum orders no lower than 1k-2k, and the die will cost you $500-$1000. A few tricks I've picked up for dealing with being mid-scale: 1. Rubber stamps are cheap and a low-environmental-impact way to brand packaging. Stickers are cheap too, but less low-impact. If you live in a major city, there's probably a stamp maker near you with a 1 or 2 day turnaround. 2. Packaging inserts can be laser cut out of cardboard in small quantities, if you can find a hack space near you with a shared laser. You can do cardboard design using the sheet-metal tooling in fusion 360, but do the prototyping with scrap cardboard and an exacto knife - it's way faster than starting digitally. 3. Cardboard sourcing is harder than you'd think - you run into minimum order issues just like with buying custom boxes. 4. For enclosures, see my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36115141 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36115141