7 ms·

I'm going to complicate this a bit and say "If you can use open source, you can prototype hardware" Part of building hardware is making it robust enough to exi

I'm going to complicate this a bit and say "If you can use open source, you can prototype hardware" Part of building hardware is making it robust enough to exist in meat space long term. That means thinking about how the humidity sensor is affected by ambient conditions (including the packaging bag, that one has bit me in the past) and having a plan for re-calibration if drift becomes too great. That means picking connectors for your wire harnesses that can handle the number of times you expect to connect/disconnect them over the course of your things lifespan. That means tuning the length of that wire harness so you can't damage it when you open the enclosure to change the battery or whatever. It means thinking about how ambient conditions affect the rest of the design, so you don't have to clean the contacts on all the wire harnesses every so often, because you didn't get gold contacts for both the harnesses and the connectors, and you live in a high humidity environment. Don't get me wrong, I'm self-taught on virtually all of these points, it is achievable for the hobbyist. Just understand that swapping out one smart relay controller for another is pretty far from having a smart relay controller you'd even give to your sister-in-law for Christmas.

imachine1980_ 3y ago
Some things that are cheaper at a low scale is quite expensive at scale, 3D printing is obvious here, your way to consume less 3D printing may be opposite to the way that regular plastic manufacturer does, so you need to adapt your process to the process of your suppliers.
- petsfed 3y ago
  I wasn't even touching manufacturing at scale, because sometimes you really do need just the one. But it should not be so fragile you can't carry it from the garage to thermostat mounting position. I learned that the hard way when I automated the heat lamp that I put in my chicken coop. Having to noodle around with screw terminals while being pecked at by an angry rooster was not a great time.
  - bytefactory 3y ago
    The rooster didn't approve of your soldering technique?
    - bonestamp2 3y ago
      Rooster thought he should have used chicken wire.
- ilyt 3y ago
  3D printing looks like linear scaling and from what I saw 3D printing services are pretty cheap. Yeah they are more expensive than running printer in your garage because they need to earn money too but it's not like the price grows with volume
  - sokoloff 3y ago
    As someone who sells a low-volume niche product (as a sideline), the problem isn’t that 3D printing costs grow per-unit, but rather that they don’t meet people’s intuition of what plastic things should cost. A box that might cost $0.25 if injection molded might be $25 if 3D printed.
andyjohnson0 3y ago
I've breadboarded a number of projects, but always awem to hit a wall when faced with the concerns you describe. Do you have any pointers for how to gain the knowledge to get past this? Right now I feel like I dont even know what I dont know.
- petsfed 3y ago
  A lot of it comes down to being mindful of what you're spending the most time on during assembly, but some of it is just hard-won. But I've learned a lot from reading Hackaday. Some simple things that you shouldn't have to learn the hard way (but most people do): Make sure your wiring contacts are electrochemically compatible. Gold-to-gold is safe in almost every household environment. Strain relieve every wire. Solder is not meant to be structural. Every circuit component degrades over time. Heat, humidity, and dust accelerates that process. Make a plan to mitigate the ingress of each, and a plan to account for that degradation. Learn to design simple breakout-board carrier boards. The best breadboard layouts are still worse than a mediocre PCB, because the PCB doesn't have flywires to catch on literally everything. Make sure you include mechanical support points for your designs, and pick the right size and material for your mechanical supports. All of this to say, your hardware thing is a thing first, and an expression of your software/firmware design second. If it cannot physically survive being that physical thing, the elegance or resiliency of your code is meaningless.
  - andyjohnson0 3y ago
    Thank you.
  - joshspankit 3y ago
    Please improve this (I have only dabbled), but I’ll add a couple points as well: - Don’t run data lines and power lines right next to each other (electric signals flow through a field surrounding the trace/wire, not in or on the metal itself) - PCB pros avoid right angles for the same reason. Bevel your corners. (You see examples of this on every board if you’re not sure what I mean) - Verify PCB traces with a multimeter before soldering components to it (or if it’s been assembled by the PCB manufacturer, verify everything before powering it on for the first time)
kbaker 3y ago
Agreed. Also, the kinds of passive safety needed to not burn your house down in the event of a code error or other design issue. The hardware design is the last line of defense before you can do real-world damage. Things like fuses, ESD and surge protection, watchdog timers, often get overlooked in a hobbyist or even open-source design... it takes (sometimes hard-won) experience to know when these things are required.
- munk-a 3y ago
  There are also some physical constraints as well. I have an essential tremor - painting warhammer minis and doing anything with a sodering gun are forever out of my reach. That all said - I have written firmware for things that other people have wired and it's quite fun!
  - fanf2 3y ago
    I have heard that using magnifying glasses or a microscope can help suppress shaking in the hands: it has a weirdly helpful interaction with the hand-eye feedback loop. Dunno if it would work for you, but it might be worth trying?
    - munk-a 3y ago
      I'll have to give that a try - though it didn't seem to help my father very much. He was a model railroader and just got used to taking several dozen passes at painting cars and locomotives. For me myself I've found that stress tends to make it worse so it's a bit of a vicious cycle where trying to suppress shaking can spur it on more. Advice is never unappreciated though so thank you for you consideration!
      - mitthrowaway2 3y ago
        FWIW, I have a terrible hand tremor as well. I've found that with a good, wide-aperture magnifying glass or binocular microscope, I'm able to do soldering and even chip-level wirebonding. Having an armrest or other surface I can support my forearm/wrist on, with a tight structural loop to the target, can also help a lot.
generj 3y ago
I’m a big proponent of open source hardware but as your post shows it often involves skills of many disciplines that requires vigorous thought or trial and error. Electronics and physics are unforgiving in a way processors are not. Even after reaching the prototype phase, the open source hardware is probably only useful to one person: it’s creator. There is a big difference between making a prototype and detailing the build in sufficient detail other hobbyists can replicate it / modify / use it. Documenting hardware is substantially harder than documenting software. If the project is cool a bunch of people will be excited to jump in; some of these people have zero experience soldering or ordering laser cut parts or whatever. Supporting them is hard. Then another step up to sell the design to other hobbyists, even just a few extra copies on Tindie. And then a huge step up from that to selling to the general public, where suddenly FCC interference certifications are needed and the company is liable if the design burns down a few houses. There’s a reason firms making hardware have real engineers on staff held to professional standards. Plus all the cash flow and business concerns when the marginal cost per unit isn’t under 1 cent like software. Each of these steps often involves multiple iterations of hardware and therefore lead time and cost.
- eternityforest 3y ago
  There are a lot of OSHW projects I'd love to work on, but the main thing that holds me back is knowing they'd basically go nowhere. I can't post them online for others like with code. Nobody is going to build it, the physical building of it is way harder than the design, anyone who could build it is too busy building their own projects that will go in the junk drawer in a week. I would love to work at a real OSHW company, making IoT gadgets and stuff that for production and sale as polished commercial products with a software ecosystem behind them... but I lack a degree, live in Montana, and don't drive, and there are not many companies like that(And most of them are making expensive FOSS phones that don't run normal apps, cryptocurrency stuff, or glorified dev boards kinda pretending to be products)
  - xnzakg 3y ago
    Really depends on the specific pronect of course, but there's definitely some "posted online like code" projects out there. It's a more technical target audience of course, but I've seen plenty of projects with design files included ready to be sent to a PCB manufacturer. Two categories I can easily think of are mechanical keyboards and modular synthesizers.
eternityforest 3y ago
And all of this together still doesn't solve the bigger problem with DIY hardware, which is the DIY itself. It it goes wrong, you cannot buy a new one or hire repairperson at a sane price. If it has a software side, it will probably need maintainence. If you want one, there's a large chance you might want another to expand your project. While yes, I am able to design a reliable hardware device, unless you have a large budget it will not be immune to direct baseball bat hits or spilling epoxy in the connector. So, in practice, if you ask me to build something for you, I'll try to find a way to do it with off the shelf parts as much as possible. Which sucks, because electronics projects are super fun, but the fun is dampened by the fact that in the end you have this completely unique irreplaceable thing that becomes a liability if you use it for anything important, which is generally tied to one application and becomes junk if you no longer need it, unlike the more general purpose off the shelf stuff. ESPHome and Amazon modules plus 3D printing gives a pretty good balance for a lot of things. Reconfigurable, machine-soldered reliability, a prefab software stack, but still enough flexibility to build novel things.
- KRAKRISMOTT 3y ago
  Just buy some spare tapeouts from digikey when building ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
  - eternityforest 3y ago
    Doesn't solve the issue of nobody else knowing how to build it, and the ones that do often somehow making 60$ an hour, now you're stuck with this thing that could be your responsibility at any time.
- bacon_waffle 3y ago
  > It it goes wrong, you cannot buy a new one or hire repairperson at a sane price. If it has a software side, it will probably need maintainence. It's not clear to me that the alternative provides these either. Just thinking about some of the appliance-type things I've had issues with lately: my oven would've made more sense to replace than hire a repair person, and my ISP-provided router is running their latest firmware which is horribly out of date...
notsurenymore 3y ago
> "If you can use open source, you can prototype hardware" You can prototype some hardware. I’ve looked into trying to build some stuff that goes beyond what a little prepackaged MCU dev board can do, and I can’t wrap my head around it. Too much stuff involved that in no good at.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  Compared to software skills those are relatively easy to learn though and they have a longer best-before date than any kind of language/framework kind of knowledge.
  - notsurenymore 3y ago
    I’m not so sure about that. Learning a programming language for example is pretty easy, iterative, and had quick feedback for me. Learning years worth of math makes my eyes glaze over. I do agree on the latter half though, regarding how they’re useful for much longer.
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      You won't need 'years worth of math' to be able to prototype hardware. There is plenty of tooling now that will take the sting out of timing and other nasty little details and there is plenty of hardware where those details don't even matter all that much. Good starterpoint: and FPGA evaluation board, such as Digilent's offerings. Those pack enormous power in a tiny setup and will teach you a ton of very valuable skills. If that looks like a hit you can decide to deepen your knowledge.
      - z500 3y ago
        Any tips for getting started for a software engineer? I built a couple CPUs in a circuit simulator, I'd love to get these things running on silicon of some kind and benchmark them against each other, but I wonder if I would be biting off more than I can chew.
01100011 3y ago
This reminds me of when I was in college(EE) and working at an electronics store. A small aircraft owner wanted help with a regulator to (IIRC) drop 28v down to 12v and handle a few amps. I resisted helping design a solution but he kept pushing so I suggested putting a couple TO-3 packaged 7812s in parallel. We bench tested it and it worked so he went on his way. A few years later I learned you never do that as one regulator can end up handling the load and it ends up overloaded. Instead you use a pass-transistor(or other mechanism) to allow a single regulator to do the job. I still wonder if that guy's plane ended up going down in flames...
- ilyt 3y ago
  You can get away with it if there is some resistance in series with each one but yeah, the enemy here is that each of the regulators will have slightly different voltage and the unlucky one with highest will handle most of the current. Although I'd imagine you got lucky here because IIRC this particular's chip voltage drops with temperature a tiny bit so technically the one that starts to heat up would drop voltage, letting other pick up the slack
fho 3y ago
I recently started at a big connector manufacturer... And I have to say, there is so much more that goes into connectors, even "simple" ones, than what is obvious to the end user.
- contingencies 3y ago
  Want to second this comment. Spatial efficiency, insert and locking mechanisms, electrical characteristics, mechanical strength characteristics, machine pickability/placeability, solderability, thermal characteristics, thermal impact to overall system, environmental seal properties including water/saline air/weak acids/weak bases, orientation guarantees, safety factors such as susceptibility of shorting with different categories of pollutant including metal dust, longevity/susceptibility of contacts to build-up of dust, formal fire engineering properties (including combustion temperature/off-gassing), fabrication cost including line purchase/scheduling/maintenance and hard tooling fabrication/longevity/maintenance, color coding for human error reduction in assembling and maintenance, documentation and translation, distribution and recalls, etc. That's just the connector. Now look at regulatory outlook, availability and all of the above mentioned concerns for the relevant cables and their fabrication processes...
keithnz 3y ago
No different than writing software to a releasable stage. Prototyping is a very important stage of building hardware, it's how you test, if you get yourself that far, you can get yourself to a production build. It does mean a bunch of reading and research though. I've been doing embedded/electrical/mechanical systems for decades from consumer grade products to large industrial machines which have to last decades. There are often hard-earned lessons along the way, but many end up jumping out at you. Solving some of those problems sometimes require significant rethinks, but a lot of stuff is not that tricky. Main thing is having good tools to investigate problems.
- bibabaloo 3y ago
  > No different than writing software to a releasable stage. It's extremely different, imo. Releasing buggy software to prod: no biggy, hotfixed in a couple of hours Releasing buggy hardware: recalls, mass customer dissastifaction.
- contingencies 3y ago
  IMHO the oversight in this response is that having good tools to investigate problems essentially equates to (1) tens of thousands of dollars in hardware; (2) permanent lab space; (3) the relevant base capital; (4) supply chain access; (5) a university equivalent level education in physics and electronics; and (6) at least a few years to hone your craft. This is realistically a five to ten year commitment, perhaps a little less full time if enthused and adequately capitalized.

imachine1980_ 3y ago

Some things that are cheaper at a low scale is quite expensive at scale, 3D printing is obvious here, your way to consume less 3D printing may be opposite to the way that regular plastic manufacturer does, so you need to adapt your process to the process of your suppliers.

petsfed 3y ago
I wasn't even touching manufacturing at scale, because sometimes you really do need just the one. But it should not be so fragile you can't carry it from the garage to thermostat mounting position. I learned that the hard way when I automated the heat lamp that I put in my chicken coop. Having to noodle around with screw terminals while being pecked at by an angry rooster was not a great time.
- bytefactory 3y ago
  The rooster didn't approve of your soldering technique?
  - bonestamp2 3y ago
    Rooster thought he should have used chicken wire.
ilyt 3y ago
3D printing looks like linear scaling and from what I saw 3D printing services are pretty cheap. Yeah they are more expensive than running printer in your garage because they need to earn money too but it's not like the price grows with volume
- sokoloff 3y ago
  As someone who sells a low-volume niche product (as a sideline), the problem isn’t that 3D printing costs grow per-unit, but rather that they don’t meet people’s intuition of what plastic things should cost. A box that might cost $0.25 if injection molded might be $25 if 3D printed.

andyjohnson0 3y ago

I've breadboarded a number of projects, but always awem to hit a wall when faced with the concerns you describe. Do you have any pointers for how to gain the knowledge to get past this? Right now I feel like I dont even know what I dont know.

petsfed 3y ago
A lot of it comes down to being mindful of what you're spending the most time on during assembly, but some of it is just hard-won. But I've learned a lot from reading Hackaday. Some simple things that you shouldn't have to learn the hard way (but most people do): Make sure your wiring contacts are electrochemically compatible. Gold-to-gold is safe in almost every household environment. Strain relieve every wire. Solder is not meant to be structural. Every circuit component degrades over time. Heat, humidity, and dust accelerates that process. Make a plan to mitigate the ingress of each, and a plan to account for that degradation. Learn to design simple breakout-board carrier boards. The best breadboard layouts are still worse than a mediocre PCB, because the PCB doesn't have flywires to catch on literally everything. Make sure you include mechanical support points for your designs, and pick the right size and material for your mechanical supports. All of this to say, your hardware thing is a thing first, and an expression of your software/firmware design second. If it cannot physically survive being that physical thing, the elegance or resiliency of your code is meaningless.
- andyjohnson0 3y ago
  Thank you.
- joshspankit 3y ago
  Please improve this (I have only dabbled), but I’ll add a couple points as well: - Don’t run data lines and power lines right next to each other (electric signals flow through a field surrounding the trace/wire, not in or on the metal itself) - PCB pros avoid right angles for the same reason. Bevel your corners. (You see examples of this on every board if you’re not sure what I mean) - Verify PCB traces with a multimeter before soldering components to it (or if it’s been assembled by the PCB manufacturer, verify everything before powering it on for the first time)

kbaker 3y ago

Agreed. Also, the kinds of passive safety needed to not burn your house down in the event of a code error or other design issue. The hardware design is the last line of defense before you can do real-world damage. Things like fuses, ESD and surge protection, watchdog timers, often get overlooked in a hobbyist or even open-source design... it takes (sometimes hard-won) experience to know when these things are required.

munk-a 3y ago
There are also some physical constraints as well. I have an essential tremor - painting warhammer minis and doing anything with a sodering gun are forever out of my reach. That all said - I have written firmware for things that other people have wired and it's quite fun!
- fanf2 3y ago
  I have heard that using magnifying glasses or a microscope can help suppress shaking in the hands: it has a weirdly helpful interaction with the hand-eye feedback loop. Dunno if it would work for you, but it might be worth trying?
  - munk-a 3y ago
    I'll have to give that a try - though it didn't seem to help my father very much. He was a model railroader and just got used to taking several dozen passes at painting cars and locomotives. For me myself I've found that stress tends to make it worse so it's a bit of a vicious cycle where trying to suppress shaking can spur it on more. Advice is never unappreciated though so thank you for you consideration!
    - mitthrowaway2 3y ago
      FWIW, I have a terrible hand tremor as well. I've found that with a good, wide-aperture magnifying glass or binocular microscope, I'm able to do soldering and even chip-level wirebonding. Having an armrest or other surface I can support my forearm/wrist on, with a tight structural loop to the target, can also help a lot.

generj 3y ago

I’m a big proponent of open source hardware but as your post shows it often involves skills of many disciplines that requires vigorous thought or trial and error. Electronics and physics are unforgiving in a way processors are not. Even after reaching the prototype phase, the open source hardware is probably only useful to one person: it’s creator. There is a big difference between making a prototype and detailing the build in sufficient detail other hobbyists can replicate it / modify / use it. Documenting hardware is substantially harder than documenting software. If the project is cool a bunch of people will be excited to jump in; some of these people have zero experience soldering or ordering laser cut parts or whatever. Supporting them is hard. Then another step up to sell the design to other hobbyists, even just a few extra copies on Tindie. And then a huge step up from that to selling to the general public, where suddenly FCC interference certifications are needed and the company is liable if the design burns down a few houses. There’s a reason firms making hardware have real engineers on staff held to professional standards. Plus all the cash flow and business concerns when the marginal cost per unit isn’t under 1 cent like software. Each of these steps often involves multiple iterations of hardware and therefore lead time and cost.

eternityforest 3y ago
There are a lot of OSHW projects I'd love to work on, but the main thing that holds me back is knowing they'd basically go nowhere. I can't post them online for others like with code. Nobody is going to build it, the physical building of it is way harder than the design, anyone who could build it is too busy building their own projects that will go in the junk drawer in a week. I would love to work at a real OSHW company, making IoT gadgets and stuff that for production and sale as polished commercial products with a software ecosystem behind them... but I lack a degree, live in Montana, and don't drive, and there are not many companies like that(And most of them are making expensive FOSS phones that don't run normal apps, cryptocurrency stuff, or glorified dev boards kinda pretending to be products)
- xnzakg 3y ago
  Really depends on the specific pronect of course, but there's definitely some "posted online like code" projects out there. It's a more technical target audience of course, but I've seen plenty of projects with design files included ready to be sent to a PCB manufacturer. Two categories I can easily think of are mechanical keyboards and modular synthesizers.

eternityforest 3y ago

And all of this together still doesn't solve the bigger problem with DIY hardware, which is the DIY itself. It it goes wrong, you cannot buy a new one or hire repairperson at a sane price. If it has a software side, it will probably need maintainence. If you want one, there's a large chance you might want another to expand your project. While yes, I am able to design a reliable hardware device, unless you have a large budget it will not be immune to direct baseball bat hits or spilling epoxy in the connector. So, in practice, if you ask me to build something for you, I'll try to find a way to do it with off the shelf parts as much as possible. Which sucks, because electronics projects are super fun, but the fun is dampened by the fact that in the end you have this completely unique irreplaceable thing that becomes a liability if you use it for anything important, which is generally tied to one application and becomes junk if you no longer need it, unlike the more general purpose off the shelf stuff. ESPHome and Amazon modules plus 3D printing gives a pretty good balance for a lot of things. Reconfigurable, machine-soldered reliability, a prefab software stack, but still enough flexibility to build novel things.

KRAKRISMOTT 3y ago
Just buy some spare tapeouts from digikey when building ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- eternityforest 3y ago
  Doesn't solve the issue of nobody else knowing how to build it, and the ones that do often somehow making 60$ an hour, now you're stuck with this thing that could be your responsibility at any time.
bacon_waffle 3y ago
> It it goes wrong, you cannot buy a new one or hire repairperson at a sane price. If it has a software side, it will probably need maintainence. It's not clear to me that the alternative provides these either. Just thinking about some of the appliance-type things I've had issues with lately: my oven would've made more sense to replace than hire a repair person, and my ISP-provided router is running their latest firmware which is horribly out of date...

notsurenymore 3y ago

> "If you can use open source, you can prototype hardware" You can prototype some hardware. I’ve looked into trying to build some stuff that goes beyond what a little prepackaged MCU dev board can do, and I can’t wrap my head around it. Too much stuff involved that in no good at.

jacquesm 3y ago
Compared to software skills those are relatively easy to learn though and they have a longer best-before date than any kind of language/framework kind of knowledge.
- notsurenymore 3y ago
  I’m not so sure about that. Learning a programming language for example is pretty easy, iterative, and had quick feedback for me. Learning years worth of math makes my eyes glaze over. I do agree on the latter half though, regarding how they’re useful for much longer.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    You won't need 'years worth of math' to be able to prototype hardware. There is plenty of tooling now that will take the sting out of timing and other nasty little details and there is plenty of hardware where those details don't even matter all that much. Good starterpoint: and FPGA evaluation board, such as Digilent's offerings. Those pack enormous power in a tiny setup and will teach you a ton of very valuable skills. If that looks like a hit you can decide to deepen your knowledge.
    - z500 3y ago
      Any tips for getting started for a software engineer? I built a couple CPUs in a circuit simulator, I'd love to get these things running on silicon of some kind and benchmark them against each other, but I wonder if I would be biting off more than I can chew.

01100011 3y ago

This reminds me of when I was in college(EE) and working at an electronics store. A small aircraft owner wanted help with a regulator to (IIRC) drop 28v down to 12v and handle a few amps. I resisted helping design a solution but he kept pushing so I suggested putting a couple TO-3 packaged 7812s in parallel. We bench tested it and it worked so he went on his way. A few years later I learned you never do that as one regulator can end up handling the load and it ends up overloaded. Instead you use a pass-transistor(or other mechanism) to allow a single regulator to do the job. I still wonder if that guy's plane ended up going down in flames...

ilyt 3y ago
You can get away with it if there is some resistance in series with each one but yeah, the enemy here is that each of the regulators will have slightly different voltage and the unlucky one with highest will handle most of the current. Although I'd imagine you got lucky here because IIRC this particular's chip voltage drops with temperature a tiny bit so technically the one that starts to heat up would drop voltage, letting other pick up the slack

fho 3y ago

I recently started at a big connector manufacturer... And I have to say, there is so much more that goes into connectors, even "simple" ones, than what is obvious to the end user.

contingencies 3y ago
Want to second this comment. Spatial efficiency, insert and locking mechanisms, electrical characteristics, mechanical strength characteristics, machine pickability/placeability, solderability, thermal characteristics, thermal impact to overall system, environmental seal properties including water/saline air/weak acids/weak bases, orientation guarantees, safety factors such as susceptibility of shorting with different categories of pollutant including metal dust, longevity/susceptibility of contacts to build-up of dust, formal fire engineering properties (including combustion temperature/off-gassing), fabrication cost including line purchase/scheduling/maintenance and hard tooling fabrication/longevity/maintenance, color coding for human error reduction in assembling and maintenance, documentation and translation, distribution and recalls, etc. That's just the connector. Now look at regulatory outlook, availability and all of the above mentioned concerns for the relevant cables and their fabrication processes...

keithnz 3y ago

No different than writing software to a releasable stage. Prototyping is a very important stage of building hardware, it's how you test, if you get yourself that far, you can get yourself to a production build. It does mean a bunch of reading and research though. I've been doing embedded/electrical/mechanical systems for decades from consumer grade products to large industrial machines which have to last decades. There are often hard-earned lessons along the way, but many end up jumping out at you. Solving some of those problems sometimes require significant rethinks, but a lot of stuff is not that tricky. Main thing is having good tools to investigate problems.

bibabaloo 3y ago
> No different than writing software to a releasable stage. It's extremely different, imo. Releasing buggy software to prod: no biggy, hotfixed in a couple of hours Releasing buggy hardware: recalls, mass customer dissastifaction.
contingencies 3y ago
IMHO the oversight in this response is that having good tools to investigate problems essentially equates to (1) tens of thousands of dollars in hardware; (2) permanent lab space; (3) the relevant base capital; (4) supply chain access; (5) a university equivalent level education in physics and electronics; and (6) at least a few years to hone your craft. This is realistically a five to ten year commitment, perhaps a little less full time if enthused and adequately capitalized.