17 ms·

This is the type of stuff that trips up many Kickstarter / crowd funded projects. "I have a great idea, I'll just manufacture it in China and sell it as a prod

• andy_ppp 3y ago
  I wonder why with things like this people don’t get that it involves real experience and expertise to get parts made correctly. Surely there are people offering their services to avoid these mistakes who have the relevant skills. Making things is much harder than software in some really important ways, are these computer programmers demonstrating hubris?
  • wmf 3y ago
    People just assume that the factory already has that expertise included with their services.
    • jpgvm 3y ago
      It is available sometimes (at a price). There are some upsides, namely in-house experts are more familiar with that specific suppliers processes and capabilities. Downsides are obvious, they work for the supplier and not for you.
    • exmadscientist 3y ago
      The factory can help with a lot of this (if you incentivize them appropriately). The factory can never help tweak your initial concept, right at the beginning of development (when it's ~free!), to save tremendously on future production cost. That's what you hire the consultants for.* *Disclaimer: I'm just such a consultant, though I work on the EE side.
      • mips_r4300i 3y ago
        This is critical and underappreciated. Numerous small design choices early on can have drastic impacts on the complexity of the mold and how expensive it will be. A simple example: designing your side I/o ports to be on the parting line, or move the parting line up through the hole centers. Didn't think of this? Now you need a slide. Deciding the surface finish you want also impacts hard it will be. You can hide a lot of flow problems and tooling marks with a nice rough textured finish. Some colors show cooling and flow worse than others. Clever gate placement hidden under something hidden in assembly makes cooling simpler. Etc, etc Well worth the money spent on a guru to look at your design and provide feedback. (I am not one, I've just hit every wall)
    • baybal2 3y ago
      [dead]
  • postmodest 3y ago
    Their main problem seems to be that they had never thought about how injection molding works, but started a CAD path to a product that would need to be injection molded. Anyone who has built plastic models could have told them a lot of this information, and it's a bit surprising that they had to learn by doing at that stage.
    • mionhe 3y ago
      Not that surprising, unfortunately. I work with lots of clients and engineers who assume that 3d printing and CAD is all the experience & input you need to move to plastic injection. It's actually shockingly common. I think it's really a problem of not knowing what you don't know yet.
      • hef19898 3y ago
        +1 on the 3d printing, portong parts from 3d printed rapid prototypes to machined / molded / forged / cast production parts involves much more work and effort than most people think. Including engineers and even manufacturing engineers...
    • leptons 3y ago
      With resin 3D printing, I can produce a complex case for my product, although at a higher cost per unit than injection mold - but with no up-front costs. It seems fairly cost effective considering the extremely high cost of making an injection mold. I'm not at the scale of needing 100,000 or 1mil units though. Right now it's costing me $5 per complete case (5 parts, $1 each - it isn't a very large case). I can have 10,000 of these cases made for about the same price as it costs to create the injection mold. I'm nowhere near the scale of 10,000 units right now, but maybe in the region of 1,000 units. The cost does get passed on to the customer and if I ever get an investor and serious traction in the market then the injection mold will sort itself out and the per unit cost for my product will go down.
    • mmac_ 3y ago
      Often I see someone who will design something in CAD but not think about how the product will be manufactured. Design for manufacturing isn't a buzzword. It happens with both plastic and other type of enclosures (metal etc). The better designers understand the manufacturing process and build their designs thinking about how they will be created in a production line. As others have mentioned, most manufacturers will say 'yes' to anything you request and charge accordingly. They'll just figure it out somehow, but you'll be unaware that you've doubled the cost of your part due to a lack of understanding of construction. I guess it happens in other fields as well, i.e. architects vs builders in the construction industry.
  • iancmceachern 3y ago
    Surely! I'm one, contact info is in my bio
  • spuz 3y ago
    I think it's a combination of not knowing what you don't know but also the huge amount of exposure we've all had to injection moulded plastic products we've all had throughout our lives. The ubiquity and low cost of plastic products makes it seem that they must not be hard to produce.
    • TheSpiceIsLife 3y ago
      The first one is hard to produce, the subsequent several million, not so much.
      • jjk166 3y ago
        Running a mold takes a great deal of skill as well. Right now (literally just found out about the issue on Thursday) I'm dealing with a mold house that's struggling to hold tolerances on a part for a medical device. And they're running the parts because our in house team wasn't even coming close. Yeah it's not something you need a skilled artisan to actively control, but a lot of technical skill goes into making consistently high quality parts.
  • derefr 3y ago
    I would guess that people assume more abstraction layers stand between them and the process than there actually do — that “getting something manufactured” is more like using PaaS than like using IaaS. Which is, honestly, kind of a reasonable assumption. In construction, you hire a general contractor. Why is there no manufacturing equivalent of a general contractor? Because all such people are too busy running their own successful product businesses?
    • pavlov 3y ago
      > "In construction, you hire a general contractor. Why is there no manufacturing equivalent of a general contractor?" Houses are much more similar to each other than products. If you've built a few houses, you can probably find many more customers who will want similar houses. Most people don't care if their house is essentially the same as somebody's on the other side of town. But a new product must offer something that's not found in the existing products on the market. If it doesn't, then there's no reason to go to all the effort of getting it manufactured — customers could just buy the existing products where all that investment was made already and is largely recouped. So an industrial design product is more like the houses you see on the "Grand Designs" TV show. Each of them represents a dream and a vision, and usually there's a lot of trouble and blown budgets on the way to the grand finale where the family finally gets to sit together by the fireplace in their unique creation. ("Grand Designs" doesn't show the dream projects that fail miserably.)
      • bryanrasmussen 3y ago
        >But a new product must offer something that's not found in the existing products on the market. how is it then the case that there are multiple versions of products on the market that differ very little from each other?
        • pavlov 3y ago
          Typically they're either using the same elements despite being branded differently, or there's a competitive factor in the design that's not superficially obvious to the consumer, or the market is so established that there's a repository of existing designs that can be slightly tweaked to create a new product affordably. Let's say you want to sell plastic brooms. With such a common product, what possible competitive edge could you get by creating your own design from scratch? If your reason for getting in the business is that you want to address a niche or trend (e.g. you want to sell hot pink brooms because it's Barbie summer of 2023), that can be accomplished with an existing design. It only makes sense to create new molds for a broom if you're a corporation like Ikea with the massive sales volume that enables vertical integration of every aspect of the product.
  • m-ee 3y ago
    It’s not always easy to find a mold wizard at short notice. Things in hardware space are more word of mouth and relationship based. And as others said you don’t know what you don’t know. I had a (mechanical engineer!) boss who was happy to 3D print and ignore mold DFM against our mechanical contractors advice until he finally did a mold estimate and realized it would cost half a mil to make the current design.
  • negative_zero 3y ago
    In my experience, if a company is majority software, it's a weird combination of hubris and ignorance that I don't really see in other sectors. I consult on product development and I'd say about 50% the time, software majority companies think you are trying to rip them off somehow when you try to explain everything that is NOT software that needs to be done, what it costs and how long it takes (and how important it is to lock things in early as you can't just "push out a patch" for a $50,000 molding tool or that you can't just "slap bluetooth in later" and not redo all of your EMC certs).
    • asdefghyk 3y ago
      How about using a pre certified bluetooth module ? would this avoid having to redo EMC certs ? OR make very much simpler? Of course there may a "cost penalty " for this option ....
      • exmadscientist 3y ago
        We always recommend radio modules for anything but the highest volume new products. It's easy to cost-reduce one out (worst case, you just build the module yourself), it just takes a bit of cash flow to pay for it. And if your product isn't earning any money, then you have bigger problems than radio cost....
      • pjc50 3y ago
        Anyone doing "small" (<1k) runs will be using bluetooth modules, but unfortunately the EMC cert is for the unit as a whole, at least in the EU. Which makes sense technically as the construction of the whole unit matters - conducted emissions through the power supply, for example. It does make it expensive and annoying to do small production electronics, which is why all the stuff you might see is "modules" from aliexpress.
        • londons_explore 3y ago
          <1k units runs tends to get a pass from EU authorities anyway.
  • _kb 3y ago
    There are. It’s an entire domain: industrial design. Just like software there’s both in-house roles and consultants. The depth of knowledge required to do it well warrants full university degrees in the topic. As with most things, you can probably take the autodidact route but be prepared to make a lot of mistakes. Also be prepared for those mistakes to cost 5 or 6 figures. The ease and almost zero cost of exploration and learning from failure that software allows does not always map to other domains. This is one of them. Source: partner is an industrial designer and geeks out on plastics, materials science and manufacturing techniques way harder than obsessions I pursue. It’s literally her entire world and she still fucks up occasionally too.
  • NegativeK 3y ago
    > are these computer programmers demonstrating hubris? Yes, but not in a way that's unique to programmers. People often underestimate the effort a job entails, be it teaching, sales, programming, graphic design, machining, car repair vet medicine, etc. Most of my career history, when I've heard someone say "ugh, department X just sits around all day and occasionally does Y", they're assuming that the sliver of their insight into department X is the totality of what is actually done.
  • petsfed 3y ago
    A lot of people are saying "hubris" without really drilling into what the arrogant mistake is. For the record, I don't think its unique to computer programmers, but rather to people who solve complex problems for a living, and consider themselves, at some level, to be decently smart. It is very easy to convince yourself that you understand something because you read a lot about it, and what you read makes intuitive sense. But that is not at all the same as actually going out and doing the thing, and solving the problem from the blue sky. Dunning-Kruger sort-of describes this, but I believe that there's a multi-dimensionality issue where being on the good side of Mt. Stupid in one domain makes you overrate your capabilities in other domains. Vis the nuclear physicist disputing the official explanation of how the buildings collapsed on 9/11, apparently because he hadn't gotten to the part of the freshman material science course that covered how yield strength decreases with temperature. So articles like this are important, even as they are kind of obvious to people who have already learned these lessons, because often times it takes learning these things the hard way to understand why (for instance) the software is actually the easy part of an IoT thingy.
• iancmceachern 3y ago
  100% a lot of the issues they mote are things you would expect to catch in the design phase even with a single design review with an experience mechanical design engineer
• ahaucnx 3y ago
  Author here. Yes I agree with you. Having your own mold expert really saves a ton of money and makes things much more smoothly. We work with a great engineer based in the Philippines. You can contact me [1] and I can connect you with him. [1] https://www.airgradient.com/support/ https://www.airgradient.com/support/
• raverbashing 3y ago
  Yeah How many hw startups start with "we'll just ship an Arduino/RPi with our custom module and that's it" heh, that's very not ideal for a variety of reasons
• smoyer 3y ago
  Wholeheartedly agree ... 2/3rds of your cost will be the enclosure and power supply!