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How do people "productize" their ESP32 projects? (Edit: not talking about mass-producing something, I just want a self-contained unit rather than a board with a

by davidw 3y ago

How do people "productize" their ESP32 projects? (Edit: not talking about mass-producing something, I just want a self-contained unit rather than a board with a bunch of wires sticking out) I see a lot of pages where they show some bare-looking board, but in the real world you want to package that up. If you're a software guy like me, you would likely prefer to pay a bit extra to just have that tidied up for you rather than fiddle around with stuff.

lostapathy 3y ago
3d printed enclosure?
- davidw 3y ago
  That sounds like one of those "I have a problem... now I have two problems" jokes. I wanted something simple and cheap and now I need to go deal with this whole other thing I don't know much about and either rent or buy into it?
  - krasin 3y ago
    JLCPCB would 3d print high-quality enclosures from a variety of UV resins: https://3d.jlcpcb.com/ https://3d.jlcpcb.com/ and decently cheap. The next best option is injection molding with PCBWay (or other similar provider): https://www.pcbway.com/rapid-prototyping/manufacture/?type=4&reffercode=TOP https://www.pcbway.com/rapid-prototyping/manufacture/?type=4... An alternative is a sheet metal enclosure: https://www.pcbway.com/rapid-prototyping/manufacture/?type=4&reffercode=TOP https://www.pcbway.com/rapid-prototyping/manufacture/?type=4... But 3d printing with JLCPCB is really the most convenient way unless you need a lot of parts (thousands) or the material properties of the UV resins would not be enough (high-temperature, outdoors, etc).
  - Zetobal 3y ago
    You can also pay someone to do it.
  - lostapathy 3y ago
    As somebody else mentioned, you can hire it out. There's a lot of files running around with existing models for common projects, so you probably don't need to design your own enclosures a lot of the time unless you want to. And printers have gotten cheap, like $99 gets you a jumping off point into the hobby.
    - davidw 3y ago
      Do people not just sell like "complete package" things? The board in the article is $13.49 ( https://www.amazon.com/dp/B072HBW53G https://www.amazon.com/dp/B072HBW53G ). If you could get an enclosed, complete thing for $20, including the board and whatever you need for it to run, that'd be much less of a PITA than "brand new hobby" or "find someone to 3D print stuff for me locally and deal with that whole hassle".
      - kps 3y ago
        There are things like M5Stack (also ESP32-based) that suit some purposes.
        davidw 3y ago
        Yes! That looks pretty cool and more like what I'm talking about.
      - kube-system 3y ago
        The thing about enclosures is that they are pretty design dependent. Nobody knows what you are hooking up to your board or what the intended purpose is. Some boards do have generic type cases, e.g. raspberry pi cases.
    - szundi 3y ago
      $99 is just enough to jump into the hobby of fixing your printer all the time - and that's what hobbyists are actually looking for solving something would be like $700 calibrated out of the box, like the old prusa 3 something or the bambu p1something.
  - bluGill 3y ago
    That is why so many amateur projects look ugly: making a pretty package is a whole new skill set. 3d printing is the easiest acceptable solution, but it isn't the best. Best would be a custom designed injection molded housing, but that is even more work to design. Nothing about making a nice presentation is beyond what amateurs can do. However it is a lot more effort and so most decide it isn't worth it.
    - davidw 3y ago
      I don't care if it's "beautiful" or ultra-compact or looks as nice as some Apple device. All I want is to buy one thing without wires and an exposed board.
      - bluGill 3y ago
        There are not enough of you to make it worth the effort most likely. If you disagree then you should invest in the business opportunity.
  - fnordpiglet 3y ago
    There are plenty of enclosures available on AliExpress and Amazon. But a cheap reprap 3d printer is a general tool like a screw driver or hammer, albeit more complex for sure. But the learning curve isn’t absurd, it’s basically buying something plugging it in and loading filament then printing a downloaded STL. It gets harder when it needs calibration and maintaining, but it’s not an unknown dark art - there are a billion helpful discord groups. But once you have it and know how to maintain it, anything where you’re like “man wouldn’t it be nice if I had a physical object like X” becomes a relatively solvable problem. There are lot of materials with many different properties. When you skip into a zone of material or print you can’t afford the equipment for, there are a bazillion print shops. The harder skill frankly is the 3d modeling. But I find openscad is sufficient for almost everything and then for the rest I use Build123. They’re both parametric code driven design tools so fit well inside a software project (better than GUI tools, and more easy to be precise with). Openscad is absurdly easy, build123 is more advanced and requires Python skills as well as effort to learn the conceptual model. I sort of felt the way you seem to once upon a time until I said screw it and figured it out one day. Now I feel like I lived most my life hobbled for want of this tool. So, yeah, overkill for printing an esp32 enclosure. But doing so unlocks a lifetime of possibilities.
  - Johnny555 3y ago
    If you're looking for an enclosure for your hobby ESP32 project, there are lots of off the shelf, small enclosures available: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=esp32+enclosure https://www.amazon.com/s?k=esp32+enclosure If you want to sell a more finished commercial quality project and don't want to print your own, there are places that will fabricate one for you (but in low quantities, having them 3d print it probably cheaper)
  - dekhn 3y ago
    The simplest I can think of is this: https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/sparkfun-electronics https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/sparkfun-electron... use a step drill or other large-diameter bit to cut holes for cable glands, dremels to cut rectangular holes for power switches, and drill and tap holes for standard brass standoffs. IMHO everybody should have at least one cordless drill and drill bits, as well as an M3 tap. Then use Cable glands for wires going in/out, and nylon sheathing for the cables outside the box. If you take the time to make the holes nicely, the result often looks good enough that non-makers will think you are a god of manufacturing.
bluGill 3y ago
There are lots of options. Most of what you see they don't: this is a one off project for the hacker and if others find it useful great, but not the goal. As such packaging isn't needed, sometimes you shove it in a box. If you want something nice, that can be done, now you need to pay someone (could be yourself!) to design a package. ESP32 is designed to be easy to put into your own products, this means design a circuit board and case to fit each other, and so on. Then you buy the ESP32 chips in bulk and assemble them onto the circuit board. The board you buy for a prototype is officially only a reference board and not what they expect you to ship (though shipping the board is common: they are small, cheap, and someone else did the hard board design)
- davidw 3y ago
  I'm not really talking about producing something at scale, just the bare minimum of not having a board with wires coming out of it. Say I want to do some one-off project and put it outside somewhere, out of the weather, with some batteries to power it. Or an indoor thing with an AC hookup of some kind. Doesn't have to be perfect or beautiful or as tiny as possible; just sort of a complete package.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - qwertox 3y ago
    I just buy new small breadboards and jumper wires and make it so that it looks nice. Jumper wires of the proper length, not jumper cables.
  - amenghra 3y ago
    You can buy project boxes. Some of them come with breadboards/perfboard that properly fit with screws (e.g. https://discountbloc.ru/archive/products/xwzz1130z33x.html https://discountbloc.ru/archive/products/xwzz1130z33x.html). Alternative is to 3D print a box. Altoids box is a classic. Food plastic boxes also works depending how hot the components run.
mikub 3y ago
I look if if I can find some already assembled things and try to build an project around it. For example I used an pictureframe to build a nice neopixel thing, I also documented it on my website, https://mikub.me/post/(1)/ https://mikub.me/post/(1)/ So what I do is I usually look around what everyday objects could become nice enclosures for microcontrollers and such things.
morphle 3y ago
You shouldn't productise anything with ESP32, its just an overprized bloated hobby pcb. See my comment below on how to productize this: use a 4 cent off the shelf microcontroller on a 10 cent pcb or much better: make a custom chip with all the sensors on board but with $25K minimum Capex but tiny Opex
- chpatrick 3y ago
  There are thousands of ESP32-based IoT devices on AliExpress that would disagree with you. It's an SoC chip not a "pcb".
- morphle 3y ago
  As others point out: you could hire someone to do it. Based on my custom 1 cent ASIC (custom chip) I would design, test and build your (moisture or other) sensor for €3000 excluding tax and price of all the needed tools. Usually more like $6000 because they want to outsource all the problems (like mass production and sales) to me morphle@ziggo.nl if you want me to design it
  - szundi 3y ago
    Mine would be 0.3 cent per chip and would need $50k investment. Jokes aside, if you know how to design a custom chip for 3k USD, I would like to know about it.
    - morphle 3y ago
      it is not a joke, you can do as low as 1.10870 cent per custom chip or 2 cent per off the shelf chip. 0.03 cent is impossible, the minimum size of a chip is .625 mm2 and that sets the minimum price. Designing one for $3K is possible because I already have a tested chip design that I just have to modify for you. A master student project is usually a free design with a free tapeout at Google MPW, Mosys of Europractice. I also design bigger chips and $500 wafer scale integration with 10000 cores : https://vimeo.com/731037615 https://vimeo.com/731037615
      - 3y ago
serial_dev 3y ago
You get a "product designer" (?) who designs a case. If your product is "standard enough", you might skip this step. Then, you reach out to local manufacturers and ones from bigger markets. You get some samples, you check if things work like they should. If you like it, order a smaller batch. Design a quality assurance workflow, or find a specialist who can help you with that so that the manufacturer doesn't ship you 20% faulty products. Get your products onto the shelves of a brick and mortar store, and/or create a website, sell on Amazon and other portals. Talk to your customers, listen to their feedback, improve every step a little. It sounds overwhelming. I worked for a small smart home startup, and I learned that, for example, in Shenzhen, there is a whole industry ready to help entrepreneurs realize their dream products, and at every step of the way, you can contract someone to help you. In our experience, the Chinese service was both much better, cheaper, faster than European offers.
greggsy 3y ago
Smaller dev boards and shrink wrap.
_jal 3y ago
I like wood. It is pretty much everything you want for something like this - super durable, very easy to work with, and depending on what you pick, cheap and pretty, too. Plus, woodworking is very satisfying by itself. And also easy to get started with - for small box-like things like this you only need a few cheap hand tools.
morphle 3y ago
You shouldn't productise anything with ESP32, its just an overprized bloated hobby pcb, very unprofessional. See my comment below on how to productize this: use a 4 cent off the shelf microcontroller on a 10 cent pcb or much better: make a custom chip with all the sensors on board but with $25K minimum Capex but tiny Opex
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- AnotherGoodName 3y ago
  The esp is a cheap microcontroller. You shouldn't productionize an esp32 dev kit but you should absolutely productionize an esp32 on a board you've designed that has the specif features to do your thing (whatever that is).
  - morphle 3y ago
    no, the ESP32 is a SoC, a bunch of chips in a package on a PCB. not a bare microcontroller chip. It is already a product with several resellers: ip, fab, packaging, exporter, distributor, retailer and a very high profit overhead of at least 2.7 times the costprice
    - k0k0 3y ago
      You're absolutely wrong on a number of points. A SoC stands for "system on a chip", it refers to a single die (if you want to get pedantic, there are multi-die packages but this does not apply here) package, a "bare chip" if you will. https://www.espressif.com/en/products/socs/esp32 https://www.espressif.com/en/products/socs/esp32 The ESP32 is a SoC. It's available in QFN packaging (Quad Flat Pak No Lead). The ESP32 is available included with a number of "modules" (and of course devkits). These modules are designed for production use and it can be economical to do so. You clearly don't have the foggiest idea about these product lines so don't seem to be in a good position to comment on the economics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESP32 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESP32
mkingston 3y ago
I mount the board on some nylon standoffs through a takeaway box lid. The rest of the takeaway box is the enclosure. I drill some holes through the takeaway box for wire ingress and egress. I use a tupperware container if I'm feeling fancy.
boustrophedon 3y ago
There are a lot of companies that make electronics enclosures. Some of them are waterproof. Usually they have a couple pre-drilled mounting flanges to screw in the board as well, and then you'd drill your own external holes for input/output as necessary. Here's a couple manufacturers, and you can usually find stuff on e.g. adafruit and digikey as well to save on shipping if you're buying dev boards or other parts from them already. https://www.hammfg.com/ https://www.hammfg.com/ https://www.budind.com/ https://www.budind.com/ http://takachi-enclosure.com/ http://takachi-enclosure.com/ https://www.adafruit.com/product/903 https://www.adafruit.com/product/903
HeyLaughingBoy 3y ago
I am a huge fan of M5Stack. Take a look at the Tough or Core units. You get an ESP32 with couple of peripherals (speaker, buzzer, real-time clock) and a TFT touchscreen all in a case. Water-resistant in the case of the M5Stack Tough. I've shipped a couple of consulting products based on them and it really cuts down on the work I need to do in order to build product.
- davidw 3y ago
  That's exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about. You could take those and plug them together and be basically ready to go, rather than "just" investing in a bunch of 3D printing and soldering and lord only knows what else. Maybe it costs a bit more, but that's fine - you get something that you can use somewhere besides sitting on your desk with a bunch of exposed wires.
jpcfl 3y ago
You can design both a circuit board and a case with Fusion360, which is free for personal use. Use JLCPCB to assemble the board for you. You can 3D print the case yourself. It took me about 20hr to learn how to use Fusion360 and make a simple circuit and case this way.
martinsnow 3y ago
Usually a black abs box will do
dragontamer 3y ago
If you're handy with wood, you use wood. If you've got a 3d printer, you make a 3d print. If you're more of a acrylic guy, then you take your laser-cutter, cut out some shapes, drill a few holes and bam you've got a box. If you got none of these and just want a bare-necessities box, you use an Altoids Tin that costs about $25 for 12 tins... and they have these kinda useless mints in them though. So you buy those boxes, then you throw away the mints and shove your project in there. If you want slightly better than the Altoids tin, you buy a Hammon Enclosure. (https://www.hammfg.com/electronics/small-case https://www.hammfg.com/electronics/small-case). If you're like me, you wrap it in electrical tape, and then wrap that in duct tape or something. Maybe color on it with permanent marker.
shoelessone 3y ago
I am by no means an expert, but I wrote up a bunch of words on how I did this personally for a family Xmas present here. The tl;dr; is a custom PCB in my case: https://kevinmitchell.io/blog/mitchine-esp8266-wooden-thinking-of-you https://kevinmitchell.io/blog/mitchine-esp8266-wooden-thinki...
bobsmooth 3y ago
I designed a carrier board for my module to slot into. You can also solder the header pins directly to some perfboard and build off that.
dekhn 3y ago
I wouldn't call it "productize", but when I wanted to give an ESP32 project to a friend who would be using it, I did these things: designed and printed a case for the ESP32. The ESP32 is soldered into a perma-proto and all wire connections are soldered to the ESP32's terminals (I don't use a solderless breadboard, or Dupont wires, once I'm done with the design). The perma-proto is screwed into posts in the case (as are several daughterboards). The user-controlled potentiometer is also soldered into the perma-proto and is tightly screwed into the case. There's a power jack screwed into the case, and all wiring in/out of the case goes through a "cable gland" and the cables, outside the case, and wrapped into nylon sleeve with strain relief. And an on/off switch. example: https://www.printables.com/model/72839-stable-and-waterproof-electronic-box-enclosure https://www.printables.com/model/72839-stable-and-waterproof.... If I am using screw terminals, wires are terminated with ferrules. For some projects that use 120V AC directly, I've purchased nice receptacle with fuse, and grounded the metal casing. But I don't feel comfortable distributing those. I have also been known to encase an entire project in clear epoxy (the first "maker" project I did, thanks to an enlightened shop teacher in the 1980s, was a nightlight using only 3 components, encased in epoxy; they work some 35 years later!) Some things I can think of to go further: designing my own PCB instead of using perma-proto. FInding better temporary connectors (duponts are not reliable). Eliminating the ESP32, replacing it with simpler logic circuits when possible.
qiqitori 3y ago
If it uses Bluetooth you're theoretically on the hook for thousands of dollars if you want to sell your ESP32 project as a product. (IANAL; it may take a lawyer to truly understand if you have to pay or not.)
- sweetjuly 3y ago
  ESP32 modules (read: not just the packaged ICs) are pre-certified in most markets. This is the main advantage of shelling out for these more expensive modules instead of just integrating it all yourself. It's also why many of the IOT products which use ESP32s use modules and waste a lot of area rather than the much smaller ICs: certification is a nightmare for small scale products!
tbyehl 3y ago
If you're not wiring anything but power, LilyGo T-Dongle-S3 is an ESP in a USB-A thumb drive form factor complete with a shell and optionally a 160x80 color LCD.

by davidw 3y ago

lostapathy 3y ago

3d printed enclosure?

davidw 3y ago
That sounds like one of those "I have a problem... now I have two problems" jokes. I wanted something simple and cheap and now I need to go deal with this whole other thing I don't know much about and either rent or buy into it?
- krasin 3y ago
  JLCPCB would 3d print high-quality enclosures from a variety of UV resins: https://3d.jlcpcb.com/ https://3d.jlcpcb.com/ and decently cheap. The next best option is injection molding with PCBWay (or other similar provider): https://www.pcbway.com/rapid-prototyping/manufacture/?type=4&reffercode=TOP https://www.pcbway.com/rapid-prototyping/manufacture/?type=4... An alternative is a sheet metal enclosure: https://www.pcbway.com/rapid-prototyping/manufacture/?type=4&reffercode=TOP https://www.pcbway.com/rapid-prototyping/manufacture/?type=4... But 3d printing with JLCPCB is really the most convenient way unless you need a lot of parts (thousands) or the material properties of the UV resins would not be enough (high-temperature, outdoors, etc).
- Zetobal 3y ago
  You can also pay someone to do it.
- lostapathy 3y ago
  As somebody else mentioned, you can hire it out. There's a lot of files running around with existing models for common projects, so you probably don't need to design your own enclosures a lot of the time unless you want to. And printers have gotten cheap, like $99 gets you a jumping off point into the hobby.
  - davidw 3y ago
    Do people not just sell like "complete package" things? The board in the article is $13.49 ( https://www.amazon.com/dp/B072HBW53G https://www.amazon.com/dp/B072HBW53G ). If you could get an enclosed, complete thing for $20, including the board and whatever you need for it to run, that'd be much less of a PITA than "brand new hobby" or "find someone to 3D print stuff for me locally and deal with that whole hassle".
    - kps 3y ago
      There are things like M5Stack (also ESP32-based) that suit some purposes.
      - davidw 3y ago
        Yes! That looks pretty cool and more like what I'm talking about.
    - kube-system 3y ago
      The thing about enclosures is that they are pretty design dependent. Nobody knows what you are hooking up to your board or what the intended purpose is. Some boards do have generic type cases, e.g. raspberry pi cases.
  - szundi 3y ago
    $99 is just enough to jump into the hobby of fixing your printer all the time - and that's what hobbyists are actually looking for solving something would be like $700 calibrated out of the box, like the old prusa 3 something or the bambu p1something.
- bluGill 3y ago
  That is why so many amateur projects look ugly: making a pretty package is a whole new skill set. 3d printing is the easiest acceptable solution, but it isn't the best. Best would be a custom designed injection molded housing, but that is even more work to design. Nothing about making a nice presentation is beyond what amateurs can do. However it is a lot more effort and so most decide it isn't worth it.
  - davidw 3y ago
    I don't care if it's "beautiful" or ultra-compact or looks as nice as some Apple device. All I want is to buy one thing without wires and an exposed board.
    - bluGill 3y ago
      There are not enough of you to make it worth the effort most likely. If you disagree then you should invest in the business opportunity.
- fnordpiglet 3y ago
  There are plenty of enclosures available on AliExpress and Amazon. But a cheap reprap 3d printer is a general tool like a screw driver or hammer, albeit more complex for sure. But the learning curve isn’t absurd, it’s basically buying something plugging it in and loading filament then printing a downloaded STL. It gets harder when it needs calibration and maintaining, but it’s not an unknown dark art - there are a billion helpful discord groups. But once you have it and know how to maintain it, anything where you’re like “man wouldn’t it be nice if I had a physical object like X” becomes a relatively solvable problem. There are lot of materials with many different properties. When you skip into a zone of material or print you can’t afford the equipment for, there are a bazillion print shops. The harder skill frankly is the 3d modeling. But I find openscad is sufficient for almost everything and then for the rest I use Build123. They’re both parametric code driven design tools so fit well inside a software project (better than GUI tools, and more easy to be precise with). Openscad is absurdly easy, build123 is more advanced and requires Python skills as well as effort to learn the conceptual model. I sort of felt the way you seem to once upon a time until I said screw it and figured it out one day. Now I feel like I lived most my life hobbled for want of this tool. So, yeah, overkill for printing an esp32 enclosure. But doing so unlocks a lifetime of possibilities.
- Johnny555 3y ago
  If you're looking for an enclosure for your hobby ESP32 project, there are lots of off the shelf, small enclosures available: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=esp32+enclosure https://www.amazon.com/s?k=esp32+enclosure If you want to sell a more finished commercial quality project and don't want to print your own, there are places that will fabricate one for you (but in low quantities, having them 3d print it probably cheaper)
- dekhn 3y ago
  The simplest I can think of is this: https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/sparkfun-electronics https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/sparkfun-electron... use a step drill or other large-diameter bit to cut holes for cable glands, dremels to cut rectangular holes for power switches, and drill and tap holes for standard brass standoffs. IMHO everybody should have at least one cordless drill and drill bits, as well as an M3 tap. Then use Cable glands for wires going in/out, and nylon sheathing for the cables outside the box. If you take the time to make the holes nicely, the result often looks good enough that non-makers will think you are a god of manufacturing.

bluGill 3y ago

There are lots of options. Most of what you see they don't: this is a one off project for the hacker and if others find it useful great, but not the goal. As such packaging isn't needed, sometimes you shove it in a box. If you want something nice, that can be done, now you need to pay someone (could be yourself!) to design a package. ESP32 is designed to be easy to put into your own products, this means design a circuit board and case to fit each other, and so on. Then you buy the ESP32 chips in bulk and assemble them onto the circuit board. The board you buy for a prototype is officially only a reference board and not what they expect you to ship (though shipping the board is common: they are small, cheap, and someone else did the hard board design)

davidw 3y ago
I'm not really talking about producing something at scale, just the bare minimum of not having a board with wires coming out of it. Say I want to do some one-off project and put it outside somewhere, out of the weather, with some batteries to power it. Or an indoor thing with an AC hookup of some kind. Doesn't have to be perfect or beautiful or as tiny as possible; just sort of a complete package.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- qwertox 3y ago
  I just buy new small breadboards and jumper wires and make it so that it looks nice. Jumper wires of the proper length, not jumper cables.
- amenghra 3y ago
  You can buy project boxes. Some of them come with breadboards/perfboard that properly fit with screws (e.g. https://discountbloc.ru/archive/products/xwzz1130z33x.html https://discountbloc.ru/archive/products/xwzz1130z33x.html). Alternative is to 3D print a box. Altoids box is a classic. Food plastic boxes also works depending how hot the components run.

mikub 3y ago

I look if if I can find some already assembled things and try to build an project around it. For example I used an pictureframe to build a nice neopixel thing, I also documented it on my website, https://mikub.me/post/(1)/ https://mikub.me/post/(1)/ So what I do is I usually look around what everyday objects could become nice enclosures for microcontrollers and such things.

morphle 3y ago

You shouldn't productise anything with ESP32, its just an overprized bloated hobby pcb. See my comment below on how to productize this: use a 4 cent off the shelf microcontroller on a 10 cent pcb or much better: make a custom chip with all the sensors on board but with $25K minimum Capex but tiny Opex

chpatrick 3y ago
There are thousands of ESP32-based IoT devices on AliExpress that would disagree with you. It's an SoC chip not a "pcb".
morphle 3y ago
As others point out: you could hire someone to do it. Based on my custom 1 cent ASIC (custom chip) I would design, test and build your (moisture or other) sensor for €3000 excluding tax and price of all the needed tools. Usually more like $6000 because they want to outsource all the problems (like mass production and sales) to me morphle@ziggo.nl if you want me to design it
- szundi 3y ago
  Mine would be 0.3 cent per chip and would need $50k investment. Jokes aside, if you know how to design a custom chip for 3k USD, I would like to know about it.
  - morphle 3y ago
    it is not a joke, you can do as low as 1.10870 cent per custom chip or 2 cent per off the shelf chip. 0.03 cent is impossible, the minimum size of a chip is .625 mm2 and that sets the minimum price. Designing one for $3K is possible because I already have a tested chip design that I just have to modify for you. A master student project is usually a free design with a free tapeout at Google MPW, Mosys of Europractice. I also design bigger chips and $500 wafer scale integration with 10000 cores : https://vimeo.com/731037615 https://vimeo.com/731037615
    - 3y ago

serial_dev 3y ago

You get a "product designer" (?) who designs a case. If your product is "standard enough", you might skip this step. Then, you reach out to local manufacturers and ones from bigger markets. You get some samples, you check if things work like they should. If you like it, order a smaller batch. Design a quality assurance workflow, or find a specialist who can help you with that so that the manufacturer doesn't ship you 20% faulty products. Get your products onto the shelves of a brick and mortar store, and/or create a website, sell on Amazon and other portals. Talk to your customers, listen to their feedback, improve every step a little. It sounds overwhelming. I worked for a small smart home startup, and I learned that, for example, in Shenzhen, there is a whole industry ready to help entrepreneurs realize their dream products, and at every step of the way, you can contract someone to help you. In our experience, the Chinese service was both much better, cheaper, faster than European offers.

greggsy 3y ago

Smaller dev boards and shrink wrap.

_jal 3y ago

I like wood. It is pretty much everything you want for something like this - super durable, very easy to work with, and depending on what you pick, cheap and pretty, too. Plus, woodworking is very satisfying by itself. And also easy to get started with - for small box-like things like this you only need a few cheap hand tools.

morphle 3y ago

You shouldn't productise anything with ESP32, its just an overprized bloated hobby pcb, very unprofessional. See my comment below on how to productize this: use a 4 cent off the shelf microcontroller on a 10 cent pcb or much better: make a custom chip with all the sensors on board but with $25K minimum Capex but tiny Opex

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
AnotherGoodName 3y ago
The esp is a cheap microcontroller. You shouldn't productionize an esp32 dev kit but you should absolutely productionize an esp32 on a board you've designed that has the specif features to do your thing (whatever that is).
- morphle 3y ago
  no, the ESP32 is a SoC, a bunch of chips in a package on a PCB. not a bare microcontroller chip. It is already a product with several resellers: ip, fab, packaging, exporter, distributor, retailer and a very high profit overhead of at least 2.7 times the costprice
  - k0k0 3y ago
    You're absolutely wrong on a number of points. A SoC stands for "system on a chip", it refers to a single die (if you want to get pedantic, there are multi-die packages but this does not apply here) package, a "bare chip" if you will. https://www.espressif.com/en/products/socs/esp32 https://www.espressif.com/en/products/socs/esp32 The ESP32 is a SoC. It's available in QFN packaging (Quad Flat Pak No Lead). The ESP32 is available included with a number of "modules" (and of course devkits). These modules are designed for production use and it can be economical to do so. You clearly don't have the foggiest idea about these product lines so don't seem to be in a good position to comment on the economics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESP32 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESP32

mkingston 3y ago

I mount the board on some nylon standoffs through a takeaway box lid. The rest of the takeaway box is the enclosure. I drill some holes through the takeaway box for wire ingress and egress. I use a tupperware container if I'm feeling fancy.

boustrophedon 3y ago

There are a lot of companies that make electronics enclosures. Some of them are waterproof. Usually they have a couple pre-drilled mounting flanges to screw in the board as well, and then you'd drill your own external holes for input/output as necessary. Here's a couple manufacturers, and you can usually find stuff on e.g. adafruit and digikey as well to save on shipping if you're buying dev boards or other parts from them already. https://www.hammfg.com/ https://www.hammfg.com/ https://www.budind.com/ https://www.budind.com/ http://takachi-enclosure.com/ http://takachi-enclosure.com/ https://www.adafruit.com/product/903 https://www.adafruit.com/product/903

HeyLaughingBoy 3y ago

I am a huge fan of M5Stack. Take a look at the Tough or Core units. You get an ESP32 with couple of peripherals (speaker, buzzer, real-time clock) and a TFT touchscreen all in a case. Water-resistant in the case of the M5Stack Tough. I've shipped a couple of consulting products based on them and it really cuts down on the work I need to do in order to build product.

davidw 3y ago
That's exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about. You could take those and plug them together and be basically ready to go, rather than "just" investing in a bunch of 3D printing and soldering and lord only knows what else. Maybe it costs a bit more, but that's fine - you get something that you can use somewhere besides sitting on your desk with a bunch of exposed wires.

jpcfl 3y ago

You can design both a circuit board and a case with Fusion360, which is free for personal use. Use JLCPCB to assemble the board for you. You can 3D print the case yourself. It took me about 20hr to learn how to use Fusion360 and make a simple circuit and case this way.

martinsnow 3y ago

Usually a black abs box will do

dragontamer 3y ago

If you're handy with wood, you use wood. If you've got a 3d printer, you make a 3d print. If you're more of a acrylic guy, then you take your laser-cutter, cut out some shapes, drill a few holes and bam you've got a box. If you got none of these and just want a bare-necessities box, you use an Altoids Tin that costs about $25 for 12 tins... and they have these kinda useless mints in them though. So you buy those boxes, then you throw away the mints and shove your project in there. If you want slightly better than the Altoids tin, you buy a Hammon Enclosure. (https://www.hammfg.com/electronics/small-case https://www.hammfg.com/electronics/small-case). If you're like me, you wrap it in electrical tape, and then wrap that in duct tape or something. Maybe color on it with permanent marker.

shoelessone 3y ago

I am by no means an expert, but I wrote up a bunch of words on how I did this personally for a family Xmas present here. The tl;dr; is a custom PCB in my case: https://kevinmitchell.io/blog/mitchine-esp8266-wooden-thinking-of-you https://kevinmitchell.io/blog/mitchine-esp8266-wooden-thinki...

bobsmooth 3y ago

I designed a carrier board for my module to slot into. You can also solder the header pins directly to some perfboard and build off that.

dekhn 3y ago

I wouldn't call it "productize", but when I wanted to give an ESP32 project to a friend who would be using it, I did these things: designed and printed a case for the ESP32. The ESP32 is soldered into a perma-proto and all wire connections are soldered to the ESP32's terminals (I don't use a solderless breadboard, or Dupont wires, once I'm done with the design). The perma-proto is screwed into posts in the case (as are several daughterboards). The user-controlled potentiometer is also soldered into the perma-proto and is tightly screwed into the case. There's a power jack screwed into the case, and all wiring in/out of the case goes through a "cable gland" and the cables, outside the case, and wrapped into nylon sleeve with strain relief. And an on/off switch. example: https://www.printables.com/model/72839-stable-and-waterproof-electronic-box-enclosure https://www.printables.com/model/72839-stable-and-waterproof.... If I am using screw terminals, wires are terminated with ferrules. For some projects that use 120V AC directly, I've purchased nice receptacle with fuse, and grounded the metal casing. But I don't feel comfortable distributing those. I have also been known to encase an entire project in clear epoxy (the first "maker" project I did, thanks to an enlightened shop teacher in the 1980s, was a nightlight using only 3 components, encased in epoxy; they work some 35 years later!) Some things I can think of to go further: designing my own PCB instead of using perma-proto. FInding better temporary connectors (duponts are not reliable). Eliminating the ESP32, replacing it with simpler logic circuits when possible.

qiqitori 3y ago

If it uses Bluetooth you're theoretically on the hook for thousands of dollars if you want to sell your ESP32 project as a product. (IANAL; it may take a lawyer to truly understand if you have to pay or not.)

sweetjuly 3y ago
ESP32 modules (read: not just the packaged ICs) are pre-certified in most markets. This is the main advantage of shelling out for these more expensive modules instead of just integrating it all yourself. It's also why many of the IOT products which use ESP32s use modules and waste a lot of area rather than the much smaller ICs: certification is a nightmare for small scale products!

tbyehl 3y ago

If you're not wiring anything but power, LilyGo T-Dongle-S3 is an ESP in a USB-A thumb drive form factor complete with a shell and optionally a 160x80 color LCD.