6 ms·

15 years ago I did a hardware startup, development was extremely hard and I woved never to do a hardware startup again. Now I'm not so sure. Our problem was t

by mixmax 14y ago

15 years ago I did a hardware startup, development was extremely hard and I woved never to do a hardware startup again. Now I'm not so sure. Our problem was twofold: First hardware development was not generally something you just did in your sparetime, it was for the big boys. This meant a lot of convoluted processes for dealing with suppliers, expensive and unreliable dev kits and tools, long lead times and all sorts of other hassles. Second the turnaround time for a prototype was at least two weeks. If you made a small mistake you'd find out two weeks later when your prototype arrived. This adds up quickly and slows you down tremendously. Not because we made a lot of mistakes, but we had to be absolutely sure that something worked before sending it off to be prototyped. No testing a new idea in an afternoon or two. These things have totally changed with the commodisation of hardware and the looming 3D revolution. With a makerbot, a raspberry Pi, an arduino and a shelf full of components you're prety much ready to go and can hammer together a working prototype in no time. If you feel cheap you can buy a nice box for your arduino and call it a finished product.

jpdoctor 14y ago
> Second the turnaround time for a prototype was at least two weeks. If you made a small mistake you'd find out two weeks later when your prototype arrived. [Cue Four Yorkshiremen] Try an fabless IC company: 8-10 week turn times on fabrication, each run was 6 digits $.
- arbuge 14y ago
  Indeed. I used to be an ic designer... 2 weeks turnaround would have been hog heaven. As for money, some of our runs were 7 digits expensive. Very painful.
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ErrantX 14y ago
> With a makerbot, a raspberry Pi, an arduino and a shelf full of components From recent experience working on a hardware side-project: these are extremely cool and useful development/indie tools. But when you get to the stage of large scale production we are still lacking easy entry. I've been working on an XBEE home automation project intended to be run from a Rasp Pi "server" (but designed to run from anything that can boot linux and has GPIO). It's looks great, has a nice enclosure and is something any hobbiest could get working with the right plug and play bits. But. Packaging this for mainstream, where a user can simply buy "black boxes" and connect them up is tough. Circuit design and fabrication on any scale requires both skill (i.e. in designing the layout - I am an Electronic Engineer but of the solder-stuff-together ilk rather than CAD) Admittedly places such as Batchpcb etc. make prototyping a lot easier, but the hurdles you mention are still there in many forms. The maker/hacker collective is very well serviced nowadays. Next we need someone to disrupt the small-scale development arena: off hand, a community of PCB designers/hackers available to make bespoke PCB layout which links into a batch production system would rock! I've hacked together my prototypes, but have minimal confidence they will work first time :)
- ippisl 14y ago
  circuits.io is working on an interesting solution: http://blog.circuits.io/post/34159982502/in-this-video-karel-demonstrates-how-to-build-a http://blog.circuits.io/post/34159982502/in-this-video-karel...
  - ErrantX 14y ago
    I've got further using that tonight than I got in about 2 weeks learning Eagle. Thank you! A great project.
- beambot 14y ago
  Plus... a lot of these companies are side-stepping CE / FCC certifications by clinging to the "we only sell to 'developers'." When you want to sell to non-DIY consumers, I'm not so sure this is an option anymore -- especially for projects like home automation where there are serious safety concerns (fire and electrocution!). I've never gone through that process. Anyone know ballpark costs for certifications?
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hn_ta_acct 14y ago
(this is from a throwaway to avoid naming the company I worked for) I worked at a startup with a hardware product in 2011 (nb: I didn't work on the hardware personally, but was aware of the difficulties we faced), and the issues you describe are all very familiar. It may be the case that the technologies you describe allow you to push the problems to later in the product development cycle, but from what I observed, they all still happen once you try to transform that product into a consumer product that can be manufactured and sold at a viable price-point. It's true for example, that the hardware engineer founder built a prototype relatively quickly using off the shelf components, but the resulting product was so large, the housing so ugly, and those components so expensive that it would never have been economically viable. Once they were past the prototype stage, they faced all the problems you describe: parts manufacturers and suppliers only willing to deal in huge quantities and make sales well in advance; finding manufacturers who can make plastics that are of high quality and meet safety standards is surprisingly difficult and slow [1]; much of the tooling for small, cheap, low-power-consumption microcontrollers seems to be from the dark ages [2]. What made it even worse was that many VCs we spoke to seemed to be unfamiliar with or unwilling to take the risks associated with hardware startups: much higher up-front costs to scale the business, and much longer product development times. It's possible the company I worked for didn't take advantage of all the modern developments available to hardware startups, or that they had the wrong strategy (trying to scale too fast or seeking the wrong customers, for example), but I certainly have enormous respect for the challenges hardware startups must overcome, even in these times. 1: Some anecdotes I remember from the plastics saga: the first overseas manufacturers they tried in an early attempt to make the housings cheaper absolutely would not, and maybe could not produce a housing in the correct shape. We would send them models in a form designed to be structurally sound and aesthetically appealing, and they'd come back as basically ugly square boxes. We ended up using a much more expensive US-based manufacturer for a long time because of this. (IIRC, they were more expensive mostly because their facility was really meant for rapid development and not mass production.) I also remember a significant delay at a crucial time because we couldn't get the fireproof coloring agent we needed in the right color. 2: One of the hardware engineers spent a grueling couple of weeks hunched over an oscilloscope looking for a particular pulse that would indicate that the microcontroller had found and booted our company's software on the chip.

by mixmax 14y ago

jpdoctor 14y ago

> Second the turnaround time for a prototype was at least two weeks. If you made a small mistake you'd find out two weeks later when your prototype arrived. [Cue Four Yorkshiremen] Try an fabless IC company: 8-10 week turn times on fabrication, each run was 6 digits $.

arbuge 14y ago
Indeed. I used to be an ic designer... 2 weeks turnaround would have been hog heaven. As for money, some of our runs were 7 digits expensive. Very painful.
deleted 14y ago
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ErrantX 14y ago

> With a makerbot, a raspberry Pi, an arduino and a shelf full of components From recent experience working on a hardware side-project: these are extremely cool and useful development/indie tools. But when you get to the stage of large scale production we are still lacking easy entry. I've been working on an XBEE home automation project intended to be run from a Rasp Pi "server" (but designed to run from anything that can boot linux and has GPIO). It's looks great, has a nice enclosure and is something any hobbiest could get working with the right plug and play bits. But. Packaging this for mainstream, where a user can simply buy "black boxes" and connect them up is tough. Circuit design and fabrication on any scale requires both skill (i.e. in designing the layout - I am an Electronic Engineer but of the solder-stuff-together ilk rather than CAD) Admittedly places such as Batchpcb etc. make prototyping a lot easier, but the hurdles you mention are still there in many forms. The maker/hacker collective is very well serviced nowadays. Next we need someone to disrupt the small-scale development arena: off hand, a community of PCB designers/hackers available to make bespoke PCB layout which links into a batch production system would rock! I've hacked together my prototypes, but have minimal confidence they will work first time :)

ippisl 14y ago
circuits.io is working on an interesting solution: http://blog.circuits.io/post/34159982502/in-this-video-karel-demonstrates-how-to-build-a http://blog.circuits.io/post/34159982502/in-this-video-karel...
- ErrantX 14y ago
  I've got further using that tonight than I got in about 2 weeks learning Eagle. Thank you! A great project.
beambot 14y ago
Plus... a lot of these companies are side-stepping CE / FCC certifications by clinging to the "we only sell to 'developers'." When you want to sell to non-DIY consumers, I'm not so sure this is an option anymore -- especially for projects like home automation where there are serious safety concerns (fire and electrocution!). I've never gone through that process. Anyone know ballpark costs for certifications?

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

hn_ta_acct 14y ago

(this is from a throwaway to avoid naming the company I worked for) I worked at a startup with a hardware product in 2011 (nb: I didn't work on the hardware personally, but was aware of the difficulties we faced), and the issues you describe are all very familiar. It may be the case that the technologies you describe allow you to push the problems to later in the product development cycle, but from what I observed, they all still happen once you try to transform that product into a consumer product that can be manufactured and sold at a viable price-point. It's true for example, that the hardware engineer founder built a prototype relatively quickly using off the shelf components, but the resulting product was so large, the housing so ugly, and those components so expensive that it would never have been economically viable. Once they were past the prototype stage, they faced all the problems you describe: parts manufacturers and suppliers only willing to deal in huge quantities and make sales well in advance; finding manufacturers who can make plastics that are of high quality and meet safety standards is surprisingly difficult and slow [1]; much of the tooling for small, cheap, low-power-consumption microcontrollers seems to be from the dark ages [2]. What made it even worse was that many VCs we spoke to seemed to be unfamiliar with or unwilling to take the risks associated with hardware startups: much higher up-front costs to scale the business, and much longer product development times. It's possible the company I worked for didn't take advantage of all the modern developments available to hardware startups, or that they had the wrong strategy (trying to scale too fast or seeking the wrong customers, for example), but I certainly have enormous respect for the challenges hardware startups must overcome, even in these times. 1: Some anecdotes I remember from the plastics saga: the first overseas manufacturers they tried in an early attempt to make the housings cheaper absolutely would not, and maybe could not produce a housing in the correct shape. We would send them models in a form designed to be structurally sound and aesthetically appealing, and they'd come back as basically ugly square boxes. We ended up using a much more expensive US-based manufacturer for a long time because of this. (IIRC, they were more expensive mostly because their facility was really meant for rapid development and not mass production.) I also remember a significant delay at a crucial time because we couldn't get the fireproof coloring agent we needed in the right color. 2: One of the hardware engineers spent a grueling couple of weeks hunched over an oscilloscope looking for a particular pulse that would indicate that the microcontroller had found and booted our company's software on the chip.