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I worked for a hardware startup for 2 years. In my experience, part of the reason "Hardware is hard" is because it's not something that a lot of people in the t

by vcarl 11y ago

I worked for a hardware startup for 2 years. In my experience, part of the reason "Hardware is hard" is because it's not something that a lot of people in the tech space have spent their lives tinkering with in the way that they have with computers. Version 0 of software just runs on your computer than you already have. Version 0 of hardware (beyond 3d printed prototypes) isn't fundamentally impossible, but most of the startup people I know aren't the sort who know how to cast aluminum in their backyard, for example. We shot ourselves in the foot by paying for tooling for castings before we'd validated it beyond 3d prints. It ended up having minor flaws that we couldn't fix because it required adding material to the tooling, which isn't something you can do easily. If we'd had somebody on the team who was the sort of guy blowing shit up, setting stuff on fire, and making aluminum ingots in a homemade forge when they were 16, I'm confident we wouldn't have screwed up in such a basic way.

fit2rule 11y ago
>>>not something that a lot of people in the tech space have spent their lives tinkering with in the way that they have with computers. Its one of those 'truths' that are so true that people just don't want to deal with it: you can upgrade your software within seconds, but it takes - at least - a few minutes (if you're lucky) to upgrade your hardware. I've also worked for hardware companies, over the years. Hardware is hard because you're pushing atoms around. Not electrons. The difference between the particles is reflected in the difference between the kinds of engineers: you can express, in words, mere electrons - in seconds. But it takes a lot longer to make that same expression in hardware. >>>We shot ourselves in the foot by paying for tooling for castings before we'd validated it beyond 3d prints. We need better tools, and this is pretty clear to the hardware engineers who are trying to bring the design and production of hardware products to the same level of software. Imagine if, one day, we can build new hardware near-as-rapidly-as new software. In many ways (e.g. OpenSCAD: http://openscad.org http://openscad.org) we could compile hardware components as simply as we can software. When the gap is closed, we will have a new class of society: simply, wizards.

by vcarl 11y ago

fit2rule 11y ago

>>>not something that a lot of people in the tech space have spent their lives tinkering with in the way that they have with computers. Its one of those 'truths' that are so true that people just don't want to deal with it: you can upgrade your software within seconds, but it takes - at least - a few minutes (if you're lucky) to upgrade your hardware. I've also worked for hardware companies, over the years. Hardware is hard because you're pushing atoms around. Not electrons. The difference between the particles is reflected in the difference between the kinds of engineers: you can express, in words, mere electrons - in seconds. But it takes a lot longer to make that same expression in hardware. >>>We shot ourselves in the foot by paying for tooling for castings before we'd validated it beyond 3d prints. We need better tools, and this is pretty clear to the hardware engineers who are trying to bring the design and production of hardware products to the same level of software. Imagine if, one day, we can build new hardware near-as-rapidly-as new software. In many ways (e.g. OpenSCAD: http://openscad.org http://openscad.org) we could compile hardware components as simply as we can software. When the gap is closed, we will have a new class of society: simply, wizards.