I feel the project outline is very idealised, without any much regard to how manufacturing will be done.
Massive component shortages are a life, and death matter for small companies now, and it's not only about IC shortage.
What we had in the industry for last 5-6 year is a chronic shortages, and interruptions of supplies of passives for example.
Redesigning entire power supply circuit, and re-layouting the PCB because one can't find a high spec capacitor? Happened many times on my watch.
Doing design is only like 10% of time one spends to manufacture anything, and because of that it's not rational to obsess over it.
For an enthusiast team, just getting anything, even a prototype run coming out of a factory is where 9 out of 10 projects stall.
People run out of the financial runway thinking the factory gate being the finish point... and then they get an email like "Please redesign all your design, and do it 1 week or loose the manufacturing time slot"
Thank you for your feedback. I agree with your points; manufacturing is an essential part of the process that I neglected to include in the article. Thank you for bringing it up. When we are at that stage, I would appreciate your feedback and suggestions.
Either you have lots of trial, and error yourself, or you pay somebody for a bit less of it, but still nowhere near a complete assurance.
An experienced contractor may keep burning your money, but deliver something in the end.
If you yourself is not confident in your experience, there is a risk your team just running out of enthusiasm, and patience, if not money without seeing the light in the end of the tunnel.
Yeah,the technical challenge of getting something working usually end up being the easier part. Manufacturing ends up being very difficult: at a small scale, it's super expensive and at a medium to large scale, logistics becomes difficult.
At every scale changes to the design (either for enhancements or EOL parts) is expensive. Injection molding dies require significant engineering, setup, and futzing-with to bring to production. More recent innovations in mfr'ing can be helpful (speed up prototyping and lower the cost of spinning molds or dies) but can't completely liberate you from the difficulties.
I would love to see stuff like this succeed, but the difficulty can't be underestimated.
Massive component shortages are a life, and death matter for small companies now, and it's not only about IC shortage.
What we had in the industry for last 5-6 year is a chronic shortages, and interruptions of supplies of passives for example.
Redesigning entire power supply circuit, and re-layouting the PCB because one can't find a high spec capacitor? Happened many times on my watch.
Doing design is only like 10% of time one spends to manufacture anything, and because of that it's not rational to obsess over it.
For an enthusiast team, just getting anything, even a prototype run coming out of a factory is where 9 out of 10 projects stall.
People run out of the financial runway thinking the factory gate being the finish point... and then they get an email like "Please redesign all your design, and do it 1 week or loose the manufacturing time slot"