Although hardware is known for being “hard” for good reason, it has never been easier to turn an idea in your head into a real-world product ready for sale.
Don’t get me wrong, hardware is still hard, in fact any new business venture is hard. But it’s so much easier today than in the past to introduce a new hardware product to the world.
As a designer for Texas Instruments, and through Predictable Designs, I’ve been lucky enough to work with some of the smartest engineers in the world.
I’ve worked with or hired people from India, China, Russia, the U.K., Germany, Mexico, Malaysia, Canada and others. So, don’t discount a potential engineer because of the country they work in. Don’t assume that hiring a developer overseas is always too risky.
Creating a new hardware startup is an overwhelming process and it can be quite confusing to know where to even start. In this article I want to highlight what your top 6 priorities should be when forming a hardware startup.
Choosing your product’s optimal price is an extremely important decision that should be made as soon as possible. In general, if your product is priced too high then it won’t sell well. If your product is priced too low, you won’t be able to make a decent profit.
My name is Dave Millman and I help high-tech startups find their first customers. John Teel asked me to share some of my first-hand experiences so as to help you avoid many of the first timer manufacturing mistakes.
One of the most frequent questions I am asked is, “how long will it take to develop my new product?”. Everyone, of course, wants to know when they can expect to have their product ready to go on store shelves.
This is a guest post by industrial designer Christian Theill.
The design of electronic devices almost always requires a multitude of professional skills: electronics, mechanics, production techniques, aesthetics, ergonomics, finance, commerce, communication, marketing and others. The conscious coordination of these disciplines is vital for the success of your project.
In a recent blog I discussed the path to market for entrepreneurs with a strong technical background. I started that blog by telling a story about an engineer named Gary, and his marketer friend named Paul. You eventually learn that Gary and Paul are really Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs (I used their middle names).
I’m going to start with a story about an engineer named Gary.
Like many engineers and makers, as a child Gary always loved playing with electronics and computers, so it was no surprise that he ended up with an electrical engineering degree. He spent his free time as a teenager tinkering around with circuit boards and building odd ball things like a dial joke machine.
Developing a new electronic product is never cheap, but in this article I’m going to share with you 12 tips to significantly lower your costs.
Minimizing your costs is even more important in the early stages of development. Goal number one should be getting your product to market as quickly and cheaply as possible.
It’s a long, rough, expensive journey to take a hardware product from idea to market. That journey becomes even longer, rougher, and more expensive when you end up taking the wrong path.
So I want to share eight tips with you that will speed up your journey and make it a bit easier and less expensive too. These tips will help keep you on the right path to success.
The odds are you are going to need some sort of outside funding at some point in order to get your product to market. If you are lucky enough to get your product to market without outside funding, you will surely require it to grow your company.
What if I told you that it was possible to build an army of salespeople around the world, and that you only had to pay them if they actually sold your product?
And, even better, that you only had to pay them after the customer has paid you, so you don’t need to spend any money upfront.
I’m going to share with you the three steps I followed to get a manufacturer to invest over $100,000 in my product without me having to give up any equity in my company.
By following these three steps, you will have a much better chance of getting a manufacturer to invest in your product too.
Most electronic products require multiple certifications in order to be sold. Which certifications you will need depends on your product specifics and the countries where you will market and sell it.
Don’t overlook the cost and time you will need to obtain all of the certifications necessary for your product.
There are many types of prototypes that you will hear about when developing a new hardware product. Each stage of bringing your product to market has different prototype requirements.
Unfortunately, a single prototype is never sufficient for bringing a commercial product to market. No matter how advanced computer-aided-design has become any new product will require multiple prototype iterations.
Determining the right type of business structure for your startup is critical. It affects how much you pay in taxes, your ability to raise outside funding, the paperwork you need to file, and your personal liability.
When bringing a new product to market, most entrepreneurs follow the same, orderly sequence.
First, they focus solely on product development. After that’s complete, they focus on manufacturing. Once the manufacturing is setup, they finally start thinking about how to market and sell the product.
Many entrepreneurs have so much confidence in their product idea, and are so sure that it will be a success, that they skip one of the most critical steps when bringing a product to market. That step is to first validate the product idea.
Hardware startups take a long time before they begin generating significant income. Because of this, most people find it necessary to keep their nine to five job to support themselves, their families, and their start-ups during the early years.
When starting a new product business, you’ll likely need to hire engineers.
Unless you happen to be a jack of all trades who can do electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, and software development, or if you’re lucky enough to have a co-founder team with all of these skills, you’re going to have to bring on outside engineers.
How do you know if you have what it takes to succeed with your product?
Developing a new product is no simple feat, and neither is getting it reliably manufactured. And, perhaps most challenging of all is figuring out how to get the word out about your product.
Invention promotion firms want one thing – your money. They don’t really care if your product is a success or not, because they are only focused on scamming you and taking your money. They have no interest in seeing your product succeed.
Should you raise money for your startup, and if so when?
The short answer is yes, you probably will need to raise money for your hardware startup. It’s very difficult to completely scale a hardware startup without, at some point, raising money.
I can’t stress enough how critical it is to have an audience for your product.
Having an audience helps you gather feedback on what features you should include in your product, and it is critical whenever you run a crowd funding campaign or begin selling your product.
The battery type of choice for most electronic equipment running on batteries is the li-ion battery.
Of the other types that were used previously, NiCad batteries for use in electronic equipment have been banned in the EU, so the overall demand for those types have dropped.
Modern smartphones are marvels of technology, and it is really impressive how much technology is crammed into such a compact device. The product that the customer holds in their hands is certainly the result of many compromises made to satisfy many conflicting requirements.
Microcontrollers are great for implementing the smarts behind a given product. However, one thing that they cannot do is directly control anything other than, maybe, a single LED. That’s because the output drive of most microcontrollers can directly source or sink only about 10mA.
Embedded applications often need to reproduce sound. Whether you need simple prompts, chimes, rings or music clips, having the ability to reproduce pre-recorded audio can greatly enhance the UI (User Interface) of many embedded applications.
An oscilloscope, frequently referred to in the trade as a scope, is an essential diagnostic tool used in any serious electronic circuit design activities.
A scope provides a time-stamped, running clip of a signal at the point of measurement. The signal in this case is simply an input voltage.
An embedded system is a stand alone, intelligent system dedicated to running a set of tasks, or an application, from the moment it is powered on.
This is in contrast to the way an application is started on a desktop or similar device, where the user does not have to specifically load anything.
The ESP32 is a powerful, feature-packed, SoC that can be effectively used in many applications. For all its features, it is surprisingly affordable.
While generally known for its WiFi and Bluetooth ability, it can nonetheless be used as a general-purpose computing platform, due to its favorable cost to benefits ratio. This is the focus of this article.
Given the explosion of Internet-of-Things (IoT) capable products, I wanted to go into more detail on how to add wireless sensors to your new product.
This article describes a simple system, and a communication protocol, that can be used to implement a two-way, low-speed, polled star network. While not suitable for all applications, there is a surprising range of applications where this setup could be used.
If you are a maker or engineer planning to develop your own electronic product, then you’re going to need a way to test, program, and debug the electronics. In this article we will discuss how you can construct your very own lab setup for testing out all your product concepts.
The STM32H7 is the most powerful member of the popular STM32 family of 32-bit microcontrollers based on ARM Cortex-M cores, and offered by ST Microelectronics.
This microcontroller can be clocked at speeds up to 480 MHz with a benchmark performance greater than 1,000 DMIPS. This is one of the fastest, most powerful microcontrollers currently available on the market.
The ESP32 is a very versatile System On a Chip (SoC) that can be used as a general purpose microcontroller with quite an extensive set of peripherals, including wireless capabilities.
Manufactured by Shanghai based Espressif Systems, the ESP32 costs less than $5. It’s quite popular with the maker community, but is also a good low-cost solution for mass production.
There are numerous applications where detecting the presence or absence of an object is required. This article will explore the different methods of object detection, how they are implemented, and their major advantages and limitations.
Developing a wearable electronic product involves juggling design constraints and compromises in ways that are quite a bit different from a conventional non-wearable design.
In this article, I’m defining a wearable product as a body-worn device, with its own power source, that doesn’t restrict the movement of the wearer. Examples would be a pair of smart glasses, or a smart watch.
Thanks to Amazon, Google, and Apple, voice recognition has finally gone mainstream.
I’ve personally dreamed about intelligent voice recognition since I was a kid tinkering with electronics and programming my Commodore 64.
NOTE: This is a guest post by Shawn Litingtun, an amazing electronics engineer that I work with closely. He is also one of the experts inside the Hardware Academy available to answer your technical questions.
NOTE: This article is a guest post by Shawn Litingtun. Shawn is an extraordinary electronics designer. He has an insanely comprehensive understanding of many topics in electronics and has extensive knowledge on electrical certifications. I’m yet to ask him a question about electronics that he can’t answer! He is also one of the experts inside the Hardware Academy available to answer technical questions.
In my years of working with hardware entrepreneurs I’ve seen too many cases of poorly designed Printed Circuit Boards (PCB) that would never be of sufficient quality for commercial production.
In some cases these boards were designed by the entrepreneur themselves, and other times they were designed by a freelance engineer.
Choosing a battery for a given application involves more than just knowing the application requirements. An understanding of the underlying technology of each battery type, its characteristics, limitations, and advantages, is required in order to select the right type of battery.
Selecting the right microcontroller for a project involves juggling many factors. In addition to cost, performance, power consumption and overall size, the availability of the proper software and hardware tools is a prime consideration.
Every electronic system that has some kind of microcontroller, or microprocessor, needs to have some memory attached to it.
This memory holds the program that the processor executes. It also holds the data that the program requires, or produces. This data may come from sensors, or is some intermediate result of the running program, or is simply to be saved or displayed. In an ideal world, there should be only one kind of memory.
If your new electronic product requires a display, then it is essential that you select the right type of display.
Your choice of a display directly impacts your product’s user experience simply by being one of its most visible aspects. A display is also likely to be one of the most expensive components in your product, and also one of the most power hungry.
In this second part on battery chargers we’re going to be looking at the BQ24092 and the BQ24703 chargers from Texas Instruments.
If you are not familiar with lithium battery chargers I highly recommend you first read part 1 where I explain some of the fundamental concepts.
One of the most common types of electronic circuits used in modern portable electronic products are battery chargers, specifically those for recharging lithium-ion and lithium-polymer batteries.
This two-part series will review three common battery chargers.
Probably more than 90% of products require a voltage regulator of some kind, making them one of the most commonly used electrical components.
Unless you’re able to run everything directly off battery voltage or an external AC/DC adapter voltage, a voltage regulator is required. Odds are that multiple voltage regulators will be needed.
Technical Difficulty Rating: 7 out of 10
This is a guest post by Roberto Weiser of Developpa.io.
If you are designing an electronic product, chances are that it will have a microcontroller (MCU) embedded into it.
