While you're not entirely wrong, have you seen the stuff people are building with even simple off the shelf components like Arduino's and Raspberry PIs? Even FPGAs are within the price range of individuals, and small companies can easily go full ASIC for a few 100k$ if you want to get really custom. There is nothing stopping you diving head first into this world and designing and building (or having built) basically any hardware you want.
Yes, and yet plenty of tools and products target that market anyway. Especially since while a good chunk of it is hobbyist use, another large chunk is small-run electronics where relatively high price tags can easily be justified. But even in the hobbyist space, while the people who would actually use the tools are few in numbers, many hobbyist projects get built in the 100's or even thousands - whether by end-users themselves or by people selling them to end users. FPGAs are often a good chunk of the cost of projects like that.
There's a group of guys I build hardware/firmware for. They are experienced engineers, but their expertise is in machine tools.
We met because they made a post on an Arduino forum a few years ago basically saying "we need to do X. We know it has to be possible in a cost-effective way because of all the cheap Arduino, Raspberry Pi, etc. hardware we keep seeing for sale but we don't have any experience on those platforms. Can anyone help us?"
This illustrates a point that a lot of people don't see: while Arduino or RPi were released for a specific purpose, the absolutely massive ecosystem that grew up around them enabled a slew of entirely new classes of applications that weren't feasible before due to cost.
Back to "my" guys. If I quoted them an upfront design for what they needed, starting from scratch, it would have reached into the five figures easily. Instead I was able to say "hey, I'm working on something that has a lot in common with that. I'll build you a prototype of what you need for the cost of the hardware" and we went from there. Now that project makes me a few $k per year.
Hardware as a rule isn't necessarily expensive. If you had a specialised peripheral you might be able to get going on a million -- maybe even a lot less if you can push functionality to software (eg a simple setup where the fpga or microcontroller does all the heavy lifting).
The problem is when you want to compete in a market with volume and wide distribution. Eg something like a tablet pc. Unless most of the idea comes from OEM parts then you need big money.
Could you expand on this? I'm an EE but I don't see the practicality of building all your own hardware. As it is it is difficult enough to build economical hardware to sell to others, let alone build one off personal hardware. What power am I holding here?...
The article assumes all learning is academic from authorities and never from doing. WRT doing at only $280/mon at a reasonable billing rate I could burn thru my learning budget on a saturday afternoon and barely keep up with the times much less get ahead.
The other problem is it assumes all learning is of the mind, but if you get it in your head to get involved in physical aspects of the field, then some FPGA boards and oscilloscopes and next thing you know you've blown your budget until 2030 unless you're careful. Arguably even "mind only" developers who buy anything more than a raspberry pi should account for their annual $3000 mac laptop and $500 phone (and its $1200/yr of phone service) and pretty soon you have no budget left over just buying hardware alone.
I've been thinking about this a lot lately. It seems that hardware may be the New Way (tm). There exist some pretty exciting technologies for cheap, namely FPGA boards and SOC (system on a chip... and/or nano-itx). These make a very large portion of hardware design much simpler. We can suddenly apply software rapid development techniques to board design with the FPGAs. Further the SOC makes much functionality within a product just software development.
Further, there are many exciting "hobby kits" which make gadgets very creatable and testable, since they allow for easy plug-and-play hardware creation. This sort of thing makes prototyping very very easy, and the rest can be outsourced pretty well. Sure there are complications that I know nothing of, but I think there is an abundance of supply chain for a lot of projects, making small hardware companies totally possible.
A slightly different perspective on the above: I beleive there exists at least one market that can be exploited by putting together existing big components in fun new ways.
You can still build interesting devices that are not available off-the-shelf. It's just that these days most of the value (and complexity) lies in the software, not the hardware, and people are both not capable of writing complex software and do not enjoy doing it.
As an example, take a Nordic nRF52832 in a module, connect some sensors or LEDs to it, and you have a pretty neat device that you could access with your phone. But programming it to do something is an entirely different story.
One thing I found about hardware is that the prototype is only 10% of the effort. Sourcing components for mass production, government regulatory hurdles, and then that damn enclosure are 90% when everything goes right.
I can build all kinds of things with my arduino and all of those awesome little one-off function boards you can snag on ebay from china theses days. I can't build 10000 of any of them.
Making hardware hasn't gotten any easier except at the edges where open source has taken a hold, but it seems like the only reason you'd want to design hardware anymore is to have more vertical control. Tesla, Apple, Google are all prime examples.
The margins on an OK product just aren't worth it, and to be competitive you have to build the whole thing and provide a reference design that's within 20% of the best out there to even break even. No surprise the market is all oligopolies. If there wasn't open source and affordable fab services coming up, there would really be no hope.
My formal education and majority of background is hardware (EE undergrad and grad). I also work full time doing hardware design and firmware mostly.
The problem with a lot of hardware is the initial investment and that things take longer. If you are just hacking some simple hareware together like a microcontroller and nothing special its easy to proto, but if you get into things that need to be prototyped on PCBs the cost and time goes up, especially the time factor.
I tend to enjoy software more these days simply because I can compile things and test them right away. It can get onerous when you spend days laying out circuit boards, a week or two to spin them, then 2 weeks to get them built, while you just spent about 10k for 50 prototypes.
Hardware development is hard, but if it's doable. Even on a budget.
A Ten years ago I started a hardware company that developed an advertising sign based on LED's. It was basically a motor with a stick of RGB LED's attached like a propeller. When you spun the stick and modulated the LED's just right you could paint full color disc shaped picture seemingly in free air. An FPGA would control and modulate the LED's (at the time it was the only affordable thing that could modulate a LED 400.000 times a second) The whole thing was online via an OEM phone module and would automatically update with ads, weather, etc. from a server where customers could buy campaigns online. Campaigns could of course be customised wo that you could get your ad only on the displays you wanted. I was in charge of getting this whole bandoogle from an idea to a product, and while it was hard I managed develop and bring it to market for around $200.000. Remember this was ten years ago where you had to tap directly into the a carriers network and hack around just to get an IP address, and five years before the iphone.
The point of the story is that sometimes small nimble companies that are set on doing something actually succeed. I'm not saying that these guys have solved all the problems, indeed it sounds from the article that there are some huge obstacles. I'm just saying that you should never underestimate the power of a small team whose only goal in life is to make something happen.
As a software-only guy, this article brings me great encouragement for doing a hardware project in the future! :)
Although, to be honest, my bigger problem is probably just simply not having a use case which I could use a self-built hardware project for. I don’t feel like I’m missing or lacking anything in my life or at home that could be fixed with a hardware project.
Additionally, I usually want the absolute best solution to a problem that I can afford. Commercial products have satisfied me well so far. My mindset about this is that if I can just pay someone for a product that solves my problem, I will gladly do so instead of scratching my head with a self-built project (I consider my time more valuable than anything else).
So I guess what really needs to happen to make me actually dip my toes in the hardware soup… is to have an annoying enough problem that cannot be solved with ready-made products on the market (either because they are bad or outright don’t exist).
Most people in software have no concept of just how difficult hardware can be. Add to that the fact that most physical products today are really hybrid hardware + software, with the added feature that this sometimes means FPGA + one or more MCU's + analog + high speed controlled impedance + matched propagation delay + signal and power integrity. Yeah, hardware is, well, hard. This is particularly true at scale. Anyone can make one or a few of something. Scale it up and things get interesting very quickly.
I am currently working on one such projects. One of the modules will be manufactured at an initial rate of about 5K units per month and is predicted to eventually reach as high as 50K per month. With software --and particularly with web-based products-- you can literally have millions of customers, make mistakes and fix things overnight.
Imagine shipping hundreds of thousands of physical products and discovering a problem with the design. Not the same world at all. Heck, in most cases you can't even update the software after shipping. Which means you have to get all of it right before it goes to manufacturing.
Among other things, I think this is one of the reasons for which VC's aren't all that interested in hardware. It's difficult, capital intensive and the risk vs. reward simply isn't on the same scale.
That said, I enjoy hardware development. Yes, I do software just as much and, believe me, its a walk in the park compared to hardware, but I would not trade one for the other. No pun intended, either you are wired to like hardware or you are not. That's the way I see it.
>The complexity of developing hardware is driven by the number of discrete components used.
No its not. Most components are practically free #1, placing them is also very cheap #2. Hardware is not expensive because of _hardware_ costs. Its expensive because of engineering, prototyping, and latency of development.
/1 single/two digit cents. Except for specialized parts. For example hiend precision resistors, supercaps, weird connectors, non commodity microcontrollers, fpgas, fast ADCs, or precision opamps/voltage references. Nevertheless you will largely use jelly bean components with only few expensive parts on the board.
/2 again except for the very hiend small footprint ones. Super small components targeting lightweight products (cellphones, ultra light laptops) require professional millions of dollars machines and experience. Here is a story of one company almost tanking because CEO is a Jobs wannabe and decided to make his product "sexy" using same components and techniques as Macbooks:
It's all about the hardware now, building out your own components isn't going to be easy, get a microprocessor that was build pre-1998 or try an open source hardware solution but who wants to do that..
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