> If they can save money by swapping out a component for unknown alternatives, there's some nonzero chance that will happen.
Yeah, I don't tend to go full turnkey unless I'm doing everything in China. At which point, I fully expect that they're going to use the cheapest, crappiest components they can find, and I'm going to just have to deal with it.
Normally, I buy the components and then ship them if I'm using a US assembly house.
> They won't supply us with parts unless we have some sort of product interest, but we can't generate any sort of product interest unless we have some sort of website. It's very much a chicken and egg sort of problem.
> The problems are, that they stock to much of some parts and not enough from others.
Is there a reason for that? I would imagine they'd have actuarials telling them exactly how much of each thing they need to produce a thing, as well as failure rates.
> But these requirements still ignore one of the biggest problems: the price of spare parts.
No, that is short-sighted.
The price of spare parts is the symptom. The root cause is that the part are highly specific to whatever they are going into, and there is a single supplier for them.
For repairs to be easy, things have to be made with generic parts that are available from multiple suppliers.
Not all parts have to be that way, just the ones likely to break, or ones that are expected to require replacement by design.
You're not going to get decent prices for spare parts, if you're vendor-locked, and there is no competition.
> Sure, but components and all of your other equipment also have to be shipped.
Those are not custom parts, they are shipped in bulk.
> but you at least need a decent soldering iron
There are people out there who cannot afford to _need_ a $40 temperature controlled soldering iron, and irrespective of the lottery of where they were born in the world, they still have an interest in (and often a need to repair) electronics.
The industry trend of ending dip package options is inevitable but it also makes things harder for many makers across developing countries.
> This should be based on core tech development only..
What good is the tech if you can't put it into production? There are real design and manufacturing issues to deal with, and a company that doesn't take that into consideration and give it the attention it deserves likely won't do well in the long run.
> they could have used off-the-shelf components for the same task.
They did use off-the-shelf components. They performed poorly and they resulted to developing a custom die with the right components to handle the task of computer vision. They explicitly stated this in multiple interviews. The off-the-shelf solution was crap.
>> Yeah, their parts generally are very good, but the industry isn't healthy if they're the only company with good designs.
>> All this consolidation has left a lot of room for a good competitor.
Which will come from Asia. US companies seem to avoid competition as much as possible. The rather obvious outcome of that is they end up uncompetitive. The thing is, new stuff has to be developed while you are still profitable, not after someone is winning away your business.
> almost like they just didn't keep track of how much R&D they did for each item.
That’s often almost the whole point!
Tracking the R&D effort for each item in the repair kit would add an enormous amount of overhead and accomplish essentially nothing. The numbers will be wild guesses and you’re going to have to make tons of ad hoc decisions about allocation anyway. Suppose you tweak the design so it a part can be attached with a special pin rather than a screw and spend an hour testing it. What’s the “right” allocation of time to the pin, hammer, part, and screw (that you’ve eliminated)?
> Traditional car companies largely rely on suppliers to redesign electronics (at even greater cost and lead time).
Just to put this in perspective for some readers, I used to work at one of the largest automakers and suppliers would bend over backwards for us. They would shut down the line and retool for us when we needed something quickly. But even when things were running smoothly, some parts had a 12 month lead time and there was nothing that could be done to expedite that.
I remember one part that we shared with many other automakers had a recall. It took the industry over 3 years to supply all of those parts to consumers. Not airbags, this was almost 20 years ago.
All of that is without a design change. Now add a design change on top and it can easily move a 3 month lead time to 12 months or more.
I do consulting for another automaker now and one of our chips has become unavailable. Actually, at the beginning of the pandemic the price jumped almost 10,000%. We had no choice to pay it, but that also killed all of the margin on that particular part so we immediately started redesigning the PCB for a new chip. The software had to be rewritten for the new chip; several case components had to be redesigned to accommodate the new PCB, testing, mass production, etc. That was over a year ago and the part is just starting to roll out now.
So, I think PlayDate's messaging is completely reasonable.
> As has been typical in my career, when the vendor said they had a product, what they really meant was they had something vaguely resembling a product that vaguely matched what we needed, and with heavy customization they could torture it into doing what we needed.
How many times have I been accused of wanting to "reinvent the wheel" while facing this exact situation ? I can't count.
> OEMs (GM, Ford, Toyota, VW, etc) do not design components, and they do not want to. They design specifications for components, and then get suppliers to bid. This is great for efficiency in established ecosystems, not great for agility.
There are some great stories about SpaceX trying to source components this way and then finally ending up having to DIY.
What they found was that modern CAD and rapid prototyping made it easier than it used to be. Car companies would probably find the same thing, and have the luxury of doing it piecemeal at their own pace by gradually insourcing components in the order of necessity or benefit.
The “do not want to” part probably points to these companies being run by Ivy League MBAs educated in the 1990s and 2000s when this was conventional wisdom. The world is changing.
> If they actually wanted to make change, they would have explicitly said “without adhesive” or “consumer is able to open without specialized tools.” This is no more than posturing.
They could also target availability of repair parts and tools (both the software kind and the electromechanical kind) rather than dictating design constraints.
> >How comprehensive is the part library?
> I don't care as long as it has the usual industry standard footprints. For anything unusual I can make my own footprints.
A thousand times this.
There's two kinds of people:
1: Uses library parts
2: Makes their own parts, has been bitten by the library parts being wrong (wrong pinout, footprint size etc)
> Are knobs and plastic moldings that expensive though?
If you consider the entire cost, yes. Every BOM item has a huge cost associated with it, and it's price only a small fraction.
Consider that for every item you need to:
* secure supply for the next 10 years or so
* organize purchasing and put it into the supply chain
* design assembly instructions, teach workers how to assemble it
* design and implement testing procedures
* design and implement diagnostics to figure out which specific component has failed
* maintain it and keep it available for your service network for the next 10-15 years
* deal with unexpected failure rates and be ready to re-design in case of problems
* also, every knob is actually not one component, because it needs to be connected to something, which implies wires and connectors (the most problematic components in electronics) and multiples all of the above several times.
Look at it this way and suddenly you really want to minimize the number of individual components and replace them all with a single touchscreen. Especially given that you can then deliver crappy software and the market will bear it, because we have been trained to expect and accept crappy software.
But I do agree that the marketing appeal is there, too, although I think some people are waking up.
> They had ordered their complete BOM before a prototype was finalized... They spent all their money buying components before their design was finalized. These aren’t poor engineering decisions, they’re poor business decisions.
Not having even a single prototype (even if you ignore the fact that ideally there should be multiple) done before ordering the parts for manufacturing is fundamental failure of engineering process, it is not a business decision failure.
Those are your parts; the designs are owned by you. You are always free to ask around for other manfs to make them.
> Even what seemed to be commodity components like switches, screws and motors would be made to spec.
This makes the product sound terrible. I really doubt they need to make screws or switches.
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