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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 15th, 2023

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  • 10+ years experience in product design here. There is nothing about a “simple” product that is cheap or easy. Say you hire a design engineering firm to design it, who is going to make the parts? Have you ever worked with manufacturing in Asia? Who is going to assemble it? Who deals with the inevitable issues?

    Then you have to think about selling it. What certifications do you have to get?

    That is just hardware, now repeat many of these same questions for firmware and app development.

    Now you have a product, what are the customers and who do you need to hire to market and sell to them? Assuming someone is interested in purchasing it how much money do you have to pay for all the product up front and warehouse it?

    There is a damn good reason why so many Kickstarter projects never actually ship. Hardware is hard even if you know what you are doing.









  • Nope, I’ve long worked in designing for North American electronics manufacturing, it’s still manual. We just outsource as many of those sub assemblies as possible to cheaper countries and design things with as few fasteners as possible.

    That really is the least of the worries, there just isn’t the manufacturing infrastructure for all the raw material and individual parts, manufacturing those parts just isn’t feasible to do at a reasonable cost or schedule outside of Asia. China is still popular not due to cost, they are no longer cheapest, but because they have the infrastructure in place.










  • Time and motion studies can be incredibly effective. My company once wanted to automate some processes and sent me down there to watch the workers and identify the processes we could automate. Talking with the workers and filming a few of them gave me all the information to save well over $1M per year just by making the current process more efficient. Literally cost some people’s time to do the analysis, change some documentation and validate the improvements. Even the workers were happy because they had less waiting around for things to happen and were part of the process.