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Lessons learned by a software guy venturing into hardware

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Re: Lessons learned by a software guy venturing into hardware

#11

Post by babl-yc »

wslh wrote: post #9
babl-yc wrote: post #7

I'm on a similar adventure right now, an ex-software person building a motorized iPhone stand that is Bluetooth controlled. It's been fun to see how with Fusion 360, a 3D printer, and JCLPCB you can build all kinds of devices. YouTube and GPT-4 are excellent tutors for hobbyists entering the hardware space. The 2 week wait for custom parts from China makes you realize the advantage they have over there when it comes…

What is the cost of your project? Could you share more information? I was looking to do something similar.

The individual builds will be pretty cheap: sub $75 with an Arduino, NEMA stepper motor, PCB, a few other parts, and some plastic enclosures.

There's definitely some bootstrapping costs to acquiring tools (3d printer, soldering set up, adjustable power supply, Fusion 360 license). That's around $1k-1500 for a nice hobbyist setup by the time you get everything.

The real cost is when you decide to quit your software job to work on a hardware project :)

Re: Lessons learned by a software guy venturing into hardware

#12

Post by codetrotter »

analog31 wrote: post #8
latchkey wrote: post #3

What about advertising your product? I've heard that that is exceptionally difficult these days.

Indeed, advertising suffers from a severe signal-to-noise problem. Like the OP, I make a hobby related product as a side hustle. There are some sources of word-of-mouth advertising through web forums for enthusiasts. Usually you have to give something before you can get something back, and respect the forum rules. I never mention my product unless someone specifically asks. Also, I was an established member of a foru…

What’s the name of your product? Do you have a page with pictures of it and descriptions of what it does?

Re: Lessons learned by a software guy venturing into hardware

#13

Post by Lectroid »

The Author stated that they had experienced hostility when asking questions. While I'm not sure to what level their experience was, I can share the many times I've tried to answer a hardware question in many forums , I found the the individual who was asking was just looking for a quick working solution to their design idea (mostly a school project) and not really willing to take input on how to figure the solution out themselves. Many became hostile when I would not provide the schematic (with calculations) for them. That got old fast and convinced me to not try to help out any more. It's unfortunate that I can't share my 30 years of hard earned design experience with someone who truly wants to learn but I don't have the time to determine who is genuine and who is not. I'm just not going to deal with the hassle anymore. I get plenty of that at my day job....and they pay me to tolerate it.

Re: Lessons learned by a software guy venturing into hardware

#14

Post by hiAndrewQuinn »

>First and Most Important Lesson: If You’re Here for the Money, You’re in the Wrong Place

It's worth reiterating this for college students, etc. considering going down the hardware path. While I got a tremendous amount more intellectual satisfaction by going for an electrical engineering degree instead of a CS or even CompEng one, that was because I realized CS was the kind of thing I would end up in anyway and would gladly study on my own terms. Numerical methods in differential equations, not so much.

If you do decide to do EE in 2023, I strongly recommend you break the mold of sparkies being atrocious coders. The skills are natural complements, even if for some reason most people like to pretend otherwise. But one is much more lucrative on average.

Re: Lessons learned by a software guy venturing into hardware

#15

Post by acchow »

hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #14

>First and Most Important Lesson: If You’re Here for the Money, You’re in the Wrong Place It's worth reiterating this for college students, etc. considering going down the hardware path. While I got a tremendous amount more intellectual satisfaction by going for an electrical engineering degree instead of a CS or even CompEng one, that was because I realized CS was the kind of thing I would end up in anyway and would…

> While I got a tremendous amount more intellectual satisfaction by going for an electrical engineering degree instead of a CS

I find this interesting. Did you end up getting a CS degree and then compare the intellectual satisfaction?

I found CS fascinating. Of course you get to choose your own path through CS and could possibly avoid most of the major breakthroughs, but to do it in earnest is revelatory. There is Godel’s Incompleteness restated/rediscovered through computation; the church-Turing thesis, Curry-Howard correspondence, graph theory, etc. I never did EE, but I did some math in my past and CS felt closer to pure math than anything else I’ve studied.

Re: Lessons learned by a software guy venturing into hardware

#16

Post by nickelpro »

Just like "software" is a huge field with a wide variety of technologies, payscales, opportunities, and niches, so it is hardware.

You wouldn't expect someone writing about the opportunities and lessons from the JavaScript/CSS frontend world to have a huge amount of insight into the work and opportunities of firmware developers.

So it is with hardware, and personally it frustrates me when software people think they can generalize about the "hardware" space because they printed a 4 layer with JLCPCB and now they know the "hardware" world and its ins and outs.

This post is about PCB design and fabrication. The equivalent would be if a hardware person spent a day banging their head against Azure Continuous Integration workflows and wrote a post entitled, "Lessons learned by a hardware guy venturing into software".

Re: Lessons learned by a software guy venturing into hardware

#17

Post by hiAndrewQuinn »

acchow wrote: post #15
hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #14

>First and Most Important Lesson: If You’re Here for the Money, You’re in the Wrong Place It's worth reiterating this for college students, etc. considering going down the hardware path. While I got a tremendous amount more intellectual satisfaction by going for an electrical engineering degree instead of a CS or even CompEng one, that was because I realized CS was the kind of thing I would end up in anyway and would…

> While I got a tremendous amount more intellectual satisfaction by going for an electrical engineering degree instead of a CS I find this interesting. Did you end up getting a CS degree and then compare the intellectual satisfaction? I found CS fascinating. Of course you get to choose your own path through CS and could possibly avoid most of the major breakthroughs, but to do it in earnest is revelatory. There is Go…

>Did you end up getting a CS degree and then compare the intellectual satisfaction?

No, but we could always flip the question since we know you didn't do EE. ;) I did however slap on a math minor and find out I'm way better at abstract algebra than I have any reason to be.

I'll sum it up as "I'm just more of a frog than a bird", but I don't really think that's it. I think relevancy selection is just an inherently hard philosophical problem and it's really hard to actually grok the internal or aesthetic kicks smart people get at different things.

Dynamical systems tickle my fancy, so do group actions and finite fields and generating functions, the incompleteness theorems don't, go figure - at least not present day me, a depressed teenager me looking for philosophical solutions in all the wrong places ate that stuff up.

Re: Lessons learned by a software guy venturing into hardware

#18

Post by xeonmc »

davidhyde wrote: post #10

This article initially upset me because it muddied my hardware honeymoon memories and attacked my perceived future. However, I’m glad I read the whole thing because I the author actually did the thing and built something and wrote about it. It is one of those rare blog posts where things don’t go perfectly well and the author is not some sort of flawless god. Experience is gold and this article lays it out raw, I lov…

There's a reason why it's called "Hardware" and not "Easyware".

The very same reason why it's called "Software" rather than "Dependaware".

Re: Lessons learned by a software guy venturing into hardware

#19

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

Lectroid wrote: post #13

The Author stated that they had experienced hostility when asking questions. While I'm not sure to what level their experience was, I can share the many times I've tried to answer a hardware question in many forums , I found the the individual who was asking was just looking for a quick working solution to their design idea (mostly a school project) and not really willing to take input on how to figure the solution o…

I try to handle this by not being too invested. If the poster hasn't mentioned anything other than "help me," then I point them at resources to learn with a suggestion of where to start.

If they say "I did X Y and Z but I have problem W" then I try to provide more directed, actionable assistance, or at least explain how to debug the problem.

That at least keeps me feeling like I'm being helpful, but not wasting my time.

Re: Lessons learned by a software guy venturing into hardware

#20

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

readthenotes1 wrote: post #4
latchkey wrote: post #3

What about advertising your product? I've heard that that is exceptionally difficult these days.

One approach is to write a blog posting about how you created your product and get it on the front page of Hacker News

... which is not particularly useful if your target user does not intersect with the HN demographic.
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