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What I learned selling 2,500 MIDI recorders: Hardware is not so hard

chipweinberger.com

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Re: What I learned selling 2,500 MIDI recorders: Hardware is not so hard

#81

Post by dominotw »

embedding-shape wrote: post #37
dgellow wrote: post #35

Wow, congrats, I remember reading your HN post. I hope you will continue writing blog posts on your journey, I expect quite a lot of software engineers would be very interested going though a similar journey now that LLMs removed most of the fun of programming. It’s neat to work on something physical for a change

> now that LLMs removed most of the fun of programming Never understood this, was the "most of the fun of programming" the literal typing for you? For me it was about solving problems and building things, and I get to do that more now than before, and without all the literal typing.

programming is thinking while typing. its not like llm think, chill, think. very unatural.

Re: What I learned selling 2,500 MIDI recorders: Hardware is not so hard

#82

Post by cmicali »

Congrats on an impressive achievement and milestone. This is a great outcome, great work, and an indication of how far the hardware industry/tooling has come.

This feels though a little to me like building a simple SaaS service, and deploying it on a managed cloud service, and concluding all software is really easy!

This project is near to (if not at) the easy end of the hardware product difficulty/complexity spectrum. Some great choices were made to keep it simple and therefor easy.

An alternate take-away: "If you keep things simple, hardware doesn't have to be as hard"

Re: What I learned selling 2,500 MIDI recorders: Hardware is not so hard

#88

Post by connicpu »

Graziano_M wrote: post #86

> Have a strong anti-counterfeit strategy What is this strategy? You're building this in China, it's already over.

I would assume the 200K lines of software and the firmware is presumably flashed after receiving the product from the assembly house.

Re: What I learned selling 2,500 MIDI recorders: Hardware is not so hard

#89

Post by t-3 »

dominotw wrote: post #81
embedding-shape wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> now that LLMs removed most of the fun of programming Never understood this, was the "most of the fun of programming" the literal typing for you? For me it was about solving problems and building things, and I get to do that more now than before, and without all the literal typing.

programming is thinking while typing. its not like llm think, chill, think. very unatural.

Thinking while typing? Can you just keep generate code at typing speed? I spend a lot more time thinking than typing, and my most productive days are usually when I throw out a heap of code and replace it with a few highly factored functions.

Re: What I learned selling 2,500 MIDI recorders: Hardware is not so hard

#90

Post by Intermernet »

chipweinberger wrote: post #25
iambateman wrote: post #24

This is cool! Thanks for sharing. What understanding about hardware did you start with, and what tools did you use to learn what you didn’t already know?

I started with having watched ~100 hours of EEVBlog :) Electronics, PCBs, CAD, injection molding was all new to me.

I'm in the middle of my first hardware project right now and I can recommend the videos on the "Phil's Lab" channel on YT. He mostly uses Altium, but he has a few videos on KiCAD which really helped me. He also has generally good throwaway comments in his videos with regards to PCB design / component placement, as well as the order of operations for good PCB design.
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