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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

#91

Post by mosura »

cmicali wrote: post #82

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 spectru…

That underrates the difficulty in keeping things simple.

It is mentioned elsewhere here that a lot of time was burned on unused firmware features. It takes surprising discipline to cut stuff and still deliver.

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

#92

Post by c0nsumer »

rustyhancock wrote: post #18
chipweinberger wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm using an STSAFE chip - the same IC they use in StarLink terminals. Essentially the digital equivalent of a holographic barcode. I have some other protections too. e.g. Random 128-bit per-device IDs / product-keys. iMessage uses this strategy. Maybe I'll write an article about that.

Sounds like that'll be a great read. This is (literally) none of my business, but would you consider a cut down or basic open source version (hardware and software, with open software running in the proper hardware). Yes it'll be cloned by factories, and yes it will cut into sales no matter what proponents claim. (And yes it's probably more work than I imagine it is). But also yes, it'll be genuine open hardware and…

Reading your comment it sounds like you're asking the author to do more work to potentially/likely undercut their own sales. They are already offering a quality device at a reasonable price without any untoward restrictions.

If you want a Free work-alike, why don't /you/ put in the work and make it happen?

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

#93

Post by t-3 »

embedding-shape wrote: post #68
alabhyajindal wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did solutions to problems just pop into your head when you were programming before LLMs? Did you not pause and think about the code you were writing before?

Most of the time by the time I reach the problem, the solution already been thought of, yeah. The literal typing and editing was behind compared to where my mind wanted to go I suppose. But also I spend long time considering the design/architecture before even attempting to write the code, so most of the time when I was literally typing code I'd know pretty much how it should be. Unknowns-unknowns being explored as s…

I think you just have a much narrower definition of programming. Others seem to be including the "long time considering the design/architecture before even attempting to write the code" in the programming, while you are only counting the time spent at the computer. You both agree much more thinking time than typing time is involved, just not that thinking about programming counts as programming.

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

#94

Post by illwrks »

j-bos wrote: post #63

Inquiring minds want to know: what is your anti-counterfeit strategy or is the fact that you're keeping it under your hat part of the strategy? Also, pretty cool that you set up your website real fast. Would you mind adding your Twitter link onto the site?

My guess is that it’s on the software side partnered with the app.

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

#95

Post by arthurwolf »

I don't know what the timeline is here, but to me this sounds like he either got lucky, or he's in the grace period when you begin a project and the strong enthusiasm for it, and the fact people are not seriously trying to copy it yet, work together to make everything just that much easier...

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

#96

Post by Intermernet »

discordance wrote: post #30
bgnn wrote: post #20

It's a poor take to be honest. I'm an EE with main expertise in IC design but I design a lot of the chip packages, PCBs, mechanical stuff like custom made sockets etc and write a ton of SW, be it tools for myself for development and testing, be it the firmware of the chip I'm designing or another chip I use on the board. For me it never felt like SW was the hard bit, because you can write and test it pretty immediate…

I’m working on my own PCB and it’s my first time working on a hardware project. Any tips on how or where I could get my design reviewed?

I'm usually not an Ai shill, but I found Fable to be the first LLM that could actually provide useful feedback on a KiCAD PCB design. I paired it with a KiCAD MCP, but it tended to reverting to raw KiCAD scripting. If you ask it to review a PCB design, and provide feedback relevant to PCB design best practices, it will probably give you something useful. I wouldn't trust it to do a full design, but it's pretty good at finding issues. I'd add a few clauses to the request regarding checking components against JLCPCB/PCBWay/etc available components, as well as checking copper layer thickness and distances from the main components to the supporting components.

I did this as an experiment on my current project and it found a bunch of minor, non-critical, but completely valid problems with my deisgn.

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

#97

Post by swiftcoder »

NBJack wrote: post #78
Hackbraten wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For a big enough production run, you'd likely ship an HSM to the factory I figure that the factory is exactly the adversary in the whole threat model? So why give them the keys to the castle so they can moonlight their own genuine batch?

A few ways, if I understand them correctly. On-site people you employ (if you can afford it) auditing the process, connectivity to the HSM to record every key assigned (makes it easy to trace duplicated keys to their origin), and ideally assigning these keys at the very last possible step after the rest is assembled (to minimize 'defective' parts wandering off and being assembled elsewhere).

Yeah, it's important that your own people are doing regular inspections of the production line, keys get burned at the final station (use temp keys for QA stages before that point), and you retain software control of the HSM.

You probably aren't going to do this whole rigmarole for small runs of devices like in the OP.

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

#98

Post by chipweinberger »

illwrks wrote: post #94
j-bos wrote: post #63

Inquiring minds want to know: what is your anti-counterfeit strategy or is the fact that you're keeping it under your hat part of the strategy? Also, pretty cool that you set up your website real fast. Would you mind adding your Twitter link onto the site?

My guess is that it’s on the software side partnered with the app.

Yes the anti-counterfeit is primarily app enforced (though entirely offline). I do use the firmware encryption features of the ESP32-S3, whatever that is worth, and the firmware is tied to the HSM.

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

#99

Post by HNisCIS »

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.

The anti counterfeit strategy is that the volumes here aren't worth it for someone to clone, even if the board and code are dead simple.

These niche hobby products are usually reasonably safe because they rely on community network effects, becoming the darling of a random subreddit or discord group and people aren't going to save $20 to get some device of dubious origin.

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

#100

Post by jrflo »

cmicali wrote: post #82

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 spectru…

Agreed. At someone who works primarily in hardware, it is definitely hard. A midi-to-bluetooth recorder is practically a software project in a fancy box. There is very little physical complexity to deal with here, which is what makes hardware difficult- the interaction between firmware and the "real world".

Congrats though, making a half-million a year business is a massive accomplishment! The headline just irked me a bit, haha (but, it got my attention, so I guess you win there)

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