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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

#101

Post by connorlu »

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?

If you're building with KiCad then I've found the folks on the KiCad discord[1] very willing to take a look over a design and provide feedback. There's also a subreddit[2] for PCB design posting and review, but I haven't personally used it.

[1] https://www.kicad.org/community/chat/ [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/PrintedCircuitBoard/

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

#102

Post by chipweinberger »

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…

I don't entirely disagree. Just one sample point. But there are certainly much more simplistic hardware products out there. I'm often envious of them.

Here's a good example: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=brick+smartphone+blocker&ia=web

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

#103

Post by chipweinberger »

raphman wrote: post #77
chipweinberger wrote: post #2

I'll be sticking around in the comments so feel free to ask questions. AMA!

The website gives a very nice and captivating intro to the device. But why do you spell MIDI in lowercase there? > plugs into your piano via midi

The marketing answer: all lower-case looks modern and opinionated

The real answer: I got tired of deciding what should and shouldn't be capitalized. Sounds easy but it gets ambiguous fast.

I'll revisit this decision at some point. Capital letters do make reading easier.

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

#104

Post by erwincoumans »

Another happy customer, bought two Jamcorder units. Not just the hardware is simple, the software as well: it just works, quietly in the background. I just had to enable daily auto-reset otherwise it eventually had issues. Whenever someone starts playing piano, it records. The iOS app is so nice, playing back on the phone or on the piano, and keeping track of total hours played and organizing favorites. Congrats, if only more projects kept things simple and useable!

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

#105

Post by chipweinberger »

brookst wrote: post #85

Great write up! Why custom MIDI connectors of all things? What requirement couldn’t be met off the shelf?

Not technically custom, but made to order (I gave them a spec sheet). If they had reasonably priced connectors on LCSC or DigiKey, etc, I would have used them!

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

#106

Post by scottydelta »

I am also on a similar boat. After writing softwares for almost 13 years now, I am now working on a privacy focused and universally compatible casting device.

Would love to talk to you more about hardware supply chain issues and challenges.

Meanwhile if anyone is tired of their smart TV being a spyware or showing ads, I would love to talk to you. This is what I am building: https://soljacast.com

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

#107

Post by assimpleaspossi »

>>Now, granted, Jamcorder is -- very much intentionally -- a simple device. I get that.

And let's not forget that. And let's not just follow the headline.

Greetings from a hardware engineer with decades of experience building hard things.

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

#109

Post by BloodyIron »

How did you market it? I'm trying to get into my own production stuff and I don't want to participate in the parasitic Amazon or overcrowded Etsy ecosystems. Looks like you're doing sales through your own website, which I want to do myself. But I haven't yet figured out how to bring legit traffic to my own website. I don't have money to throw at advertising and that's a minefield of fake traffic anyways. Any advice to share please?

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

#110

Post by chrismorgan »

swiftcoder wrote: post #17
stavros wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please do, that'd be very interesting. I imagine it's doable to use random per-device I'd when you're hand-flashing, but probably harder on a huge production run.

Almost all commercial devices need a unique ID, private key, etc burned in on the production line. For a big enough production run, you'd likely ship an HSM to the factory

> Almost all commercial devices need a unique ID, private key, etc

Serious question: why?

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