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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

#121

Post by crote »

Archit3ch wrote: post #73

I can't wait for ASIC manufacturing to become as easy as ordering a PCB.

Unlikely to happen any time soon. The problem is mask manufacturing costs: you spend a lot to make a set of masks, but after that making the chips is incredibly cheap. Great for mass production, not so great for prototyping. And there's a lot of proprietary 3rd-party IP involved in chip production: fabs are not very eager to make that publicly available. Heck, even FPGAs are still mostly proprietary!

That doesn't mean it is completely impossible, though. Fab2 (formerly Atomic Semi, of Jim Keller and Sam Zeloof fame) is trying to do exactly this by aiming at making small-scale production affordable. The trick is to replace the whole mask-based lithography with electron beam scanning: way slower, but no mask costs.

But they are now targeting selling mini-fabs to R&D labs rather than offering an affordable ASIC-as-a-Service. Let's hope one of their customers makes it available to the public!

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

#122

Post by swiftcoder »

chrismorgan wrote: post #110
swiftcoder wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You want a unique ID so that you can track which units are experiencing issues, you want private keys to be able to securely connect to your backend service and/or mobile companion app.

A local-only device with no telemetry can probably skip some of those

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

#123

Post by benoliver999 »

DavidPiper wrote: post #61

Very happy JamCorder customer here. I've started playing in improv shows since I bought it too, and it's nice to have those on record! It's rare that I come across a product I have literally zero complaints about, or any feedback to offer. Even my concern that it was tied to an app that might disappear one day is of course covered by the fact that it's all just MIDI files on a card. Thank you so much for making this,…

Ditto here. I was an early customer and it's just flawless. It powers right off my piano USB so it's basically silent.

If I ever get good at piano it'll be handy

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

#124

Post by 20after4 »

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.

Literally typing is definitely part of the fun for me. I’m a mechanical keyboard nerd though so that might explain a lot.

Beyond the typing though, I find enjoyment in perfecting the structure of the code, thinking deeply about how the pieces fit together. I enjoy the process of iteratively refining the code so that it clearly represents the program using the optimal level of abstraction and minimizes superfluous code/syntax. I find that using an LLM eliminates all of this and produces code that lacks all of the elegance and readability that I aspire to in my own code.

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

#125

Post by peteforde »

Very happy to hear about your success!

I'm curious to hear more about your anti-counterfeit strategies beyond just enabling encryption. I'm curious if you feel like anti-counterfeit and open source firmware are mutually exclusive. I made the choice to embrace an open firmware approach on my project while keeping the hardware closed, while knowing that if someone tries hard enough they can completely reverse engineer if they put their mind to it. Desoldering caps and x-raying PCB layers etc.

I'm also very curious to hear more about your adventure in injection molding. What starting resources do you recommend, how much did it cost? Would you do it the same way today, or have the recent innovations in 3D printing forms for injection molding present superior paths?

Finally, I'd love to hear about your certification process. What certs did you get, how much did it cost, what were the gotchas?

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

#127

Post by Fordec »

bloggie wrote: post #79

Hardware isn’t hard if the hardware is easy? There’s very few components, one of which is a pre made module, and it took 3 years to make essentially a text logger.

And the RF is a pre-certified module. Of course hardware is easy when you've offloaded the hard part to the supplier. Not to mention, a three year turn around? For this? Three months, six max with mistakes and reworks would be industry expectations "pre-LLMs". Everything is easy when you have 6x to 12x the timescale your competitors expect.

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

#130

Post by lelanthran »

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.

> 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.

Your take is so reductionist it's hard to believe you actually like to solve problems.

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