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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

#211

Post by jcelerier »

skippyfish wrote: post #132

Hardware has a reputation for being hard for three reasons. First, it scales differently than software. It's far harder to design something you want to make a million of than something you want to make ten of. Second, it's harder to anticipate, test, and correct all the things that can go wrong on the user end. Some people will put batteries the wrong way, some will drop the device on the ground, some will connect it…

> Imagine we had that for software - "your JS is too big, you can't ship until you get it under 50 kB".

... that's a very normal constraint in many fields of SWE?

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

#213

Post by Grombobulous »

embedding-shape wrote: post #197
Grombobulous wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m just wondering why it’s bothersome that someone else doesn’t like coding with LLMs. Maybe they just like doing it the old fashioned way. You can both exist. Unless you’re getting a commission to sell LLMs to people I struggle to understand what you’re trying to achieve.

> why it’s bothersome It's not bothersome, I'm not bothered by it at all, everyone gets (in my mind) to do things that makes sense to them. When I write comments here disagreeing with others, it's more from a "Please explain further your perspective so I can understand it, which hopefully I trigger by challenging it" view than anything else, not "You should do as I am doing things". > Maybe they just like doing it th…

Fair, I understand better where you're coming from now. Perhaps I read into more of an implication than there was.

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

#214

Post by thrtythreeforty »

jcelerier wrote: post #211
skippyfish wrote: post #132

Hardware has a reputation for being hard for three reasons. First, it scales differently than software. It's far harder to design something you want to make a million of than something you want to make ten of. Second, it's harder to anticipate, test, and correct all the things that can go wrong on the user end. Some people will put batteries the wrong way, some will drop the device on the ground, some will connect it…

> Imagine we had that for software - "your JS is too big, you can't ship until you get it under 50 kB". ... that's a very normal constraint in many fields of SWE?

Nothing stops embedded work faster than running out of code space on a microcontroller!

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

#215

Post by analog31 »

dofm wrote: post #111

A question: Are you still below any significant scale thresholds and are there any you dread crossing? I ask this because I tend to find things are simple until they are not. e.g. it's easy to write an e-commerce platform until you have to deal with shipping, duty, tax, tax on shipping, etc., for multiple countries. There are scale thresholds I am aware of in hardware that I have not yet run up against. For example I…

I make a physical product, akin to a guitar pedal. Possibly the most scary threshold would be if I'm successful enough that I need to quit my day job, but not successful enough for the business to support my family. That's kind of a no mans land where I don't want to be.

Another similar threshold would be having to hire people, which changes the complexity of the business in a variety of ways.

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

#216

Post by analog31 »

iamflimflam1 wrote: post #71
chipweinberger wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I chose to do FCC only and CE self-certify. If you use pre-certified radios it's not as expensive as you think. $5K should be plenty if you ask around. Just make sure you design your board so you actually pass, and don't let the labs over-sell you. They'll try to! 99.99% of cheap Chinese products you buy on Amazon don't actually have this testing done at all. So by doing any testing you're already way above them.

I wrote a bit about this in CrowdSupply write up - https://www.atomic14.com/2025/07/21/crowd-funding-retro CE is all about self certification. The lab testing gives you the confidence to do this. It can be expensive - but Chinese test labs are very affordable and do a really professional job. There is now quite a good EU based service - https://early.smander.com/ I used them to get some advice early on (disclaimer, I…

How did you go about finding a Chinese test lab? Asking for a friend. ;-)

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

#217

Post by BobbyTables2 »

tmp10423288442 wrote: post #188
skippyfish wrote: post #132

Hardware has a reputation for being hard for three reasons. First, it scales differently than software. It's far harder to design something you want to make a million of than something you want to make ten of. Second, it's harder to anticipate, test, and correct all the things that can go wrong on the user end. Some people will put batteries the wrong way, some will drop the device on the ground, some will connect it…

>your JS is too big, you can't ship until you get it under 50 kB Back in the glorious past, the iOS App Store either didn’t allow apps larger than 100 MiB, or at least forbade them from being downloaded over mobile connections. There’s an old blog post/Twitter thread you can find on Hacker News where an Uber engineer describes the challenges they faced in trying to keep their app under that limit. They were also rewr…

It still boggles my mind than such limits are a problem. Sure, a game with graphics and sound could easily burn past that.

But for a “boring” ride hailing app, it’s still beyond my imagination.

Microsoft Word was something like 8-10MB in the Windows 3.1 days. WordPerfect was about the same and even had a grammar checker.

The entire damn PC with DOS, Windows, and Word was 30MB.

We’ve fallen so far, we mistake the darkness for outer space.

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

#219

Post by Max-q »

em3rgent0rdr wrote: post #162
skippyfish wrote: post #132

Hardware has a reputation for being hard for three reasons. First, it scales differently than software. It's far harder to design something you want to make a million of than something you want to make ten of. Second, it's harder to anticipate, test, and correct all the things that can go wrong on the user end. Some people will put batteries the wrong way, some will drop the device on the ground, some will connect it…

> "actual regulations...emissions" yeah, and looking at their board I see they use one of "ESP32-WROOM" modules, which has the wifi & blutooth & antennae (pre-certified by Espressif for FCC, CE so itself doesn't need testing) & flash & processor (which even has its own RC oscillator), which takes care of a whole ton of difficult stuff so all the designer needs to do is plop that module down and power it up and wire s…

The pre certified module do not exempt the product from testing. It only means that you don’t have to do the conducted testing and that it’s a higher probability for passing the other tests. There are still lots of chances to fuck up and a full radiated test of the product is required.

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

#220

Post by Max-q »

iamflimflam1 wrote: post #71
chipweinberger wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I chose to do FCC only and CE self-certify. If you use pre-certified radios it's not as expensive as you think. $5K should be plenty if you ask around. Just make sure you design your board so you actually pass, and don't let the labs over-sell you. They'll try to! 99.99% of cheap Chinese products you buy on Amazon don't actually have this testing done at all. So by doing any testing you're already way above them.

I wrote a bit about this in CrowdSupply write up - https://www.atomic14.com/2025/07/21/crowd-funding-retro CE is all about self certification. The lab testing gives you the confidence to do this. It can be expensive - but Chinese test labs are very affordable and do a really professional job. There is now quite a good EU based service - https://early.smander.com/ I used them to get some advice early on (disclaimer, I…

You can’t self certify any products including a radio (almost everything today due to WiFi and BLE), products for children or medical equipment. An accredited lab is required.
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