Hardware's reputation derives from the reality that a lot of companies spin out the hardware before the software is even written - so all hardware bugs have to get fixed in software.
What I learned selling 2,500 MIDI recorders: Hardware is not so hard
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Re: What I learned selling 2,500 MIDI recorders: Hardware is not so hard
#232As usual for these posts. No certifications. No proper markings. Probably non compliant. Will probably go unpunished.
Re: What I learned selling 2,500 MIDI recorders: Hardware is not so hard
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
>and a full radiated test of the product is required legally?
In the EU (and UK with UKCA), CE certification is down to whoever makes the product available on the market. There's no get out for pre-certified modules. If you put a pre-certified module in a box and sell it, you have to be responsible for the CE mark.
You need evidence that the whole product complies with the EMC regulations. There's some judgement involved - if you put a certified circuit board in a plastic box, it won't change the EMC behaviour so you don't need to re-test. But if you solder a module onto a larger circuit board, you are almost certainly changing the EMC behaviour. You should definitely be re-testing something like that.
The pre-certified module does save you some time in the "intentional radiator" testing - assuming you use the same antenna it was tested with as a module, you can probably make the case that the behaviour is the same.
Will anyone ever notice or care for a few thousand niche devices? I doubt it. But to sell in the EU legally you do need to do that testing.
Re: What I learned selling 2,500 MIDI recorders: Hardware is not so hard
#234Hardware 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".
A man can dream.
Re: What I learned selling 2,500 MIDI recorders: Hardware is not so hard
#235Hardware is hard! Because of certifications and organizations like the WEEE. There are many different acts for electronic devices world wide. In Germany you have to spend about $ 20k per month even if you did not ship any product yet - just for regulations, certificates and things you have to register for to be able to sell a electronic device.
That makes hardware hard! The manufacturing and packaging is the easy part.
Re: What I learned selling 2,500 MIDI recorders: Hardware is not so hard
#236> Have a strong anti-counterfeit strategy. Don’t overlook this.
Hope we can read more about this.
Re: What I learned selling 2,500 MIDI recorders: Hardware is not so hard
#237Vast majority of the hardware, especially as it's running on ESP has already been done for you
>Assembly is just a single screw, for a single PCB. The injection mold has generous draft, no slides.
Says everything
Re: What I learned selling 2,500 MIDI recorders: Hardware is not so hard
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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 dark…
With more RAM, Storage and Compute everyone just got super lazy.
We're at the point now that everything is written in some sort of javascript, with a JIT compiler and JS engine...
Re: What I learned selling 2,500 MIDI recorders: Hardware is not so hard
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 dark…
I don't want to justify the space too much, but things like the Uber app are kind of amazing. While the base functionality is fairly simple in terms of find location > send car + all the courier and different varieties of what they do. It manages do that while working in 70+ countries over 15,000 cities with multiple different languages and payment vendors and it is all done via a single application. That is pretty n…
Because it's all just API's?
The app just calls the GeoLocation API on the device, pings that off to a server and the server responds with services available in
Re: What I learned selling 2,500 MIDI recorders: Hardware is not so hard
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't want to justify the space too much, but things like the Uber app are kind of amazing. While the base functionality is fairly simple in terms of find location > send car + all the courier and different varieties of what they do. It manages do that while working in 70+ countries over 15,000 cities with multiple different languages and payment vendors and it is all done via a single application. That is pretty n…
>It manages do that while working in 70+ countries over 15,000 cities with multiple different languages and payment vendors and it is all done via a single application. I'd assume almost all of that is done server side though. Most likely the app is mostly just a wrapped website with some gps and notification code on top.
And as someone who works on platform that makes use of numerous payment portals depending on the product and region you're buying in. It's all just wrapped up in logic AKA if statements.