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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

#181

Post by dgellow »

wildzzz wrote: post #118
t-3 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thinking while typing? Can you just keep generate code at typing speed? I spend a lot more time thinking than typing, and my most productive days are usually when I throw out a heap of code and replace it with a few highly factored functions.

While I'm typing, I'm not just thinking about which keys to hit. I'm thinking about how I'm using a function and what the inputs and outputs are. I'm debugging in my head, I may realize the code isn't going to do what I thought it would. Or I'm realizing that what I'm doing isn't going to scale and that I need a more rigorous approach. Often, I'm thinking "wow I'm going to have to type this same block a bunch of time…

That’s a very nice way to put it, thanks for that comment

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

#182

Post by torginus »

starky wrote: post #171

>But for me the take away still is: “hardware is as hard as you make it”. I dislike this statement. Hardware is as hard as the product dictates it needs to be. A 25 component PCBA and a clamshell of 2 injection molded parts is about as simple of a product as you can make. Heck, most people would just buy an off the shelf clamshell for that type of product. That doesn't work for the vast majority of products, building…

This. A decade ago, during my summer internship in the first year of college, I got put on a hardware project, basically designing a remote monitoring device for a telco.

I wrote the software, and my friend designed the PCB for the digital side. Basically I had to be a decent C programmer, and read the datasheet for the MCU we were using (which was way more work than using something like an ESP, but still). My friend had to lay stuff out on the PCB and place secondary components according to various application notes.

Overall not simple, but not rocket science.

On the other hand, the guys doing the analog daughterboard were industry veterans with decades of experience. They had a million concerns, from signal integrity, to voltage protection, back-EMF, etc. I was not even near the ballpark of that skill level.

Later on, I worked on more complex HW projects, stuff with FPGAs, DRAM integration and 8 layer PCBs, where you had to run full electromagnetic simulations because when you run at 1+ GHz, suddenly signal propagation is not instant, and traces behave like antennas.

I also did software there (a smaller slice of it this time), but there was an army of engineers working on the whole project which took a year, and not a second of it was spent in vain.

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

#183

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#184

Post by girvo »

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…

Microcontroller and sensor bugs owe me a lot of sleep that I will never get back, to add to your point.

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

#185

Post by dimatura »

I think "hardware is as hard as you make it" would've been a better title. The author made the smart decision of keeping things very simple on the hardware side, and that happened to be possible for the kind of product he wanted to make.

Interestingly I've heard a very similar story and sentiment about hardware vs software from another single-person maker (also a software engineer by trade) of a hardware product, also in the music space. And this one was comparatively a more complex product on the hardware side, and did face some supply challenges during covid and tariffs, forcing at least one redesign and price raise. But in both cases, I'd say they made smart choices about keeping the hardware simple. By not pushing the envelope on that front they gave themselves the freedom to invest a lot of time and effort into the software. But not every hardware product is like that (which the author also does acknowledge).

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

#186

Post by dimatura »

starky wrote: post #171

>But for me the take away still is: “hardware is as hard as you make it”. I dislike this statement. Hardware is as hard as the product dictates it needs to be. A 25 component PCBA and a clamshell of 2 injection molded parts is about as simple of a product as you can make. Heck, most people would just buy an off the shelf clamshell for that type of product. That doesn't work for the vast majority of products, building…

I agree with everything you're saying, but if you consider that this is a single-person company, the "hardware is as hard as you make it" statement makes sense. He saw a need, found out that it would be feasible to make a product to fill that need with very simple hardware, and chose to make the product. If solving the problem would've required hardware outside beyond their budget or skill level to make then presumably they wouldn't have pursued the whole project. Which I guess is sort of the point, but of course the title of the blog post doesn't really convey that.

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

#187

Post by socalgal2 »

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…

Maybe this isn't special in the era of pre-funding but there's also over manufacturing. You have to guess how many you'll sell. If under guess you leave sales on the table. If you over guess you lose money to all your undersold but already paid for inventory.

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

#188

Post by tmp10423288442 »

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 rewriting the app in Swift, so some compiler patches were necessary.

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

#189

Post by ost-ing »

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…

Im not an expert in emissions testing but pretty sure it still needs CE certification testing. The module shouldnt cause any problems providing that the firmware for the transmitter is configured properly, and is placed sanely in the enclosure, but the entire product must still undergo the relevant testing for 2.4GHz emitters.

Just because you use a certified module doesn't give you a free pass.

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