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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

#241

Post by marysol5 »

analog31 wrote: post #165
sudo_cowsay wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> impossible to find because a factory in Indonesia is on fire Has that happened to you?

Not this exact thing, but I make a hardware product akin to a guitar pedal. I designed around a component type that the semiconductor industry was phasing out. One day I noticed that the list of alternative parts at my distributor included many that were marked "obsolete." I panicked and bought the entire stock of the part number that I use. At this point I have the only stock of this part in the world, and it's more…

One thing I've always said that with products, especially when they're parts. They should be required to be made "open" as soon as you stop making and/or selling them.

They're making you nothing, they're going to vanish into the nether if the documentation is lost....

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

#242

Post by marysol5 »

dabinat wrote: post #169
mamcx wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AND shipping.

Shipping physical products can open you up to more fraud, because once it’s in the mail, it’s in the mail. The customer can say it never arrived or claim their card was fraudulently used in order to keep using the product for free. Whereas with a SaaS you just disable their access.

And also logistics is a race to the bottom, everyone is competing to get more and more packages through the system, and the customers are demanding lower and lower prices.

So there's a fair amount of stuff that just doesn't make it there, there's a whole business now on re-selling non-delivered packages.

And with that also comes the services, the reason they leave it at the door, or in the bin, or yeet it onto the roof. Is because there's no profit margin anymore for the delivery person to wait 30s each time for someone to answer.

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

#243

Post by marysol5 »

alwa wrote: post #137
maximilianthe1 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happens when app is outdated and can't be installed to current android os?

Are we talking about the app operationally day-to-day, or the app vis a vis the way it helps end users flash encrypted firmware images OTA to the ESP32 (like Chip alludes to in gp comment)? If there are no more app updates, presumably there are no more firmware updates either, so the flashing part probably doesn’t matter (and you can probably flash the last published image to an authentic device by other ESP32-y mean…

But even things like SDCards move on, we've already seen that with SDHC. I've had EOL kit in the past that just doesn't support it because it's that old, and thus EOL and doesn't support that standard.

Saying "It's just writing to an SD" is today

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

#245

Post by TacticalCoder »

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…

Then something has to be said about digital/discrete hardware, which is not dissimilar to programming, and then the alien (to software devs) world of analog chips.

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

#246

Post by gambiting »

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

I work in games, we run into this problem all the time ("Your IPA binary is too big, fix it and resubmit", ditto for other publishers).

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

#247

Post by holowoodman »

leoedin wrote: post #233
Suppafly wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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,…

No, you actually don't have to do the testing, except in some special circumstances (e.g. childrens' toys). Generally, the "CE" mark is a self-certification done by the manufacturer or importer that certifies that the product meets certain (category-specific) criteria. You can do the proper thing, test your product and then certify it. But it is also possible and usually legal to just issue the certificate based on a self-assessment and deal with the fallout later, if there ever is any. That's how basically all non-EU manufacturers and importers get their CE mark...

https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/product-rules-complian...

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

#249

Post by elzbardico »

It's not that hardware is simple, but the fact that we have inexpensive micro-controllers that pack a giant amount of complexity and let us turn a lot of electronic problems into software problems.

Try building such a device only with non programmable TTL logic.

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

#250

Post by exadeci »

dgellow wrote: post #60
embedding-shape wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I reject the idea that programming is „just typing“, so we are very unlikely to understand each others. Writing the code and thinking about the exact logic you want to apply and all its implications are part of the same problem solving process in my mind. You can for sure plan things at a different layer of abstraction but putting things together in code is a very satisfying and IMHO is the actual building part of th…

Maybe you haven't fully explored coding with AI, yes a lot of people will say "Make me a pretty website with user accounts" and have a working poc they'll use as finished product. But there's so much more you can do with programming knowledge to restrict and control AI to build it exactly how you want it without having to write thousands of lines of scaffolding yourself
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