[flagged]
Lessons learned shipping 500 units of my first hardware product
321–330 of 427 posts
Re: Lessons learned shipping 500 units of my first hardware product
#322Earlier quoted context omitted.
~100 lumens per watt is rather poor, especially given the cost. It's the same as a standard LED lightbulb, and that includes the miniature AC voltage converter. 150lm/w would make it at least a cut above domestic lightbulbs. 200lm/w would make it a premium product.
fwiw, LEDs with higher CRI will generally be less power efficient, so the premium category has a 3-way tradeoff between brightness, power, and color quality. It's common for high efficiency LED lightbulbs to be much worse at illuminating red objects.
True enough, although CREE's XT-E offers 140 lm/w at a CRI of 80 and a colour temp of 3000k.
I assume this product has not met any regulatory requirements, because selling a ~600W hot plate suspended at eye level cannot be legal.
These LEDs are just the ones found on imported LED strips. Adjustable colour temperature is a novelty that is not compatible with LED efficiency or lifetime.
Re: Lessons learned shipping 500 units of my first hardware product
#323This is the second article about hardware supply from China I've read and it reads very much the same, albiet in a different niche (the other one was about SBC construction) -Anything you don't specify will be done least cost, and there is no amount of "least" which cannot be chased in manufacture. The other one noted if you don't specify the density of plastic for bags, or paper for bags and packing, you get clingfi…
That's the thing that drives me nuts about buying stuff manufactured in China. They'll make this amazing Remote Control Car, with good suspension, a battery that lasts half an hour, plenty of power, and just all around amazing. But then it'll break after a day because somebody saved 1/20th of a penny by speccing this impossibly thin wire the thickness of a human hair to hook that powerful battery to the powerful moto…
This stuff is inevitable as per the article, it's just whether there's a will to fix it for the next batch
Re: Lessons learned shipping 500 units of my first hardware product
#324Earlier quoted context omitted.
Look for the CRI rating of bulbs that you buy. It's a measurement of how close to a blackbody spectrum the bulb is putting out, the highest fidelity being 100. Note that this is not the temperature measurement, and you can have e.g. 2700K or 5000K bulbs with high CRI. Newer LED phosphors are typically 90+ CRI, and I commonly find 93 CRI bulbs available off the shelf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_rendering_inde…
Even high cri lights have a huge blue spike that doesn't match the sun. I don't know what chip OP uses, but you need a full spectrum light if you actually want very sun-like light. This page has some details: https://optimizeyourbiology.com/best-natural-full-spectrum-l... No idea if there's any evidence or not of the blue spike actually mattering for human biology.
Kind of what I worry about—the spectrum mismatch. Damn but incandescents sound pretty good for just this one application. I must be (am) getting old.
Re: Lessons learned shipping 500 units of my first hardware product
#325Earlier quoted context omitted.
Got a discount code for the HN family? ;-) Congrats on shipping. I'm living in the EU working California hours (4pm-1am) and will definitely be buying one.
Just made one - use HN100: https://getbrighter.com/discount/HN100 :)
Is this coupon still valid? I don't see any price difference...
Re: Lessons learned shipping 500 units of my first hardware product
#326Re: Lessons learned shipping 500 units of my first hardware product
#327Earlier quoted context omitted.
You could equally say "just because you take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics will take an interest in you".
What does this even mean?
It means that the consequences of politics will impact you, even if you don't think about politics in the first place.
Re: Lessons learned shipping 500 units of my first hardware product
#328This is super interesting, and I'd actually be quite interested in buying a 60K-Lumen lamp... but not at $1200. Years ago, there was an HN article "You Need More Lumens"[1], which in turn led me down a rabbit hole. I ended up purchasing: 4 standard table lamps from Target, 28 2000-lumen Cree LEDs bulbs[2] and, 4 7-way splitters[3]. The end result is somewhere around 56,000 lumens. And I LOVE it. Makes me much happier…
Curious if LEDs can really match the black-body that is our sun (and therefore incandescents). I would get/build such a thing for my mental health, but I worry the LED illumination will be counter-productive.
Any spectrum you want with the right phosphor mix, but are they commercially produced, or must you make your own?
Re: Lessons learned shipping 500 units of my first hardware product
#329Author here, happy to answer any questions about the journey!
Do you have any recommendations for FCC/CE testing providers?
FWIW I've had good luck with Intertek https://www.intertek.com/ for most testing and certification processes across a variety of products.
Re: Lessons learned shipping 500 units of my first hardware product
#330This reminded of the YouTube guy of "Smarter Every Day" who tried to manufacture a a grill brush completely in USA and still be competitive in the marketplace (i.e. China) [0]. It turned out that USA / "the west" lost the engineering knowledge to manufacture "stuff" (in this case injection molding and other procedures): Nowadays, we simply create the plans and schematics (e.g. CAD files) and let the Chinese do the bu…
Slightly more nuanced, I think we no longer have domestic industries making the components for the machines that make stuff. Many machine shops have Haas mills, but lots of Haas's suppliers are overseas. Regarding injection molding, we actually have better suppliers for the prototyping phases such as https://www.protolabs.com/ .