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Lessons learned shipping 500 units of my first hardware product

simonberens.com

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Re: Lessons learned shipping 500 units of my first hardware product

#371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but as OP pointed out, that requires you (or them) to spec it all out. And if you do, that’s how it works, and that’s probably exactly what happened when you buy any well-made product that was designed in America and built in China. But a whole lot of manufacturing relies on the OEM not just for the production but also some of the engineering. They probably don’t communicate to you all of the little parts you did…

> They probably don’t communicate to you all of the little parts you didn’t spec because they don’t think you want them to. And yet, every single time I've seen reports of people having trouble with manufacturing, this was one of the problems. Someone presumably had to figure out all the little parts, so send the result of the figuring out before manufacturing begins ! I'm not trying to oversimplify, here. There are…

Well, they will send you whatever you ask them to, and it would help you if you caught an error. That would require you to know what you were looking at. For that you’d probably have to be an electrical engineer.

So you’d have to spend electrical engineering salary on checking over every little wire. That adds to cost and timeline.

Part of what you use the OEM for is so that they have to spec it out, not your expensive engineers, and get something lower cost and faster.

And frankly, a lot of things you just don’t expect that you have to tell them. Like the wire length issue in this particular post, you would expect them to just get that at least approximately correct.

You don’t know what you don’t know and it’s easy to evaluate in hindsight, but what you’re not seeing in this post is all the things they just did correctly with no prompting. There were surely very many, and each of them saved a good amount of time and money.

Re: Lessons learned shipping 500 units of my first hardware product

#372
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No infrared spectrum https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-026-35389-6

You can buy IR and UV leds. All high end grow lights have these for plants. Low quality cheap led products won't include them but that is nothing to do with LEDs themselves that is just consumer preference and price conformance.

I just use a few incandescent lights in every room to fill the “blancs” of LEDs spectrum

Re: Lessons learned shipping 500 units of my first hardware product

#373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being 6'5" myself, I am worried I'd be blinded by the lamp when I stand up: to avoid adding a base under (an already bulky) base, is there a way to separate the lamp itself and have it wall/ceiling mounted (still pointing upwards)?

Because the lamp is 6'3" it's only below eye level for people who are 6'7-8. We had another 6'5" customer who was worried about the height but they said it was totally fine even with shoes on.

Thanks for confirmation, but anatomies of people, especially at the p5/p95 extremes, can be widely different: maybe I've got a very small head with a short forehead :)

So in a sense, I'd still like an option to mount it differently and more out of the way before splurging €1.2k + ~30% customs/VAT on something like this.

This even prompted me to check out comparable video fill lights on Aliexpress, and they also run around $1k (some at $500 with possibly a few gotchas about actual light output) for comparable luminosity/wattage, so your price is actually not too shabby.

Re: Lessons learned shipping 500 units of my first hardware product

#375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would certainly make certification easier, but as I suspect you understand, wouldnt achieve it alone. Even if every component was CE qualified, the combination would have to pass its own testing, plus there are a lot more to the standards than just not electrocuting you immediately upon contact. I can't see any of the energy efficiency labelling that would be required in the UK or EU for example...

1. there's no official mention of any CE / FCC certification 2. I asked shortly after the author offered to answer questions, but there was no response I'm starting to wonder if this project maybe just shipped without CE / FCC certification because they didn't know it would be required.

In the absence of any evidence to the contrary it certainly seems likely.

Pretty concerning for such a high power device.

Re: Lessons learned shipping 500 units of my first hardware product

#376
post #280
post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Googled that ‘yes’ thing. Not different from my experience in other parts of the world. ‘Yes’ means ‘yes, sir’ only in the army. What is your environment?

> ‘Yes’ means ‘yes, sir’ only in the army. Not really, if you get a "yes" in the Netherlands, Nordics, Germany or Poland it does mean, simply, yes. The consequence of which is that actually getting a "yes" takes a lot of work. I don't dare speak for other countries, no experience there.

I live in Germany. 'Ja' here means 'ich stimme zu' only when explicitly asked. That's why Germans stick 'Ja?' after every second sentence. Ja? In general, 'ja-a...' means 'I hear you', same as almost everywhere else. That has been my experience.

Re: Lessons learned shipping 500 units of my first hardware product

#377

"As someone who generally stays out of politics, I didn’t know much about the incoming administration’s stance towards tariffs, though I don’t think anyone could have predicted such drastic hikes." Except those with ears and/or eyes.

[flagged]

Becoming the "nobody could have predicted this" meme is definitely a choice.

Re: Lessons learned shipping 500 units of my first hardware product

#378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Costco sells a ceiling light that does 24k lumens for just over $100. https://www.costco.com/p/-/enbrighten-ultrabrite-hex-lights/...

The problem with lights like that is the CRI[1]. Getting just lumens is cheap. Getting a full spectrum of light is where costs increase. This is the reason I chose to go with the specific Cree bulbs (linked in original post) that get a 90+ CRI rating [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_rendering_index

The Costco lights list a CRI of 90 in the user manual.

https://enbrightenme.com/cdn/shop/files/85837_QSG_v4.pdf?v=3...

Re: Lessons learned shipping 500 units of my first hardware product

#380
post #58

This 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…

Related thread I wrote a bit ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/Lighting/comments/1po7sxb/are_there...

I do think it's actually quite hard to beat the Brighter lamp on all of: Lumens, $, QoL (ie: Google Home integration + temp control), Form Factor (ie: not looking ugly), CRI.

I personally noticed issues w/ CRI & Form Factor quite a lot with my previous options.

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