401–410 of 427 posts
As a MechE turned SWE, always a fun read when SWE try hardware. > Blink and you’ll get a different measurement. This means your environment is not controlled enough. Also quality control is usually done in terms of statistics. You might want to read something called gauge R&R. That being said, you should be proud of being able to ship a physical product! As for quality checks, software quality teams pales in comparis…
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…
Costco sells a ceiling light that does 24k lumens for just over $100. https://www.costco.com/p/-/enbrighten-ultrabrite-hex-lights/...
This 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…
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Have you seen the Philips TrueForce Core 40W LED bulbs? Not sure if they're sold in the US, but they're 4000 lumens, "last up to 15,000 hours" (whatever you make of that phrasing). They're quite huge but fit into a normal light socket. Not very expensive either.
It's a literal streetlight. It has the bigger E40 screw, not the standard E27 screw. It has an awful spectrum, it's basically blue + yellow, with a massive gap inbetween.
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Working with a Chinese vendors is an adversarial first relationship, where 差不多 is deeeeep in the culture (and, from my experience, tends to survive trips across the ocean). There are professional communication/training courses for working with Chinese vendors/colleagues that spell all of this out, because it's not some secret. It's just a very different culture, with high context communication (I'll let you read what…
Given that Mandarin has many forms of "yes", isn't the problem that all those forms map on to our singular "yes". For a native speaker "yeeeessss" means something very different to "yes", but they would use a different word. Knowing which is being spoken or heard is going to be hard.
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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…
Sunlight diverges significantly from a black-body spectrum because the atmosphere absorbs so many wavelengths.
I would not advise jumping to mass production for your first deliveries, i think your story would have had less stress and more lower risk of failure of the first n (maybe 10?) units was bespoke, made lovingly by hand in a machine shop somewhere. I don’t think this is unusual advice, it matches the ethos of the lean startup, and pg’s “do things that don’t scale”. We made our first hardware by hand, i believe we did 1…
In some sense it seems like hardware has two cliffs: the handmade one, and the factory one. You need to fall off both to really know what you’re doing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_for_manufacturability
Some are good at designing to factory capabilities, yet others try something slick and get schooled the hard way. =3
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The product in question has a cast part. How do you do that in low quantity by yourself? Sand casting?
I wander what's the cost of (renting) metal 3D printers nowadays
https://jlcpcb.com/3d-printing/?gad=1
But if you must:
Metal printing has been available for awhile. =3
I would be quite scared to have such a monster lamp near me indoors. I mean, 60k lumens can cause temporary blindness, disorientation, and potentially retinal damage. It's near the welding arc territory at this point.
It bounces off the ceiling and so is massively diffused. You definitely don't look at it directly.