[jtchang]

I've been playing around with boards like this that keep getting smaller and smaller. Do people generally prototype something using these boards and then go directly to manufacturing? I imagine you'd want to have a smaller package than use these types of components as part of you larger product right?

[analog31]

I wouldn't hesitate to do so. It all depends on what kind of price / volume you're trying to target. For very short run, garage-shop types of operations, not only is handling surface-mount a headache, but there's a learning curve to getting any kind of circuit boards manufactured.

In addition to these microcontroller boards, you can find "breakout" boards for a variety of sophisticated components, and combine them on a carrier board that can be basic 2-layer hand soldered. It's quite a practical way for getting something simple out the door.

There's a lot of garage shop types of businesses that combine small scale manufacturing with customer support, and are not looking to get into high volume consumer market. For instance a friend of mine develops industrial solutions, where the customer might buy 10 to 1000 modules for their own use, or to support a product, such as some kind of weird agricultural machinery. These folks make their money by being local, easy to deal with, and willing to listen and understand the customer's need.

This is a clear case of "do things that don't scale."

[floatrock]

Do these people write about what they do? Make and Hackaday are great for fun one-off projects, but I don't really know much about the world of small-scale commercial like this. Make went bankrupt because they couldn't support operations on a hobby budget... I'd love to know what the next step up looks like, especially if it's some large esoteric agricultural machine.

[analog31]

They rarely blog about it. Many of them are old school engineers, some are retired from engineering careers.

[tekstar]

many synth kits use a teensy or a similar board for their CPU so that the builders don't need to do the SMD soldering but can still use high speed CPUs