[civilitty]

> Manufacturing Isn’t That Difficult

That’s literally one of your headings. You can’t hide behind the arrogance of the EE community when you say stuff like that, especially if you’re just ordering a four layer board from JLPCB. No offense but you didn’t manufacture anything - you did the equivalent of spinning up an EC2 instance via the web interface, installed nginx on it, and blogged about it as if you were a cloud architect. That tone permeates the post, despite the titular admission.

I would approach any professional community with much more humility. Especially when you’re still learning stuff like ”When assembling parts, you may face delays if some are unavailable.”

[logronoide]

> I felt like using Amazon Web Services for the first time in 2006!

Literally I say that manufacturing is like using AWS in 2006…

[nalydmerc]

As an EE/firmware engineer working in the field, don't listen to the naysayers. Just because it's not some 10 layer RF board doesn't mean it's not a rewarding project and a worthwhile product. For the record, the products we design and assemble in-house are only 4 layer boards, and our business is doing just fine.There's too much elitism in engineering. I think the article is awesome; you found out a lot of pain points that I deal with regularly. The only nitpick I have is that I wish more people were on the side of open source hardware than patents.

[RetroTechie]

> I think the article is awesome; you found out a lot of pain points that I deal with regularly.

Imho the most valueable part of the article is between the lines: showing how many aspects are in play, how long the route from first experiments to shippable product can be.

The devil is in the details. And those details can differ a lot depending on project, expertise or suppliers. For example one pcb manufacturer may have very different capabilities, pricing structure or quality control than another. Picking suitable components is almost an art in itself. Etc etc.