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by oersted 372 days ago
Could you elaborate on these hardware projects? They sound cool.

If your workflow lets you crank out hardware quickly and cheaply enough for just a marketing stunt, you must be using methodologies we could learn from.

I’m not convinced developers just like normal screens though, tactile/analogue widgets are always cool and welcome!
2 comments
fidotron 372 days ago
It's not my place to go into details as to what it is at this time, and there are other people involved on here!

The build is neither cheap nor fast, though the proof of concept was. If you are aiming at a dev/maker audience telling them to configure things with ESP Flasher will work. If it's for some random person then it won't, and the complexity explodes.

I would caution anyone going into this because almost everyone you speak to will radically underestimate the difference between the proof of concept and a shippable product, even a giveaway one, with the consequence that most people respond as if it's a high school science project and not real work.

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HeyLaughingBoy 371 days ago
> radically underestimate the difference between the proof of concept and a shippable product

LOL. I had my boss call me out on this once. I made an offhand comment about doing something "in a few days" while on a customer call (yeah, I should have known better), leaving him to patiently explain to the customer that I meant a basic PoC and that would actually take us quite a few weeks to productize after we got it working :-)

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HeyLaughingBoy 371 days ago
> you must be using methodologies we could learn from

Not necessarily. You usually just need to know where to/what to buy.

e.g., someone on Reddit posted about being able to automate taking a photograph every time someone walked by. Turns out that I had an unused Raspberry Pi and a cheap webcam AND a passive-IR sensor. Half an hour of research into Linux command line webcam control and an hour later I had a proof of concept. Just lucked out that I have a well-stocked junk box.

But for most quick hardware things I'd turn to Arduino. I'm a professional embedded systems engineer. Arduino makes prototyping stuff that would have taken weeks or months just 10 years ago, doable in hours.

If for some reason, Arduino wasn't around, then I could use the "dev boards" that all microcontroller manufacturers provide to let you learn about their systems. Generally, they're below a $20 price point and come with enough I/O to do something useful and tooling is free.

I could probably go on, but there's enough stuff here to google if you're really interested :-)

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