| I was somewhat involved in two projects, one which was a physical object (but no electronics) that failed on Kickstarter, the other had electronics but was abandoned before even reaching Kickstarter. So while I can't comment on how to succeed, at least I could offer some insights on how to fail ;) First of all - it's hard. I'm not saying software is easy, but it's harder to pull off a HW project with just a couple of hours on the weekends. It's also much more expensive. The two projects I was referring to failed because the team just couldn't allocate enough time to really push it forward. By the time the Kickstarter campaign launched, everyone was already exhausted, and just didn't have enough "juice" left to push the marketing portion. But enough about failures, let's talk hardware development. Note on the Memoto page how their working prototype looks. It's a whole bunch of different boards linked together with cables. That's a good way to start - you can find many "evaluation boards" for pretty much any component you could think of. In this case, they have a camera board, a GPS board, a processor board and an antenna all hobbled together. Evaluation boards cost much more than the actual component (could be ~$100 for a EVB of a component that costs just pennies), but it's still much much cheaper than developing a custom pcb. So you order what you need, and make it work. Than, it's just a matter of shrinking it down, and cost reduction. You either hire some freelance engineer who will take all the schematics of all the EVB's you're using, and redesign just the portions you need (normally you'll just be using a small subset of each EVB), or (depending on the overall size, etc.) you could find a couple of tiny modules you just need to connect with a smaller custom pcb. It's always a good idea to browse alibaba.com, and many of the vendors there will even modify their products to you if the order is large enough. After you have the working prototype, but before you start spending money on shrinking it down, you may want to get an industrial designer to do a mockup of how the product will look. When you have a working prototype and a mockup, you can get funding (Kickstarter, for example). Note, that investors (via Kickstarter or not) will want to know exactly how much it will cost to manufacture, so you have to do all the design and manufacture "leg work", just to get the numbers right. This is rather tedious, but a necessity. |
I had not heard of some of that for sure.