[cmicali]

Congrats on an impressive achievement and milestone. This is a great outcome, great work, and an indication of how far the hardware industry/tooling has come.

This feels though a little to me like building a simple SaaS service, and deploying it on a managed cloud service, and concluding all software is really easy!

This project is near to (if not at) the easy end of the hardware product difficulty/complexity spectrum. Some great choices were made to keep it simple and therefor easy.

An alternate take-away: "If you keep things simple, hardware doesn't have to be as hard"

[mosura]

That underrates the difficulty in keeping things simple.

It is mentioned elsewhere here that a lot of time was burned on unused firmware features. It takes surprising discipline to cut stuff and still deliver.

[jrflo]

Agreed. At someone who works primarily in hardware, it is definitely hard. A midi-to-bluetooth recorder is practically a software project in a fancy box. There is very little physical complexity to deal with here, which is what makes hardware difficult- the interaction between firmware and the "real world".

Congrats though, making a half-million a year business is a massive accomplishment! The headline just irked me a bit, haha (but, it got my attention, so I guess you win there)

[chipweinberger]

I don't entirely disagree. Just one sample point. But there are certainly much more simplistic hardware products out there. I'm often envious of them.

Here's a good example: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=brick+smartphone+blocker&ia=web

[missinglugnut]

Hey man, you made a successful product, wrote a great article, and are now getting attention for it. You don't need to respond to every person who wants to nit pick at your title :)

I think there's a lot of people talking past each other here. Sourcing parts internationally, preventing counterfeiting, slow iteration time, inventory management...all this logistical stuff is hard enough that the conventional wisdom in the software business world is to never attempt it. You're here presenting a counterexample and that's wonderful. The people criticizing aren't talking about this though, they are talking about whether logging digital inputs on an esp32 counts as a real hardware project and they act as if you've insulted their expertise in [signal processing/antenna design/insert specialty here]. You didn't do that, most of us know you didn't do that, but the word "easy" sets a lot of engineers off.

Just ignore the noise and keep writing great articles. My personal request, if I may - I'd like to hear how you did injection molding since I always assumed that was out of reach for small business.

[pineaux]

I wanted to ask the exact same question. 2500 is a very low order size for injection molding am I wrong?

[jkestner]

Not super low. It starts to make sense around 1000 units. I’ve gotten runs of 2500 done domestically. But it is pretty hard to find domestic injection molders for consumer work - they will give you an FU quote at best because they cater to high volumes and industrial customers.

And they’ll make the molds in China anyway. Chinese molders are hungry — they will work with low volumes and offer a bunch of integrated services. But if you don’t know what you’re doing you will end up with bad parts over schedule.

Easiest way to get started is to use ProtoLabs. They charge lower prices on molds in exchange for higher part cost, are way faster than China, and have way better customer service.