Building a Wooden Word Watch for My Roommates | Hacker News Reader

Building a Wooden Word Watch for My Roommates

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124 pointsrcarmo17 comments

This is really cool and impressive, but doing a kickstarter seems rather ambitious. To go from your first ever embedded project and two hand-made watches to delivering 179+ watches by November? That's a tall order. And there's not a whole lot of details on the campaign page of how he's planning to pull this all off.

By all means, keep making them, but I would start small, taking just a few orders a time, before opening it up to mass production. Clearly he's a pretty capable and resourceful guy, I'm just worried he's biting off more than he can chew.

Once you have the PCB design and the CNC path files, there's not much more to it (being slightly facetious here). It's not like parts are hard to source.

I imagine scaling it from 3 watches to 179+ watches would be the main problem here. Is he going to build all 179+ units by himself?

Will probably elicit some help from friends. I think he was charging $200+ on Kickstarter. The laser cutting and CNC is probably free from his school. The PCB and LEDs are fairly cheap as are the rest of the materials. Probably quite a bit of profit built into each. Also a great learning experience.

The last word-clock kickstarter I was interested in was cancelled due to unspecified reasons: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/252714519/clockfour-chr...

I'd like to know more, perhaps it was a supposed IP violation of the qlocktwo guys?

I would normally agree but if this guy learned CAD, PCB layout, embedded programming and design just for this project, I say he can pull it out. This is very impressive.

As someone who did the same, I share the grandparent's apprehension. These skills are fantastic to have and very fun to acquire, but shipping products requires more skill than that.

Maybe I'm intimidated by the unknown unknowns (I was intimidated by learning all these skills in the first place, but it was much easier than I thought), but I think shipping a product at scale is rather hard if you haven't done it before.

At least, he'll have to deal with flaky suppliers, parts not fitting properly with each other, unforeseen costs, etc. I would feel much more comfortable if he had used a PCBA service to produce assembled PCBs (pretty cheap even if you don't want to do bulk orders) and a fabrication service for the face (harder to do if not in bulk?).

Best of luck to him, though, it seems like a fun project, and I want to make my own wall clock now.

Well, I think you are indeed afraid of the unknown unknows. There are more skills to acquire for him to achieve this, but he proved that he can acquire them, so godspeed!

By suggestion for him would be to check a few videos about how to manufacture small scale things in Shenzhen, spend a week or two there, and roll with a factory that specializes in low volumes.

Do things that don't scale : http://paulgraham.com/ds.html

There is value in keeping it in-house for the first few iterations, I think the Pebble guys did that too.

100% agreed to your advice. Starting small and maintaining the best quality is the most appropriate way to start. I hope this guys has patented this thing.

The hand/home-made engineering is mightily impressive, but it's worth noting that the design is not original [1].

[1] http://qlocktwo.com/info_w.php?lang=en

Actually I think the "original" is this: https://www.dezeen.com/2007/01/18/sam-buxton-shows-at-kineti...

You could argue that the wooden finishing is as much a part of the design as the watch face itself.

Besides, what is truly original these day? The best you can do is create something you like that you haven't seen before and hope it hasn't already been patented.

I did something like this in code when I just started exploring vue.js: https://codepen.io/anon/pen/ayKgeK

Really nifty that someone made a hardware model of this! :)

The original was a hardware clock, this is a conversion of that.

This is cool, well done for a school project and also a really nice thing to do for one's roommates!

Totally gobsmacked that he built it himself. I don't care if it isn't "original" that's some great engineering talent.

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