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Comment by DominoTree | Hacker News Reader

I didn't realize assembly/programming services were that cheap and I'll definitely consider them for final runs of things in the future if it's a decent quantity like this. I'm just a hobbyist and I enjoy putting these things together, and most of the time it's just a handful of boards at once anyways so it's not a big deal.

The real issue was that I had ended up cutting a lot of corners to try and get things done in time, particularly with regards to testing. Definitely a major lesson learned.

The MCUs didn't take long to program with a ZIF socket, but once they were baked onto boards and I was finding bugs that needed to be fixed, that's where it really turned into a pain doing it over SPI.

After all of that, I still ended up having to bodge 2 connections on all of the final boards after all was said and done (which was the 5th or 6th board revision after I did small test runs to play with things and fix issues)

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Check out CircuitHub they make it really easy to iterate on a design and get an instant quote on cost to build it. Really nice automated interface for quoting takes almost all the design parameters directly out of your design files. Makes traditional quoting interfaces feel like the stone age. They are doing for PCBA what OSHPark did for small batch PCB ordering.

They have some competition but CircuitHub is my go to. Others to check out are...

https://smallbatchassembly.com/

https://www.tempoautomation.com/

https://macrofab.com

[0] https://circuithub.com/

>The real issue was that I had ended up cutting a lot of corners to try and get things done in time, particularly with regards to testing. Definitely a major lesson learned.

Haste makes waste, measure twice and cut once. It's one of the hardest lessons to properly internalise - bodges and firmware changes can be hugely time-consuming, so it nearly always makes sense to absolutely nail your prototype before moving to production.

Congrats on a cool project.

i.e., waterfall really does make sense when you're dealing with hardware.

I want to push back on this notion a little bit. I think non-waterfall is plenty fine for hardware development. If you structure your product development cycle as a series of (design, build, test, feedback) steps, you get that valuable feedback much earlier than later.

One/one-hundred-off prototypes are expensive but nothing beats the information gained from soldering a board, plugging in connectors, and programming chips directly. You'll do these steps at the end of a waterfall process anyways, and I'd say they're more expensive to alter then. When a problem is found, deciding to bodge wire two pads is the high-cost, low-risk solution to problems found late in the game. Discovering the problem early, fixing it in the schematic, and testing during your next prototype cycle is cheaper during production and risk is mitigated because you're still going to be testing before you ship.

Of course, this is all very much propaganda, and not all shops would follow this idealistic scenario, but I don't think hardware is any more waterfall than anything else.

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