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Comment by aoi84 | Hacker News Reader

"I'm a software developer, and I barely know nothing about electronics."

That sounds like a familiar recipe for disaster. Most hardware based Kickstarters fail. Even successful ones deliver very late and over budget. I work in electronics and wouldn't do it.

You really need to find someone with experience in bringing products to market. Hardware mass production is extremely difficult and expensive (from prototyping to final layout to component sourcing to quality control) and that's before you get to stocking and delivery. That all requires a lot of investment, time and understanding of the underlying systems.

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Second this: there are a thousand things that can go wrong and irrevokably cost money. You need to get that production expertise in somehow, either by hiring or consultancy.

It's possible to learn a lot from people like Bunnie Huang, such as his "Chumby" product which he blogged the development of.

Thanks, I'll check on this guy and his project

Not always the case - I fit this profile and made it to the other side (lifeclockone.com) - OP feel free to reach out and I’d be happy to share my experiences and help out if I can.

Thanks, very interesting!

Thanks for your comment. I want to make up my mind around what's needed to go through this project. I envision it as a toy project on the prototyping/layout side, then find partners for other steps. I guess there exists companies to outsource stocking and delivery.

Can you describe what product or just hardware(hw features) you want to build without sharing any secrets ?

That will help people around here guide you towards a good way to prototype it.

Because there may be a way to prototype what you want without knowing much about hardware design.

Sure! I want to build a wristband that need a flexible rechargeable power source and to be programmed by bluetooth

The battery won't be flexible. You can have multiple batteries with flexible connections but they'll be a likely point of failure. Will you really need that much power? Bluetooth LE really is "low energy" as are many sensors. If it's supposed to make a lot of light, noise, has a motor, or use more powerful RF like WiFi, then the power requirements will be greater.

You've already be directed to Adafruit which is a great resource, not just as a store and product developers in their own right but for all their learn materials and years worth of weekly videos. Here's a breakout board for charging their little LiPo batteries via MicroUSB.

https://www.adafruit.com/product/1904

I guess I got a lot to learn before answering the requirements question :/ Thanks for the link !

So, something very similar to fitness trackers and smartwatches? As others have pointed out, no flexible power sources; realistically you're going to end up with a single SoC that already has bluetooth, such as the Nordic Semiconductor ones.

Most of these devices have on-demand displays to save power.

Miniturising it and making the casework function is the hard part. You might be able to build a "desktop" version of it fairly easily..

Yes, like a fitness tracker but with tissue. I don't even know if it's possible to combine lithium batteries and tissues :/

What do you mean by flexible ?

As for the wristband, have a look at hexiwear, and the hexiwear battery pack(which may be wearable). it has BLE and it does support "Firmware Over the Air update", i think.

In my mind, it was something like that :

https://news.panasonic.com/global/press/data/2016/09/en16092...

Flexible batteries you can embad in a tissue wristband for example. But I don't know if it's possible to do so.

Thanks for the link I will check it out asap.

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