Hacker News Reader

Comment by KuriousCat | Hacker News Reader

This is solid advice, particularly #4 is the reason I have started building my own bots. I do have one question though, how to design the production pipeline such that it is easy to iterate on the bot design with minimal disruption?

View on HN

While I agree with the other reply's "it depends" questions, at a high level there is one thing that I think applies pretty much whatever scope you're working on, with a few sub-points:

- Find robust parts for the non-innovative aspects of your system (eg motor drivers)

- ...with a standard interface (PWM/PPM, RS485, CAN, Ethernet, whatever)

- ...hide that interface behind a simple software interface so that if you do have to swap to a different bus type you can do so mostly transparently

- ...and don't reinvent the wheel if you don't have to.

Once you have a set of proven parts with well-defined simple interfaces you can start treating those like Lego and mix and match to your heart's content.

Rapid iteration at the component level would obviously require custom components, and maybe vertical integration, which clearly conflicts with point #1 about riding existing supply chains. But you can still iterate parts of the design that you more or less "have" to customize, such as the body material, axis geometries, and dozens of other factors I can't think of off the top of my head. The collected data can both be used to improve training and as input into the design iterations.

It depends.

What scale are you operating at, what sort of things do you want to iterate on, and how minimal does minimal disruption need to be? :)

I think part of the design craft is to ensure rapid prototyping and at the same time making sure that manufacturing is scalable. My question is more on how to hit the sweet spot where prototyping is fast and at the same time production pipeline changes are cost effective.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com