Ask HN: What is the best strategy to work on a HW consumer electronics idea? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What is the best strategy to work on a HW consumer electronics idea?

11 pointsyalogin3 comments

I have an idea of a consumer electronics item that I like and am thinking about the best way to approach it. I am in the process of prototyping it. I know exactly what the end result should look like. But I have not done any thing related to hw outside of prototyping. So thinking long term and aspects of taking it to actually make a finished product, I would like to get some feedback on how to approach it. I am not looking at this to sink money into it right away, but to get an idea on what to expect and how to go about it, primarily to estimate costs involved and time it might take. Specifically -

- How to find companies that will assemble the electronic components for me.

- How to find companies that make the external casing for the product.

- How to go about finding out what it might cost and how much time it would take.

Honestly, prototyping is fun and all but if the longer term aspect of this does not pan out (fall with in my limitations) I am better of spending my time on other ideas I have.

Thanks for any feedback.

This seems like a good place to start:

http://learn.adafruit.com/how-to-build-a-hardware-startup

I don't know if you want to do a startup, but there is good information in the guide.

Here are some other blog links that might be good starting points for further reading:

http://octopart.com/blog/archives/2013/10/electronic-compone...

http://octopart.com/blog/archives/2013/11/what-every-hardwar...

http://pinocc.io/blog/open-source-hardware-business/testing-...

By the way, Octopart and Adafruit are really great.

Thanks for those links! I will go through them carefully. Doing a startup is what I want to do but before any of that I want to do the due diligence part first and learn things.

You should probably start with the Adafruit guide, it's a good survey and starting point. It doesn't delve deeply into actual prototyping, but it covers the 'due diligence' aspect.

The first half is run of the mill startupy stuff, but the second half has a lot of useful information to consider.

I'm not sure how helpful the blog links will be at this point.

Re: External Casing- If you have access to a 3D printer, I highly recommend trying out a few iterations of the casing yourself before you try to outsource.

Once you have everything working, you can find companies that do limited runs of PCB and casing.

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