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Comment by walterbell | Hacker News Reader

> Pay an experienced EE or consulting company 20, 30, 40 for hours worth of work to review your design, plan, and feasibility

Would be interesting if projects disclosed that consulting company A has signed off on their design, such that backers can review the delivery track record of other projects vetted by consulting company A.

How should hardware projects source such a company? Is there a directory?

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There are product dev companies everywhere but I doubt any would go on record to vet anything. A good lawyer could hold them legally responsible. There are so many, many caveats that they wouldn't want to be legally held accountable for anything, and rightly so.

It is incumbent on Lockitron to seek their advice and review for their own sanity and meeting their legal obligations to their backers.

There's a very good one that does this. http://www.dragoninnovation.com/services/certification

> How should hardware projects source such a company? Is there a directory?

That is a very good question. I am in interested in that too.

http://www.californiaconsultants.org/Home.cfm is a good place to find reputable EE consultants in the area.

The "pitfalls" Lockitron encountered were so obvious, from the get go than a decent EE reviewing things would have been able to warn them. The similar thing holds true for ME.*

* ME = Mechanical Engineer.

Thank you! This is very informative.

If they were also looking for manufacturing services, all the big EMS companies do product design (EE, mechanical, PCB layout, software, + Potpourri for $1000, Alex), too. One of the biggest value adds in EMS is DFM work, where a customer brings in the "next big thing" that turns out is impossible to reliably or inexpensively build (Bloom boxes are an item I have some personal history with, for example). This is also why there is a pretty big EMS presence in San Jose / Fremont / Sunnyvale / Milpitas, and why Flextronics decided to open their hardware incubator (Lab IX) there, too. Besides all this, even the biggest usually only have a minimum investment of a few thousand dollars.

I've spent the past 14 years in the EMS world and am happy to help/advise anyone who has a hardware or manufacturing problem.

> I've spent the past 14 years in the EMS world and am happy to help/advise anyone who has a hardware or manufacturing problem.

You should include an email or url in your HN profile :)

My email is there (at least, I can see it).

I used to work at one: http://www.mindtribe.com

Noted.

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