What I learned selling 2,500 MIDI recorders: Hardware is not so hard

Продав 2500 устройств Jamcorder, автор открыл для себя, что аппаратная часть — не так уж и сложна, как принято считать. Несмотря на ожидания, связанные с проблемами электроники, цепочек поставок и производства, всё прошло гладко: первые 500 устройств он собрал сам за четыре дня без ошибок, а платы состояли всего из 25 стандартных компонентов. Главная сложность оказалась в программном обеспечении — 200 тысяч строк кода, разработанных три года без помощи LLM.

Успех Jamcorder объясняется сознательной простотой: убраны USB-C, датчики света, кнопка питания, упрощён корпус и сборка (один винт). Автор подчёркивает, что аппаратные трудности — это следствие излишней сложности, а не неизбежность. При достаточной марже и разумном дизайне даже средний объём производства (2500 шт.) не требует масштабных ресурсов. Его 10 рекомендаций включают: минимизацию BOM, работу с китайскими поставщиками, сохранение маржи выше 70%, локальный финальный контроль и чёткие инструкции по сборке. Главный вывод: «аппаратная часть — настолько сложна, насколько вы её сделаете».

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@skippyfish: Hardware has a reputation for being hard for three reasons. First, it scales differently than software. It's far harder to design something you want to make a million of than something you want to make ten of. Second, it's harder to anticipate, test, and correct all the things that can go wrong on the user end. Some people will put batteries the wrong way, some will drop the device on the ground, some will connect it to some vintage equipment you have never seen in your life, etc. And third, there are just more failure modes in an unfamiliar domain - sometimes, your code will intermittently crash not because you have a software bug, but because you put the decoupling capacitor too far from the chip. Or, just as you finish your design, the chip you designed it around becomes obsolete, or impossible to find because a factory in Indonesia is on fire.Another complication is that at least in theory, if you're selling electronics, there are actual regulations and third-party testing that needs to happen, and if you fail emissions, you might have to redo your design from scratch. Imagine we had that for software - "your JS is too big, you can't ship until you get it under 50 kB".So, I'm happy for the author, but I think he had an outlier experience. When you look at Kickstarter stories, people repeatedly stumble over this. Manufacturing / cost difficulties, supplier issues, reliability issues, etc.
@starky: >But for me the take away still is: “hardware is as hard as you make it”.I dislike this statement. Hardware is as hard as the product dictates it needs to be. A 25 component PCBA and a clamshell of 2 injection molded parts is about as simple of a product as you can make. Heck, most people would just buy an off the shelf clamshell for that type of product.That doesn't work for the vast majority of products, building a product with 20 COTS parts plus 60 custom tooled parts, and 4 complex PCBAs is what is hard. Getting everything to fit together, pass testing, arrive on time from dozens of suppliers, etc. it where the complexity comes in. Then consider that hardware is cash intensive, you need to pay ahead of time for all the tools, you need to pay to buy the individual parts and warehouse them somewhere while you build the products you hope are going to sell. If something goes wrong there, then your expensive parts are just sitting there waiting for replacement components before you can ship. Then even when you ship, that revenue goes into buying the next round of parts you are going to receive in 3 months. This is where many hardware projects fail as they run out of cash before the project breaks even.