Thank you so much for making this video. It's really great to hear about your experience -- the good and the bad -- of bringing your product to market. Much appreciated!
Thank you for your work to make this great video! I really appreciate the time you spent on compliance testing and on what did not work out and what did work out. Major props on producing 500 units by hand, too. Congratulations on an attractive and functional design brought to market!
Great video, you managed to pack a lot of information into a reasonable length. Thanks for your effort in making this, really gives us a real-world perspective on what it takes.
Thank you very much for explanation of hardware, software and manufacturing issues. I am sure i will come back and re-visit your Github repository as well as the website article and this video.
love ur afforts explaining all this ... thank you very much ... hatsoff for the dedication .... i am a teacher and ur work is superb to discuss with students ... thanks ...
This is VERY good, thank you for sharing. I know the technology part is what engineers want to talk about, but the FCC / CE certification, manufacturing, and marketing / selling of the products is what we need to hear please.
Our design required small buttons and I had terrible experience using qtouch, qmatrix was allot better, but none worked sufficiently and error prone for medical use. I lost 4 months of development because miss-behaving touch sensors. I guess front panel was a bit to tick for sensors so small... At the end we decided to use dual action dome buttons. By the way nice design and thanks for sharing experience with compliance testing... I left the company and returned to collage before we send that thing to TÜV. I hope they made it =)
Wow, this is *exactly* what I was looking for... a "fly on the wall" perspective of going to market. Thank you so much!! Do you have more resources that you'd recommend?
I like the www.tropicalmba.com/ podcast, they occasionally have hardware people on there and not just info-product businesses. The bedphones episode was great. www.tropicalmba.com/bedphones/
No I hadn't but that's a great option. The best part about the place I went to was the technician that fixed it :) I'm sure there's similar expertise in China, but it's something to consider if you need more than a pass/fail report.
UA-cam took out the formatting in my comment :( please imagine a paragraph break where you see "......." ...... What led you to use a Atmel chip instead of a cheap STM32 / ARM chip with USB? (actually not sure if the cheaper ones were out when you started the project...) ....... An stm32f042 would suit your project nicely - you don't even need a crystal. It has a capacitative touch sensor hardware too. The higher pin count devices should have enough pins so you don't need the shift registers, although you might not be able to drive the LEDs as brightly as the stm32 would draw too much current. Does China charge extra for fine pitch MCUs? ....... You could use a buck & boost type voltage converter to get any voltage regardless of the input voltage, but that would probably add more to the cost. ....... Also, no external programming connector/pogo pin type programmer? Even if the programming pins were used for something else, you can hold the chip in reset and program that way. Unless they're constantly asserted high/low by some other device. ....... Sorry, I don't mean to be condescending, just wanna know what design choices led you to the choices I mentioned above.
good suggestions. This project was developed in 2011, 2012, so I'm sure there are lots of better options. I spent crazy time trying to optimize the firmware to fit on that chip's memory, so I would never use that chip again. It's connected via USB, so programming pins are just the USB pins. Fine pitch has small cost, but not much. Voltage regulator is very cheap now and brightness OK on LEDs, so I don't think going higher than 5V would be necessary. LEDs were biggest portion of cost back then. And marketing :) My rule now is 4-5x unit cost to sales price, and that applies to whatever quantity you're producing, not the some-day-maybe I'll get to a 100k unit order.
+CuriousInventor I only mentioned the programming because you said you used a special programmer to program them before soldering, I forgot you can load via the preloaded bootloader as you said. thanks for making the video, I learned quite a bit. I'll have to read your article about the economics of it later, that I am clueless about :)
Thank you so much for making this video. It's really great to hear about your experience -- the good and the bad -- of bringing your product to market. Much appreciated!
This video is pure gold! Gold I tell ya! Thank you so much!
Thank you for your work to make this great video! I really appreciate the time you spent on compliance testing and on what did not work out and what did work out.
Major props on producing 500 units by hand, too.
Congratulations on an attractive and functional design brought to market!
Great video, you managed to pack a lot of information into a reasonable length. Thanks for your effort in making this, really gives us a real-world perspective on what it takes.
Thank you very much for explanation of hardware, software and manufacturing issues. I am sure i will come back and re-visit your Github repository as well as the website article and this video.
Awesome video and great overview. Thanks for posting this.
Great video on designing, testing, FCC cert, then home or China mfgr of a consumer electronic device.
Thanks for making this video, looking to design a cap touch slider for a DIY light switch and this has helped a ton!
love ur afforts explaining all this ... thank you very much ... hatsoff for the dedication .... i am a teacher and ur work is superb to discuss with students ... thanks ...
Great video! Gone through this hell myself and got burnt, but I'll definitely try again the future.
This is VERY good, thank you for sharing.
I know the technology part is what engineers want to talk about, but the FCC / CE certification, manufacturing, and marketing / selling of the products is what we need to hear please.
Thank you very much for sharing your experience.
This is an awesome video. Learned from it. Thanks!
You're a pioneer man ! continue like this, work will make you succesfull !
Thanks for the info!
Our design required small buttons and I had terrible experience using qtouch, qmatrix was allot better, but none worked sufficiently and error prone for medical use.
I lost 4 months of development because miss-behaving touch sensors. I guess front panel was a bit to tick for sensors so small... At the end we decided to use dual action dome buttons. By the way nice design and thanks for sharing experience with compliance testing... I left the company and returned to collage before we send that thing to TÜV. I hope they made it =)
Thanks, that's really interesting. Great article on the web site too.
Very good informative video! Thank you for sharing!
Wow, this is *exactly* what I was looking for... a "fly on the wall" perspective of going to market. Thank you so much!! Do you have more resources that you'd recommend?
I like the www.tropicalmba.com/ podcast, they occasionally have hardware people on there and not just info-product businesses. The bedphones episode was great. www.tropicalmba.com/bedphones/
Thanks for the info, very interesting and well described :)
have you heard about the FCC approved test houses located in China? I've heard that you can get testing done there for much cheaper.
No I hadn't but that's a great option. The best part about the place I went to was the technician that fixed it :) I'm sure there's similar expertise in China, but it's something to consider if you need more than a pass/fail report.
UA-cam took out the formatting in my comment :( please imagine a paragraph break where you see "......."
......
What led you to use a Atmel chip instead of a cheap STM32 / ARM chip with USB? (actually not sure if the cheaper ones were out when you started the project...)
.......
An stm32f042 would suit your project nicely - you don't even need a crystal. It has a capacitative touch sensor hardware too. The higher pin count devices should have enough pins so you don't need the shift registers, although you might not be able to drive the LEDs as brightly as the stm32 would draw too much current. Does China charge extra for fine pitch MCUs?
.......
You could use a buck & boost type voltage converter to get any voltage regardless of the input voltage, but that would probably add more to the cost.
.......
Also, no external programming connector/pogo pin type programmer? Even if the programming pins were used for something else, you can hold the chip in reset and program that way. Unless they're constantly asserted high/low by some other device.
.......
Sorry, I don't mean to be condescending, just wanna know what design choices led you to the choices I mentioned above.
good suggestions. This project was developed in 2011, 2012, so I'm sure there are lots of better options. I spent crazy time trying to optimize the firmware to fit on that chip's memory, so I would never use that chip again. It's connected via USB, so programming pins are just the USB pins. Fine pitch has small cost, but not much. Voltage regulator is very cheap now and brightness OK on LEDs, so I don't think going higher than 5V would be necessary. LEDs were biggest portion of cost back then. And marketing :) My rule now is 4-5x unit cost to sales price, and that applies to whatever quantity you're producing, not the some-day-maybe I'll get to a 100k unit order.
+CuriousInventor I only mentioned the programming because you said you used a special programmer to program them before soldering, I forgot you can load via the preloaded bootloader as you said. thanks for making the video, I learned quite a bit. I'll have to read your article about the economics of it later, that I am clueless about :)
Is there a name for the music in the beginning?
Where I can buy this device?
ua-cam.com/video/vIvTeHWfouA/v-deo.html