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

Article URL: https://chipweinberger.com/articles/20260719-hardware-is-not-so-hard

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48966713

Points: 382

# Comments: 186

Hacker News 讨论

383 points · 187 comments · 查看原帖

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
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 ther
DavidPiper
Very happy JamCorder customer here. I've started playing in improv shows since I bought it too, and it's nice to have those on record! It's rare that I come across a product I have literally zero complaints about, or any feedback to offer. Even my concern that it was tied to an app that might disappear one day is of course covered by the fact that it's all just MIDI files on a card. Thank you so much for making this, it's basically a perfect product for me and I love it. No notes.
j-bos
Inquiring minds want to know: what is your anti-counterfeit strategy or is the fact that you're keeping it under your hat part of the strategy? Also, pretty cool that you set up your website real fast. Would you mind adding your Twitter link onto the site?
peteforde
Very happy to hear about your success! I'm curious to hear more about your anti-counterfeit strategies beyond just enabling encryption. I'm curious if you feel like anti-counterfeit and open source firmware are mutually exclusive. I made the choice to embrace an open firmware approach on my project while keeping the hardware closed, while knowing that if someone tries hard enough they can completely reverse engineer if they put their mind to it. Desoldering caps and x-raying PCB layers etc. I'm also very curious to hear more about your adventure in injection molding. What starting resources do you recommend, how much did it cost? Would you do it the same way today, or have the recent innovations in 3D printing forms for injection molding present superior paths? Finally, I'd love to hear about your certification process. What certs did you get, how much did it cost, what were the gotchas?
cmicali
Congrats on an impressive achievement and milestone. This is a great outcome, great work, and an indication of how far the hardware industry/tooling has come. This feels though a little to me like building a simple SaaS service, and deploying it on a managed cloud service, and concluding all software is really easy! This project is near to (if not at) the easy end of the hardware product difficulty/complexity spectrum. Some great choices were made to keep it simple and therefor easy. An alternate take-away: "If you keep things simple, hardware doesn't have to be as hard"
dgellow
Wow, congrats, I remember reading your HN post. I hope you will continue writing blog posts on your journey, I expect quite a lot of software engineers would be very interested going though a similar journey now that LLMs removed most of the fun of programming. It’s neat to work on something physical for a change
dimatura
I think "hardware is as hard as you make it" would've been a better title. The author made the smart decision of keeping things very simple on the hardware side, and that happened to be possible for the kind of product he wanted to make. Interestingly I've heard a very similar story and sentiment about hardware vs software from another single-person maker (also a software engineer by trade) of a hardware product, also in the music space. And this one was comparatively a more complex product on the hardware side, and did face some supply challenges during covid and tariffs, forcing at least one redesign and price raise. But in both cases, I'd say they made smart choices about keeping the hardware simple. By not pushing the envelope on that front they gave themselves the freedom to invest a lot of time and effort into the software. But not every hardware product is like that (which the aut