[HN Gopher] If you can use open source, you can build hardware
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If you can use open source, you can build hardware
Author : gustavo_f
Score : 307 points
Date : 2023-09-05 17:33 UTC (1 days ago)
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| [deleted]
| syldarion wrote:
| The hardest part of the hardware experience for me so far has
| been the _waiting_. I recently took the next step in being a
| keyboard nerd and have been tinkering with custom macro pads.
|
| Currently printing the bottom of a custom osu! pad for the third
| time after a couple goofs.
|
| Absolutely a blast though, especially coming from doing purely
| software. Even if you're just doing prototypes, highly
| recommended.
| bambax wrote:
| > _There is a learning curve to 3D printing. It might be the
| steepest factor here, in fact._
|
| I love CAD but man do I hate 3D printing. It's a type of device
| that seems to have been invented to illustrate Murphy's law that
| "anything that can go wrong, will go wrong".
|
| The print nozzle gets clogged. Every. Time. The filament breaks
| at the worst possible position and requires some disassembly to
| remove. The printing stops for no reason in the middle of a long
| print. The plate is never exactly even. You forgot to leave the
| wire spool with enough free spinning and when the machine pulls
| on the wire it makes the spool fall, itself pulling the whole
| machine down with it as a vengeance.
|
| And of course, it takes hours.
|
| I have been much more lucky with external providers that you can
| send your file to, and they send an object back. It's often
| expensive and takes even longer than doing it at home (days vs
| hours), but there's no price for peace of mind.
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| Could that be due to consumer vs industrial 3D printers? The
| external providers are probably using more expensive industrial
| printers designed for more frequent or continuous usage vs a
| typical consumer printer.
| organsnyder wrote:
| Getting a machine that works well out-of-the-box is critical.
| While tinkering and troubleshooting is definitely part of the
| 3d printing experience, my Prusa Mini requires very little
| babysitting and maintenance.
| fidotron wrote:
| That is just how physical reality is. Everything breaks all the
| time and your process needs to be resilient to it. It is
| definitely the case that consumer 3D printers make that
| practically impossible though. (I tend to think home CNC is
| more interesting for this reason).
|
| For example, an industrial solution to some of the problems
| would be a checklist based inspection of the printer between
| every task, but this would be incredibly tedious.
|
| Software that has to directly interface with reality also has
| these problems.
| devoutsalsa wrote:
| I not sure I could.
|
| I used to do microwave communications repair in the army. The
| most painful part of my education was basic soldering. I couldn't
| solder for the life of me. I have the finger dexterity of a brick
| (which is to say none at all).
|
| A few years I took a comprehensive career aptitude assessment,
| which included testing finger dexterity. I thought I'd done
| really well after taking the test. I was informed I scored in the
| bottom 5%. If I became a surgeon, my malpractice insurance would
| cost more than my annual salary.
| krasin wrote:
| JLCPCB PCB assembly service ([1]) is excellent and is really
| inexpensive. I used to reflow PCBs myself at home, but now I
| don't bother.
|
| 1. https://jlcpcb.com/capabilities/pcb-assembly-capabilities
| akkartik wrote:
| _" If you build modern software, you're well-versed in
| composition: grab a handful of existing projects--a database
| here, a UI framework there, an HTTP library to round it all out--
| and arrange them together. You write your custom logic--the stuff
| unique to your project--and let other people's code do work
| that's common across all projects."_
|
| This approach certainly gets tried enough. I'd say it has some
| issues, though.
| petsfed wrote:
| I'm going to complicate this a bit and say "If you can use open
| source, you can _prototype_ hardware "
|
| Part of building hardware is making it robust enough to exist in
| meat space long term. That means thinking about how the humidity
| sensor is affected by ambient conditions (including the packaging
| bag, that one has bit me in the past) and having a plan for re-
| calibration if drift becomes too great. That means picking
| connectors for your wire harnesses that can handle the number of
| times you expect to connect/disconnect them over the course of
| your things lifespan. That means tuning the length of that wire
| harness so you can't damage it when you open the enclosure to
| change the battery or whatever. It means thinking about how
| ambient conditions affect the rest of the design, so you don't
| have to clean the contacts on all the wire harnesses every so
| often, because you didn't get gold contacts for both the
| harnesses _and_ the connectors, and you live in a high humidity
| environment.
|
| Don't get me wrong, I'm self-taught on virtually all of these
| points, it _is_ achievable for the hobbyist. Just understand that
| swapping out one smart relay controller for another is pretty far
| from having a smart relay controller you 'd even give to your
| sister-in-law for Christmas.
| keithnz wrote:
| No different than writing software to a releasable stage.
| Prototyping is a very important stage of building hardware,
| it's how you test, if you get yourself that far, you can get
| yourself to a production build. It does mean a bunch of reading
| and research though. I've been doing
| embedded/electrical/mechanical systems for decades from
| consumer grade products to large industrial machines which have
| to last decades. There are often hard-earned lessons along the
| way, but many end up jumping out at you. Solving some of those
| problems sometimes require significant rethinks, but a lot of
| stuff is not that tricky. Main thing is having good tools to
| investigate problems.
| bibabaloo wrote:
| > No different than writing software to a releasable stage.
|
| It's extremely different, imo.
|
| Releasing buggy software to prod: no biggy, hotfixed in a
| couple of hours
|
| Releasing buggy hardware: recalls, mass customer
| dissastifaction.
| contingencies wrote:
| IMHO the oversight in this response is that _having good
| tools to investigate problems_ essentially equates to (1)
| tens of thousands of dollars in hardware; (2) permanent lab
| space; (3) the relevant base capital; (4) supply chain
| access; (5) a university equivalent level education in
| physics and electronics; and (6) at least a few years to hone
| your craft. This is realistically a five to ten year
| commitment, perhaps a little less full time if enthused and
| adequately capitalized.
| 01100011 wrote:
| This reminds me of when I was in college(EE) and working at an
| electronics store. A small aircraft owner wanted help with a
| regulator to (IIRC) drop 28v down to 12v and handle a few amps.
| I resisted helping design a solution but he kept pushing so I
| suggested putting a couple TO-3 packaged 7812s in parallel. We
| bench tested it and it worked so he went on his way. A few
| years later I learned you never do that as one regulator can
| end up handling the load and it ends up overloaded. Instead you
| use a pass-transistor(or other mechanism) to allow a single
| regulator to do the job. I still wonder if that guy's plane
| ended up going down in flames...
| ilyt wrote:
| You can get away with it if there is some resistance in
| series with each one but yeah, the enemy here is that each of
| the regulators will have slightly different voltage and the
| unlucky one with highest will handle most of the current.
|
| Although I'd imagine you got lucky here because IIRC this
| particular's chip voltage drops with temperature a tiny bit
| so technically the one that starts to heat up would drop
| voltage, letting other pick up the slack
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| I've breadboarded a number of projects, but always awem to hit
| a wall when faced with the concerns you describe. Do you have
| any pointers for how to gain the knowledge to get past this?
| Right now I feel like I dont even know what I dont know.
| petsfed wrote:
| A lot of it comes down to being mindful of what you're
| spending the most time on during assembly, but some of it is
| just hard-won. But I've learned a lot from reading Hackaday.
|
| Some simple things that you shouldn't have to learn the hard
| way (but most people do):
|
| Make sure your wiring contacts are electrochemically
| compatible. Gold-to-gold is safe in almost every household
| environment.
|
| Strain relieve every wire. Solder is not meant to be
| structural.
|
| Every circuit component degrades over time. Heat, humidity,
| and dust accelerates that process. Make a plan to mitigate
| the ingress of each, and a plan to account for that
| degradation.
|
| Learn to design simple breakout-board carrier boards. The
| best breadboard layouts are still worse than a mediocre PCB,
| because the PCB doesn't have flywires to catch on literally
| everything.
|
| Make sure you include mechanical support points for your
| designs, and pick the right size and material for your
| mechanical supports.
|
| All of this to say, your hardware thing is a _thing_ first,
| and an expression of your software /firmware design second.
| If it cannot physically survive being that physical thing,
| the elegance or resiliency of your code is meaningless.
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| Thank you.
| joshspankit wrote:
| Please improve this (I have only dabbled), but I'll add a
| couple points as well:
|
| - Don't run data lines and power lines right next to each
| other (electric signals flow through a field surrounding
| the trace/wire, not in or on the metal itself)
|
| - PCB pros avoid right angles for the same reason. Bevel
| your corners. (You see examples of this on every board if
| you're not sure what I mean)
|
| - Verify PCB traces with a multimeter before soldering
| components to it (or if it's been assembled by the PCB
| manufacturer, verify everything before powering it on for
| the first time)
| leptons wrote:
| >Don't run data lines and power lines right next to each
| other (electric signals flow through a field surrounding
| the trace/wire, not in or on the metal itself)
|
| Not true. The electrons certainly do travel within the
| copper. The movement of the electrons generates a
| magnetic field around the conductor, but the electricity
| does not "flow through a field surrounding the
| trace/wire". The electric power absolutely does flow
| through the metal itself.
|
| >PCB pros avoid right angles for the same reason.
|
| This is a myth except _maybe_ in very rare cases. Most
| hobbyists aren 't ever going to have a problem with right
| angle traces.
|
| https://www.nwengineeringllc.com/article/right-angle-pcb-
| tra...
|
| >Verify PCB traces with a multimeter before soldering
| components to it (or if it's been assembled by the PCB
| manufacturer, verify everything before powering it on for
| the first time)
|
| You should be sure that your design works before sending
| it to be assembled. If you designed the PCB with proper
| software that does analysis between the schematic and the
| PCB design, then there really shouldn't be any surprises
| that would require you to verify any PCB traces with a
| multimeter before soldering components. Sure you may have
| had it manufactured by a crap PCB company, but it's
| unlikely, PCBs have gotten really easy to make. Software
| like KiCad if used properly make it practically foolproof
| to design a PCB that matches the schematic.
|
| Designing the schematic is another matter though, it's
| very easy for a noob to get that part completely wrong
| and testing PCB traces with a multimeter is not going to
| fix that.
|
| >or if it's been assembled by the PCB manufacturer,
| verify everything before powering it on for the first
| time
|
| Not sure what that would accomplish. What are you going
| to test? Many components can't even be tested unless
| power is applied. Seems like you're suggesting
| superstition more than practical knowledge about hardware
| design and manufacture.
| petsfed wrote:
| > - PCB pros avoid right angles for the same reason.
| Bevel your corners. (You see examples of this on every
| board if you're not sure what I mean)
|
| If your design suffers from the consequences of this,
| your reach has probably exceeded your grasp. Its true
| that you can get noise from sharp corners, but unless
| you're running SPI at maximum speed, it probably won't
| cause any bugs in your project. And if you need to run
| that fast, you're going to run into other, less
| straightforward signal integrity problems too.
|
| PCBs with right angle trances look ugly though. So I
| might still judge you for it, but only if you also wear
| white before Memorial Day.
| jacquesm wrote:
| And right angle traces are more prone to delamination,
| which is the major reason why you want to bevel your
| corners.
| prabhu-yu wrote:
| Etching would be difficult. ie, if you bend two traces
| side by side with 90 degree corner, watch the etching
| around the corner. ie copper may be left on the inner
| angle of the 90-degree turn.
|
| So, I do not use 90 degree turns for this reason, if not
| for the EMI reason.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Yes, the EMI thing is real but not at typical hobbyist
| frequency ranges. But the mechanical aspects are far, far
| more important and right angles are simply a bad idea.
| Ideally the lines are smoothly flowing (like say at the
| bottom of the old KIM boards), but that's not how auto
| routers place the traces. 45 degree angles in succession
| are a good enough compromise. They're mechanically
| reasonably strong, they don't delaminate and can be
| easily placed and used for bus patterns with closely
| spaced traces that will reliably etch without the outside
| being eaten up and the inside being 'too late'.
| tuatoru wrote:
| The Cave Pearl Project (arduino based underwater data
| loggers, used for real science in cave systems) has a blog
| and several Youtube videos with info about ruggedizing
| electronics for humid environments and temperatures from
| freezing to about 60 Celsius. [1] Two words: conformal
| coating.
|
| Lots of other good in-the-trenches reporting of hard-won
| knowledge in the blog. Many epoxy resins shrink
| significantly, for example. That may or may not be important
| for your project. The blog is not super condensed but it's
| worth reading, especially for seeing the evolution of design
| and construction practise from the early years (2011) to now.
|
| There's a book, now somewhat dated, on the Protection of
| Electronic Circuits from Overvoltages (lightning strikes, or
| fridge motors, for example): [2] TVSes (transient voltage
| suppressors) are still in use, however. Even varistors.
|
| Connectors are the bane of every electrical engineer's life.
| There are more designs of connectors than of any other
| category of component, and probably there are good reasons
| for all of them to exist. I haven't got any good references
| for this topic though.
|
| Other things like fuses, fireproof insulation on on your
| power cables, physical design such that prying objects can't
| touch high voltages, and so are about protecting the rest of
| the world from your projects.
|
| Rod Elliott's web site [3] is a mine of information for
| beginning to intermediate hobbyists. It's focused on analog,
| audio specifically, but when you get down deep enough,
| everything in electronics is analog. you need to know about
| resistance, capacitance, and inductance, earthing (grounding)
| layout, and other similar topics.
|
| 1. https://thecavepearlproject.org/2023/03/17/waterproofing-
| you...
|
| 2. https://store.doverpublications.com/0486425525.html
| Available on Amazon as an ebook.
|
| 3. https://www.sound-au.com/articles/index.htm
| analog31 wrote:
| Take things apart. Fix things, while observing how they
| break. There are amazing online videos on how to repair
| virtually anything that goes wrong with a home appliance.
| Make things that improve your life at home. These are things
| that a lot of hardware people did as kids, including myself.
| Get your hands involved.
|
| Look inside older stuff that predates 3d printing and cheap
| mold tooling, just to avoid the trap of everything being made
| the same way. In my case, since I'm interested in music, I've
| looked inside things like guitar pedals and amps, which often
| solve the problem of making something that's robust, but that
| can be made profitably in short runs and small shops.
|
| Get a hold of the McMaster-Carr catalog, in paper form, and
| leave it in the bathroom. An old Digi-Key catalog if someone
| still has one.
| kbaker wrote:
| Agreed. Also, the kinds of passive safety needed to not burn
| your house down in the event of a code error or other design
| issue.
|
| The hardware design is the last line of defense before you can
| do real-world damage.
|
| Things like fuses, ESD and surge protection, watchdog timers,
| often get overlooked in a hobbyist or even open-source
| design... it takes (sometimes hard-won) experience to know when
| these things are required.
| ilyt wrote:
| watchdog timer is not hardware protection. It might _seem_
| like it is, as the timer itself is in hardware, and it does
| occasionally protect from hardware related lockups, but it 's
| all too easy mistake to stick a watchdog refresh in a timer
| somewhere that still works even when rest of the code went
| tits up
| munk-a wrote:
| There are also some physical constraints as well. I have an
| essential tremor - painting warhammer minis and doing
| anything with a sodering gun are forever out of my reach.
|
| That all said - I have written firmware for things that other
| people have wired and it's quite fun!
| fanf2 wrote:
| I have heard that using magnifying glasses or a microscope
| can help suppress shaking in the hands: it has a weirdly
| helpful interaction with the hand-eye feedback loop. Dunno
| if it would work for you, but it might be worth trying?
| munk-a wrote:
| I'll have to give that a try - though it didn't seem to
| help my father very much. He was a model railroader and
| just got used to taking several dozen passes at painting
| cars and locomotives. For me myself I've found that
| stress tends to make it worse so it's a bit of a vicious
| cycle where trying to suppress shaking can spur it on
| more. Advice is never unappreciated though so thank you
| for you consideration!
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| FWIW, I have a terrible hand tremor as well. I've found
| that with a good, wide-aperture magnifying glass or
| binocular microscope, I'm able to do soldering and even
| chip-level wirebonding. Having an armrest or other
| surface I can support my forearm/wrist on, with a tight
| structural loop to the target, can also help a lot.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Second the armrest suggestion, it makes all the
| difference. You can be rock steady if you don't have to
| support the weight of your whole arm from the shoulder,
| the closer you can rest your hand to where the action is
| the more stable you'll become. Another thing that helps
| is breath control.
| xnzakg wrote:
| As much as I agree with this, buying off the shelf things,
| especially on the extremes of "very niche" (ok this kinda
| how's under your "hobbyist design" or "so general there are
| hundreds of knockoff versions with various cost cutting
| measures", there is no guarantee that they have thought of
| all (or any) of the required safety measures... Check out Big
| Clive on YouTube if you haven't already, and aren't afraid of
| knowing about all the different ways products skimp on
| safety.
| fho wrote:
| I recently started at a big connector manufacturer... And I
| have to say, there is so much more that goes into connectors,
| even "simple" ones, than what is obvious to the end user.
| contingencies wrote:
| Want to second this comment. Spatial efficiency, insert and
| locking mechanisms, electrical characteristics, mechanical
| strength characteristics, machine pickability/placeability,
| solderability, thermal characteristics, thermal impact to
| overall system, environmental seal properties including
| water/saline air/weak acids/weak bases, orientation
| guarantees, safety factors such as susceptibility of shorting
| with different categories of pollutant including metal dust,
| longevity/susceptibility of contacts to build-up of dust,
| formal fire engineering properties (including combustion
| temperature/off-gassing), fabrication cost including line
| purchase/scheduling/maintenance and hard tooling
| fabrication/longevity/maintenance, color coding for human
| error reduction in assembling and maintenance, documentation
| and translation, distribution and recalls, etc. That's just
| the connector. Now look at regulatory outlook, availability
| and all of the above mentioned concerns for the relevant
| cables and their fabrication processes...
| imachine1980_ wrote:
| Some things that are cheaper at a low scale is quite expensive
| at scale, 3D printing is obvious here, your way to consume less
| 3D printing may be opposite to the way that regular plastic
| manufacturer does, so you need to adapt your process to the
| process of your suppliers.
| ilyt wrote:
| 3D printing looks like linear scaling and from what I saw 3D
| printing services are pretty cheap.
|
| Yeah they are more expensive than running printer in your
| garage because they need to earn money too but it's not like
| the price grows with volume
| sokoloff wrote:
| As someone who sells a low-volume niche product (as a
| sideline), the problem isn't that 3D printing costs grow
| per-unit, but rather that they don't meet people's
| intuition of what plastic things should cost.
|
| A box that might cost $0.25 if injection molded might be
| $25 if 3D printed.
| petsfed wrote:
| I wasn't even touching manufacturing at scale, because
| sometimes you really do need just the one. But it should not
| be so fragile you can't carry it from the garage to
| thermostat mounting position.
|
| I learned that the hard way when I automated the heat lamp
| that I put in my chicken coop. Having to noodle around with
| screw terminals while being pecked at by an angry rooster was
| not a great time.
| bytefactory wrote:
| The rooster didn't approve of your soldering technique?
| bonestamp2 wrote:
| Rooster thought he should have used chicken wire.
| eternityforest wrote:
| And all of this together still doesn't solve the bigger problem
| with DIY hardware, which is the DIY itself.
|
| It it goes wrong, you cannot buy a new one or hire repairperson
| at a sane price. If it has a software side, it will probably
| need maintainence. If you want one, there's a large chance you
| might want another to expand your project.
|
| While yes, I am able to design a reliable hardware device,
| unless you have a large budget it will not be immune to direct
| baseball bat hits or spilling epoxy in the connector. So, in
| practice, if you ask me to build something for you, I'll try to
| find a way to do it with off the shelf parts as much as
| possible.
|
| Which sucks, because electronics projects are super fun, but
| the fun is dampened by the fact that in the end you have this
| completely unique irreplaceable thing that becomes a liability
| if you use it for anything important, which is generally tied
| to one application and becomes junk if you no longer need it,
| unlike the more general purpose off the shelf stuff.
|
| ESPHome and Amazon modules plus 3D printing gives a pretty good
| balance for a lot of things. Reconfigurable, machine-soldered
| reliability, a prefab software stack, but still enough
| flexibility to build novel things.
| bacon_waffle wrote:
| > It it goes wrong, you cannot buy a new one or hire
| repairperson at a sane price. If it has a software side, it
| will probably need maintainence.
|
| It's not clear to me that the alternative provides these
| either. Just thinking about some of the appliance-type things
| I've had issues with lately: my oven would've made more sense
| to replace than hire a repair person, and my ISP-provided
| router is running their latest firmware which is horribly out
| of date...
| KRAKRISMOTT wrote:
| Just buy some spare tapeouts from digikey when building
| -\\_(tsu)_/-
| eternityforest wrote:
| Doesn't solve the issue of nobody else knowing how to build
| it, and the ones that do often somehow making 60$ an hour,
| now you're stuck with this thing that could be your
| responsibility at any time.
| dotancohen wrote:
| > but the fun is dampened by the fact that in the end you
| have this completely unique irreplaceable thing
|
| For many, having a completely unique irreplaceable thing _is_
| the appeal.
| generj wrote:
| I'm a big proponent of open source hardware but as your post
| shows it often involves skills of many disciplines that
| requires vigorous thought or trial and error. Electronics and
| physics are unforgiving in a way processors are not.
|
| Even after reaching the prototype phase, the open source
| hardware is probably only useful to one person: it's creator.
|
| There is a big difference between making a prototype and
| detailing the build in sufficient detail other hobbyists can
| replicate it / modify / use it. Documenting hardware is
| substantially harder than documenting software. If the project
| is cool a bunch of people will be excited to jump in; some of
| these people have zero experience soldering or ordering laser
| cut parts or whatever. Supporting them is hard.
|
| Then another step up to sell the design to other hobbyists,
| even just a few extra copies on Tindie.
|
| And then a huge step up from that to selling to the general
| public, where suddenly FCC interference certifications are
| needed and the company is liable if the design burns down a few
| houses. There's a reason firms making hardware have real
| engineers on staff held to professional standards. Plus all the
| cash flow and business concerns when the marginal cost per unit
| isn't under 1 cent like software.
|
| Each of these steps often involves multiple iterations of
| hardware and therefore lead time and cost.
| eternityforest wrote:
| There are a lot of OSHW projects I'd love to work on, but the
| main thing that holds me back is knowing they'd basically go
| nowhere. I can't post them online for others like with code.
|
| Nobody is going to build it, the physical building of it is
| way harder than the design, anyone who could build it is too
| busy building their own projects that will go in the junk
| drawer in a week.
|
| I would love to work at a real OSHW company, making IoT
| gadgets and stuff that for production and sale as polished
| commercial products with a software ecosystem behind them...
| but I lack a degree, live in Montana, and don't drive, and
| there are not many companies like that(And most of them are
| making expensive FOSS phones that don't run normal apps,
| cryptocurrency stuff, or glorified dev boards kinda
| pretending to be products)
| d-sc wrote:
| Eh. As a counter point.
|
| I live in Montana, have a degree in an unrelated field but
| still work on IOT projects.
|
| I work mostly from home or private office and have never
| needed to drive for course of work.
|
| Not sure how you exist in Montana without driving.
|
| If you'd like to move into that field, it's certainly not
| easy but it is possible.
| xnzakg wrote:
| Really depends on the specific pronect of course, but
| there's definitely some "posted online like code" projects
| out there. It's a more technical target audience of course,
| but I've seen plenty of projects with design files included
| ready to be sent to a PCB manufacturer. Two categories I
| can easily think of are mechanical keyboards and modular
| synthesizers.
| nico_h wrote:
| There's also ergogen, which is a project that generates
| the PCB for your split keyboard based on a few inputs.
| Then just send it to your favorite online pcb maker and
| you just have to solder the components .
|
| And there are a bunch of dactyl manuform case generators.
| (Which the online pcb fabs are now also offering to print
| in your favorite material)
| eternityforest wrote:
| Keyboards are an interesting case, people are so into
| them, and also specifically _want_ them to be custom made
| just for them, so people are willing to build or even
| commission.
|
| I keep thinking that maybe high end flashlights could be
| the same way, I can definitely think of a few features
| that don't show up in your typical light, and that it
| might be cool to try to make a few boutique lights to
| sell, but my business knowledge isn't quite up to that,
| and I don't exactly have much desire to do a whole lot of
| independent work, I much prefer having an employer.
| nico_h wrote:
| The thing i see with flashlights is that the physical
| object is pretty complex and has to face thermal, power
| and environmental constraints that would destroy any
| keyboard.
|
| Maybe it could start as a gut replacement for an existing
| cheap flashlight and grow from there.
| dotancohen wrote:
| Am I underestimating how complex a battery, bulb, and
| switch are? What complexity is in a modern flashlight? I
| remember proudly making a flashlight in 1984 or so from
| scavenged components, including silvering my own
| reflector.
| petsfed wrote:
| A pretty common feature is single-button dimming. For
| LEDs, that actually requires a microcontroller and a more
| sophisticated power regulation scheme than just a current
| limiting resistor.
|
| There's also custom colors, flash patterns, etc
| dotancohen wrote:
| Wouldn't an additional button be simpler than a
| microcontroller. Button A turns on ~30% of the lights,
| Button B turns on the remaining ~70% of the lights. That
| also adds a bit of redundancy if a connection fails.
|
| I've only been caving twice. Dimmer lights are great -
| but they don't need to be on a single switch. Quite the
| opposite, putting them on a single switch means that one
| _has_ to cycle through the bright option when that is not
| wanted.
| petsfed wrote:
| Flashlight design is neither my hobby nor my profession.
| But I own a bunch of flashlights, and single-button
| dimming seems to be table stakes for a lot of
| commercially available head lamps and lanterns.
|
| Also, with the right micro, a second button (with
| relevant environmental protection) may well be more
| expensive than putting that micro and voltage regulator
| under a big blob of black epoxy.
| OJFord wrote:
| It's simple at the low end, GP's talking about much
| higher power & light output gear than you get in a
| Christmas cracker. Marine applications, cycling, caving,
| etc.
| eternityforest wrote:
| There's definitely strong thermal concerns with a
| flashlight now that everything is LED with lithium
| cellsand the chips want to stay cool.
|
| Unless maybe there's a demand for simpler lights
| somewhere? I tend to forget that non-LED light sources
| are actually a thing, but that it's pretty cool to make
| one from scratch at the level of hand silvered
| reflectors!
|
| I'd probably be putting LED and battery temperature
| sensing in anything I made, so I wouldn't be too worried
| about safety, but it would be a mechanical challenge that
| would likely take some iteration to get right on the
| mechanical side.
| vdqtp3 wrote:
| Flashlight nerds are crazy, it's definitely as big a
| market as custom keyboards
| bsder wrote:
| > Supporting them is hard.
|
| Ding!
|
| We had a bespoke wireless entry system for our hackerspace
| which kinda sucked. Eventually the board switched it out for
| OpenPath (which also sucks--to be fair).
|
| Why?
|
| Support. The board can now _call_ someone and say "We pay
| you. Fix this."
|
| Support is the bane of consumer products. I really wish we
| had some way to counter this.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Even seasoned professionals can get caught in the gap between
| 'prototype' and 'production grade' especially for things that
| are on the margin of what can be done with a particular
| hardware recipe. That's when component variation can cause
| your product yield to go straight into the sewer.
| notsurenymore wrote:
| > "If you can use open source, you can prototype hardware"
|
| You can prototype _some hardware_. I've looked into trying to
| build some stuff that goes beyond what a little prepackaged MCU
| dev board can do, and I can't wrap my head around it. Too much
| stuff involved that in no good at.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Compared to software skills those are relatively easy to
| learn though and they have a longer best-before date than any
| kind of language/framework kind of knowledge.
| crote wrote:
| Rather the opposite, I'd say.
|
| Software is deterministic and quite easy to reason about.
| It either works, or it doesn't. Hardware relies on actual
| physics, and even minute changes can be the difference
| between working perfectly fine and not working at all.
|
| A lot of hardware design is based on rules-of-thumb and
| institutional knowledge. Learning those as a hobbyist is
| _incredibly_ difficult, and most of the time you
| essentially end up cargo culting what everyone else is
| doing - and there is no guarantee that everyone else is
| doing the right thing either! It is really easy to end up
| wasting hundreds if not thousands of dollars like this.
|
| This is exactly why companies like Adafruit have become so
| big. They take care of all the hard part, and provide the
| hobbyists with essentially a bunch of lego bricks which
| neatly click together. The only thing you have to do
| yourself is... the software.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I've never spent as much time on hardware bugs as I've
| spent on software bugs. If the software you've worked on
| is 'easy to reason about' then you've led a charmed life!
|
| That's probably also why all software is 'bug free' ;)
|
| But seriously: both software and hardware have their
| unique challenges. But those can be overcome and just
| like software hardware can be 'unit tested' by breaking
| down circuitry into manageable chunks. Adafruit is a
| success simply because they fill a need: the ability to
| create bespoke gadgets without investing lot of $ or
| learning a new skill. The market to programmers, not to
| hardware people, though I'm sure there is some overlap as
| well due to the convenience. But those skills are not
| substantially harder than software skills, they are just
| different.
|
| I'm kind of lucky: I got into software through hardware
| rather than the other way around. To me software was an
| infinite parts budget (bounded by RAM limitations,
| usually). Hardware was a running expense, computing a
| one-time expense (or so I thought, hah!). So I simply got
| more mileage out of my pocket money and Saturday job
| earnings by saving for a computer rather than by spending
| it on various hardware components.
| notsurenymore wrote:
| I'm not so sure about that. Learning a programming language
| for example is pretty easy, iterative, and had quick
| feedback for me. Learning years worth of math makes my eyes
| glaze over. I do agree on the latter half though, regarding
| how they're useful for much longer.
| jacquesm wrote:
| You won't need 'years worth of math' to be able to
| prototype hardware. There is plenty of tooling now that
| will take the sting out of timing and other nasty little
| details and there is plenty of hardware where those
| details don't even matter all that much.
|
| Good starterpoint: and FPGA evaluation board, such as
| Digilent's offerings. Those pack enormous power in a tiny
| setup and will teach you a ton of very valuable skills.
|
| If that looks like a hit you can decide to deepen your
| knowledge.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| You won't need "years worth of math" to be able to
| prototype _digital_ hardware.
|
| As soon as there's a non-trivial analog element -
| anything frequency-dependent, resonant, exceptionally
| resistant to RF interference, or switching significant
| current - you absolutely do need that math.
|
| You can model resonant filters with DSP, but you still
| need to understand z-plane digital models. It doesn't
| hurt to have some idea how they relate to s-plane analog
| models.
|
| Cook-book tinkering is plenty fun, but you really can
| make things explode or burst into flames if your project
| is switching and/or carrying any significant load.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I've built massive RF stuff with high school math and it
| worked quite well, better than some off the shelf stuff,
| and that's after a nice session with a spectrum analyzer
| to make sure you don't end up spewing garbage all over
| the higher bands. What really helps is to have access to
| good measuring tools and to know how to use them, as well
| as people with more experience than you to help guide
| you.
|
| Stuff exploding or bursting into flames I've seen exactly
| once, on one of the most trivial circuits I ever built: a
| small boost converter for a windmill to charge batteries
| in low wind conditions. It worked extremely well. Until I
| disconnected the battery for service and then the boost
| converter kept on increasing its output voltage until the
| capacitors let out the magic smoke. Other than that stuff
| occasionally breaks. Oh, and if you do do RF stuff:
| beware of RF burns, that is a real risk, coils and
| capacitors in high power RF circuits should be treated
| with proper respect.
|
| I'd be much more wary of Lithium-Ion batteries than
| analog stuff and buck-boost converters are cheaper to
| source as complete units than to build yourself (though
| you definitely can if you want). Your typical hobbyist
| isn't going to start off by building themselves an large
| inverter or a HVDC interconnect. They're going to build
| amplifiers, other audio gear and maybe some measuring kit
| or digital devices. Sound generators, function generators
| and so on.
|
| By the time you reach the stage where you need to design
| a resonant LC circuit you'll have picked up a lot of
| working knowledge and some of that will tell you what
| bits to avoid and what bits you can probably handle.
|
| I know plenty of HAMs that know enough math to be
| dangerous but they usually would not be able to do really
| complex stuff without access to tools (though I also know
| some HAMs that definitely would be able to do really
| complex stuff, they also have the corresponding higher
| level license).
|
| Let's not pretend that everybody that builds electronics
| for hobby purposes is a math wizard, it just isn't true.
| Though it definitely doesn't hurt to have a basic
| understanding of RC and LC circuitry and to understand
| how to use op amps and other interesting components like
| that. Applying those is vastly different from designing
| them from scratch.
|
| Also: quite a few people have a ton of fun just building
| kits and slowly expanding their knowledge and there is
| absolutely nothing wrong with that. At the highest levels
| you will need that math, but there is plenty of
| interesting stuff to be done lower on the ladder. HN is
| the last place where I would expect such gatekeeping.
| [deleted]
| mcshicks wrote:
| I think anytime you move past the lumped circuit model
| you can run into trouble. This includes digital circuits
| with fast edge rates. On the other hand a close reading
| of a component manufacturer's application notes and
| reference schematics can help a lot of people who may
| have only limited formal training in electrical
| engineering.
| z500 wrote:
| Any tips for getting started for a software engineer? I
| built a couple CPUs in a circuit simulator, I'd love to
| get these things running on silicon of some kind and
| benchmark them against each other, but I wonder if I
| would be biting off more than I can chew.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I'd definitely go the FPGA route initially, it has
| software like advantages such as being able to reprogram
| stuff without having to tear it all up and do it all
| over. It also elegantly avoids having to build up
| soldering skills (which is a bit of a pain with SMD) Once
| you get the hang of that some simple CMOS circuits hole-
| through on a breadboard would be a gateway drug to
| building stuff for real. If you want another in-between
| step I'd go for a kit of some sort, something that you
| want to have anyway but would rather build yourself,
| there are quite a few producers of such kits and they
| range in complexity from 'blinking LED' to 'build your
| own glass teletype' and everything in between (and even
| more complex).
|
| Compared to software it is a costly hobby though, and it
| also occupies more space beyond just a laptop. And it can
| be quite messy.
| petsfed wrote:
| Can you give an example? There may well be an easily accessed
| IC for it.
| notsurenymore wrote:
| Mostly I was looking trying to do custom RF stuff, trying
| to create custom hardware. Could have used an SDR, but I
| think I still would need a solid handle on the math for
| that.
| petsfed wrote:
| That's definitely the realm of "actual electrical
| engineer". There's a lot you can learn to get most of the
| way there without the math, but to actually understand
| why you've got e.g. an impedance matching network on your
| antenna trace requires some mathematical gymnastics
| that's easiest to get in school. That can feel pretty
| frustrating, but on the other hand a lot of the hardware
| at work there can be had off-the-shelf as modules, so you
| don't have to do any RF black magic. Just standard build-
| quality questions.
| [deleted]
| fareesh wrote:
| Hardware building is an expensive hobby, and often involves
| aspects of engineering like heat, power, safety, etc.
|
| I don't trust myself to build something that I can leave
| unattended and won't catch fire. How does one get over this?
| _benj wrote:
| I think outsourcing the "dangerous parts" i.e. buying a power
| supply instead of building one. Apart from that, most
| applications stay in the 5V range and few mA. If you are using
| something that requires more current then just over engineer. A
| motor that uses 0.5A? Buy a 3A mosfet, flipping 120v
| electricity? Buy a premade relay module that is already
| optically decoupled and just feed it 5V signals.
|
| When it comes to stuff failing in general at hobby level you
| either burn something instantly (plug the power to an IC
| backwards and see the magic smoke go away) or it just heats up
| VERY VERY FAST!
|
| I once plugged an external 5V power to a development board that
| was already USB powered but I didn't know it... it started
| smelling like something was burning within a few seconds and I
| burned myself by touching it instead of pulling the heat camera
| :-)
| fellowmartian wrote:
| Outsource dangerous building blocks to qualified people,
| overpay for quality components, learn proper wiring (ratings,
| crimping, etc).
| jcalvinowens wrote:
| Use listed current limiting power supplies. A 10W 5V wall wart
| is incapable of starting a fire no matter how badly you screw
| up.
| fareesh wrote:
| Helps to know, thanks
| 01100011 wrote:
| I don't know if you ever do, but designing with fat tolerances
| helps. If you're just building something once, it often doesn't
| cost much more to over-engineer it. Choose a more powerful
| processor than you need, add more cooling than you need, use
| more fuses and power-supply filtering than you need. Opto-
| isolate all I/O. Test it in a hotter/colder/more-humid
| environment than you'll use it in normally...
| eropple wrote:
| _> You can't beat Prusa: the printers come out of the box working
| perfectly_
|
| At the cost of being old and slow. I wouldn't be throwing roses
| to Prusa after they effectively ceded the market to everyone
| else.
|
| For $200, you can get a Sovol SV06 that's a smarter iteration on
| the MK3/MK3S (while also being open-source both in hardware and
| software); for $500 you can get a Bambu P1P that's much faster
| and has _better_ vertical integration through the slicer (and for
| $100 more than that you can get a P1S, which is high-temp ready
| while also doing all the same things as the P1P).
| ilyt wrote:
| What 'using open source' is some special thing people need to
| learn ? You install a program and you use a program, 'open
| source' changes nothing there unless you want to start modifying
| it
| iancmceachern wrote:
| If anyone needs help making their hardware projects or products
| real and take it to market please feel free to reach out. Contact
| info is in my bio.
| _benj wrote:
| Saving your contact info :-)
|
| I'm not there yet but I'm working on transitioning from
| software to hardware... so I want to get there eventually!
| johnwalkr wrote:
| There are other starting points besides 3D printing,
| arduino/microcontrollers and spark fun sensors.
|
| If you just need an enclosure for a product there are ready-made
| ones that you just drill and cut as needed. And for anything to
| do with sensing or automation look into industrial PLCs
| (automationdirect.com is the cheap supplier) before you start re-
| inventing the wheel.
| lnsru wrote:
| Sounds like a typical content on today's internet: enough
| buzzwords for search engine to find it and too abstract to be
| useful.
| the-printer wrote:
| This is a valid criticism, but I don't think that it's
| necessarily the author's fault.
| 6D794163636F756 wrote:
| I think it's a flaw inherent to the current system. You have
| to make money to live and you do that, not by appeasing human
| readers, but by appeasing an algorithm. The world is not
| easily reduced into clear classifications but we're currently
| forcing it into them
| bryancoxwell wrote:
| Blog posts don't need to be useful.
| ranting-moth wrote:
| I really like the software/hardware opportunities we have today.
| But headlines like this just invite negative comments. It's like
| saying "if you can read a book you can become a nuclear
| physicist".
|
| Or even "You don't need to learn svelte!" (I love Svelte but
| statements like that are not helpful).
| Takennickname wrote:
| Is there anyone on earth not using open source in some capacity?
| codetrotter wrote:
| This group of people for one.
|
| > the Sentinelese appear to have consistently refused any
| interaction with the outside world. They are hostile to
| outsiders and have killed people who approached or landed on
| the island.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinelese
|
| But more seriously I would say there is a difference between
| intentionally and incidentally using open source software.
|
| I run Linux and FreeBSD on multiple machines. I use open source
| software intentionally.
|
| My girlfriend runs Windows on her laptop. If we look closely I
| am sure we will find open source libraries being used both
| within the OS, and within other pieces of software that she
| runs. But all of that is incidental. She is not interested in
| software and that is fine.
|
| My mother and my grandfather both use LibreOffice. But only
| because I installed it for them. So neither my grandfather nor
| my mother really are intentional users of open source software.
| It just happened to be the case that their grandson/son (me)
| knew about LibreOffice and installed it for them, so that they
| could use it to write documents and to open Word documents that
| other people sent to them.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Depends what you mean by "using" open source. If we include
| consumers of software that happens to have its source published
| but who couldn't compile it even if they downloaded the source
| (so, >90% of Chrome users, for example), then yes there are
| lots of non-devs. Likewise, there are probably still some devs
| using licensed libraries proprietary applications using
| proprietary IDEs and compilers, though it's certainly getting
| rarer.
| buildsjets wrote:
| Watching the penguin screen continuously reboot on Delta
| airlines' janky in-flight entertainment system should not
| count as "Using Open Source".
| bonestamp2 wrote:
| I would bet that every form of motorized transportation has
| open source in the build or operating model somewhere.
| Narushia wrote:
| As a software-only guy, this article brings me great
| encouragement for doing a hardware project in the future! :)
|
| Although, to be honest, my bigger problem is probably just simply
| not having a use case which I could use a self-built hardware
| project for. I don't feel like I'm missing or lacking anything in
| my life or at home that could be fixed with a hardware project.
|
| Additionally, I usually want the absolute best solution to a
| problem that I can afford. Commercial products have satisfied me
| well so far. My mindset about this is that if I can just pay
| someone for a product that solves my problem, I will gladly do so
| instead of scratching my head with a self-built project (I
| consider my time more valuable than anything else).
|
| So I guess what really needs to happen to make me actually dip my
| toes in the hardware soup... is to have an annoying enough
| problem that cannot be solved with ready-made products on the
| market (either because they are bad or outright don't exist).
| peteforde wrote:
| Lots of gatekeeping and snark in these comments. Every time
| something hard gets easier, the pure who suffered hardest come
| out of the woodwork to inform you that the easy thing you're
| doing is not as good as the hard thing they've been doing since
| you were in short pants.
|
| Composition is great for prototyping and small-scale production.
| As you level up and learn about optimizing BOMs and DFM, you will
| start to swap out MCU boards for your own designs; you'll see how
| that $10 I2C rotary encoder can be replaced with $1 worth of
| resistors, capacitors, a Schottky diode and a hex inverter.
|
| Anyhow, I came to say that with companies like JLBPCB and PCBWay
| offering 3D printing and CNC services, you don't even need to buy
| a 3D printer to get started.
|
| Heck, with https://wokwi.com/ you might not even need prototyping
| components.
| ugh123 wrote:
| Totally agree with your comment on the gatekeeping and
| snarkiness. Also my current foray into hardware (as a software
| guy) tells me there's tons of low hanging fruit on the design
| rules side to cover all sorts of scenarios for "production
| ready" component selection, placement, and environment
| concerns.
|
| My gut tells me that the software market that serves hardware
| engineers isn't nearly as creative or ambitious as that on pure
| software and even devops or infrastructure.
|
| Huge opportunity there.
| e-_pusher wrote:
| You are not wrong overall, but I am not sure if the
| opportunity is huge, at least IMO not enough to sustain a VC-
| backed company (or perhaps barely). As a benchmark, Altium
| has a market cap of 6B. The fundamental problem is that there
| aren't that many HW engineers out there (compared to SWEs and
| SWE adjacents like DevOps etc). And the existing players are
| super entrenched into existing companies doing HW design.
|
| There are some interesting companies out there that I am
| watching, like flux.io. The problem there is that none of
| these companies are working on creating open-source tooling,
| so their endgame seems to be getting acquired by Altium,
| Cadence et al.
|
| I fear a future where doing even regular PCB designs will be
| gatekept by the Cadences and Synopysyes of the world, akin to
| how IC design is today. At least we have KiCad right now,
| which is getting really powerful and is fantastic for doing
| PCB development work.
| crote wrote:
| The problem is that 1) "design rules" are in practice more
| like guidelines, and often need to be violated in order to
| actually get stuff made, and 2) all the data is wrong,
| contradictory, and cannot be trusted.
|
| A lot of the work of a hardware engineer is reading and
| interpreting datasheets and trying to separate the wheat from
| the chaff. The low-hanging fruit which can easily be
| automated is the _easy_ part of the job, and writing the
| input data for the automation ends up taking more time than
| just manually doing it yourself.
|
| I have dabbled into writing some software extensions for
| KiCad, and some turned out to be _very_ useful and now save
| me quite a lot of time. However, every time I tried to be
| "clever" and solve a seemingly easy problem, it ended up not
| being worth it in the end.
| [deleted]
| resonious wrote:
| I'm in a similar boat so maybe totally naive, but this seems
| true. I think the software industry is super rich in tooling
| because software engineers understand software, and can build
| their own software (haha..). Non-software fields have crap
| software because usually their only way to get some is to
| hire a software person who doesn't actually understand the
| industry. Introducing a communication barrier like this
| massively dampens productivity. Things are much smoother when
| the person using the software can actually dig in and fix the
| kinks themself instead of filing a Jira ticket.
| sheepshear wrote:
| Big companies buy solvers and support contracts, not
| interfaces. That's why everything has a crappy buggy
| interface slapped on it.
| [deleted]
| certyfreak wrote:
| A thing preventing people from going into hardware(prototyping)
| is the cost. Software is cheaper than hardware. i.e. i
| leptons wrote:
| Not exactly true. Many electronics manufacturers give out free
| samples. All kinds of free samples. When I was a kid (and even
| into adulthood) I would contact all the electronics
| manufacturers I could to get free samples. I had dozens of free
| Microchip PIC embedded CPUs and support chips. Back in the day
| Maxim semiconductor (now Analog Devices), and many others. I
| even got free stuff from Digikey, but that took some convincing
| of the right people at Digikey. Some of the products I begged
| and pleaded for - I got a full touchpad controller for free,
| including shipping, because I was a "student" and I was making
| a "prototype". It really wasn't that difficult to get free
| electronics to learn with. And for the passive components -
| resistors, capacitors, coils, and other parts there's always
| free broken electronics floating around, and I would harvest
| everything I could that I didn't already have plenty of.
|
| https://www.microchip.com/samples/
|
| https://www.analog.com/en/support/customer-service-resources...
|
| https://reddit.com/r/electronics/comments/1qvcr2/how_to_prop...
|
| https://www.ladyada.net/library/procure/samples.html
| crote wrote:
| Sampling is a lot rarer these days. There is a reason your
| last two links are from 10+ years ago. Too many hobbyists
| tried to use sampling as a means of getting free parts for
| their personal projects.
|
| Sampling is intended to get a _sample_ so the company 's
| expectation is that it will eventually result in an actual
| order. This will obviously happen when sampling to companies,
| and sampling to EE students means those students are more
| likely to choose your products when they enter the field.
|
| Sampling to hobbyists doesn't really have any return on
| investment, so once they started getting thousands of
| requests they just shut it down. These days you are just
| expected to order low-quantity items from their distributors.
| ilyt wrote:
| Monetary cost is only small part of it (as it got significantly
| cheaper too, at least for small electronics).
|
| The feedback loop is just very long. Few weeks to get PCB
| unless you pay a lot extra to get it in few days.
|
| And even if you own a 3d printer for mechanical parts that's
| still day of printing
| kuratkull wrote:
| Interesting, I am in the same boat with the author. Recently have
| started to dabble more in embedded devices. I am building a well
| water level sensor. First I tried to use an NRF based board, but
| I got bogged down with the SDK ecosystem, it's really meant for
| experienced embedded engineers of companies. Then I fell back to
| much simpler ESP32-C3/S3 boards, which are great, widely
| supported, easy to set up and pretty reliable. I hook it up to
| the distance sensor (HC-SR04) and make the distance calculations
| work. You also have to add a voltage converter if you want to run
| from batteries, because the sensor requires 5V - easy enough
| after some reading and failing. Then you have a mess of boards
| and cables, you need to solder it to a board which requires tools
| and a bit playing around. Now I was missing an enclosure, tried a
| few store bought junction boxes, none were perfect, and I decide
| to buy my own 3D printer (the future is now, print your own
| things, learn modelling, etc). Those are actually pretty easy
| compared to everything else, I printed my first models <1h after
| receiving the printer. Modelling in programmatic OpenSCAD or my
| currently preferred tool CadQuery - easy to pick up in a few
| hours of playing around. So yeah, I have had my printer for
| exactly a week, and I have printed almost a dozen successful
| prints, and designed a couple of usable and functional parts.
| Don't be afraid of 3d printers, oh and also you can get good
| printers for much less than 500 USD, I bought a lightly used
| second hand Sovol SV06 for 150EUR (220 for new) and it works
| really well.
|
| The idea is I didn't find an existing water-well sensor for my
| purposes, so I am building my own. Final price of BOM probably
| 20EUR. Time spent learning and tinkering - hundreds of hours.
| Cost of stuff I had to buy to support all this, probably
| somewhere around 500EUR now. (printer, connector crimpers,
| cables, MCUs, solder boards, sensors, battery holders, electronic
| components, filament for the printer, soldering iron, etc). It
| has all been worth it.
| yafbum wrote:
| Ehh... Sometimes. I tried this modular approach with a project,
| some things worked very well, others not well at all. In
| particular I have a ton of EF interference noise in my audio
| circuit and no idea how to get rid of it.
| Berryu6 wrote:
| [flagged]
| dizzydes wrote:
| How hard is it to remake and improve a random component on any
| electronic device I own? eg the control panel on my microwave or
| my entire TV remote.
|
| Would I need specific parts from the manufacturers?
|
| Would dissecting the existing component give enough detail for me
| to remake without the (I assume proprietary/hidden) schematics?
| jononor wrote:
| This is half reverse engineering (understanding the existing
| part), and half engineering. The reversing can be quite
| difficult for less common parts/designs, and is partly a
| different skillset. But for standardized interfaces like an IR
| TV remote it can be pretty easy.
| _benj wrote:
| Maybe a bit optimistic but I don't think it'd be to hard.
|
| Most devices already use pretty standard components, a
| microwave for example would have "something" to switch the
| thing on and off. It might be a solid state relay or something
| like that. Maybe it has multiple, one to control the fan,
| light, motor to turn the things around, and the thing that
| emits the microwaves.
|
| But once you figure out what signal is needed to start those (a
| bit of intuition and a multimeter might suffice) you are off to
| the races!
|
| One you open a few house appliances it's easy to see how they
| optimized for cost, so you seldom find fancy protocols or
| components unless they are absolutely necessary.
|
| In a toaster over for example, you might find a temperature
| sensor and it would likely take a bit of fever engineering to
| calibrate the temperature to the voltage output (I'm assuming
| that is a cheap analog sensor instead of something that spits a
| digital I2C signal for example).
|
| So yeah! It shouldn't be too hard to hack your devices :-)
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| uwave control panels are pretty simple - usually just some
| buttons, a display, maybe a rotary controller, and an embedded
| controller IC.
|
| But you _really_ do not want to be experimenting with custom
| control unless you know exactly what you 're doing. Aside from
| the risk of nuking food and/or accidentally bypassing the door
| switch and microwaving yourself/partner/kids/pets/etc, most
| uwaves have huge power capacitors near the controller board.
|
| An unplanned encounter with one of those can kill you.
|
| Here's a sample circuit. It's not super-complex. But there's a
| lot to go wrong, and it's really not a beginner project.
|
| https://www.electronicsforu.com/electronics-projects/microwa...
|
| Remotes are basically the same with (usually) an IR
| transmitter, more buttons, and no dangerous power switching.
| It's not all that hard to clone one, but the hard part is
| making the tiny physical buttons and inventing a better UI.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7z4CU5mw9E
| crote wrote:
| A lot harder than building your own from scratch.
|
| When you are trying to improve an existing product, you first
| need to figure out what the existing part is doing. This is
| going to be incredibly difficult because you do not have access
| to the original documentation. Often it involves proprietary
| parts for which _zero_ documentation is publicly available, and
| you are going to need quite expensive tooling to figure out
| what it is doing without those docs.
|
| In general I do not really think this is viable to a beginner
| for anything beyond completely trivial product. A microwave is
| a really bad idea due to the voltages and currents involved
| (you can easily end up killing yourself). A TV remote is
| probably doable, but mostly because you can do that without
| opening up the remote at all and just need to look at the
| (often standardized) IR signals coming out.
| ilaksh wrote:
| That's not building hardware. It's connecting up and interfacing
| existing hardware components.
|
| Which probably makes more sense than designing hardware
| components for most applications.
|
| But it's not the same as designing circuits etc. and the title is
| a bit misleading as far as that goes.
| chefandy wrote:
| Making a box of mac & cheese is still cooking-- it's just not
| from-scratch cooking.
| darksaints wrote:
| Of course it is building hardware. It just isn't building _all
| of it_ , which is what all of us do with everything we build,
| to some degree or another. I can run some wood through a CNC
| machine and I still count it as building something even if I
| didn't grow the tree nor cut it down nor kiln dry the wood nor
| cut it to exact size I needed for it to be put into a CNC
| machine.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| Side question, are there hobbyist groups or meet-ups that one
| would recommend ?
| em3rgent0rdr wrote:
| If you think building hardware is as easy as importing a library,
| you can burn your house down.
| monero-xmr wrote:
| So I'm posting this way late and I doubt anyone will read the
| comment. But I did a hardware startup once and was surrounded by
| other hardware startups in the space we were in.
|
| Ughhhhhhhh operating system updates, internet issues, test kit
| from China that we had to use a specific version of cracked
| Windows XP and still do live support in broken English at
| midnight.
|
| Hardware is hard - Never again!
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