Comment Re:New News: Product Design is Hard! (Score 1) 217
If you think it's going to be easy to put together a real techy product with software and circuits and PCBs and enclosures and EM certification and patent minefields and manufacturing and packaging and distributors and competition, you might want to examine why you think that.
it's not even that. it's scalability.
It is SUPER easy to put together a one-off or even a 10 or 100-off product.
Scale that up to the thousands and you're looking at a difficulty rating that grows exponentially - what used to work for small batches doesn't anymore when dealing with mass production.
Ordering 1000 parts through Digikey is simple. Ordering 10,000 of same, not so simple because lead times suddenly matter - Digikey may stock the item, but only in small quantities because by the time they sell out, the lead time has expired and they have a new batch.
Not to mention if you really want to order large quantities, you don't go to Digikey, but direct to the manufacturer. You can buy through Digikey and the like, but you're at the mercy of Digikey/Arrow/Newark/etc. Work with the manufacturer and they can quote you better times and availability because they know they can batch in a bigger order. But manufacturers are tricky and most don't want to deal with itty-bitty pseudo-companies. Or they find more lucrative markets (actually happened - the manufacturer of a SAW filter for GPS suddenly got their filter approved for LTE. So the manufacturer basically stopped selling to Digikey in favor of selling direct,
Then there are the companies who just don't want to deal with you, to which you are lucky you can get the part though a reseller.
Add in testing and design for manufacturability which are complicated topics in an of themselves. Testing that used to take half an hour per board needs to be condensed to be more efficient - whether it be custom designed test fixtures, test applications, test harnesses, equipment, etc. And automate, automate, automate so the QA person only has to take their board and stick it in the fixture. If there are dozens of little connectors and other crap, accommodations should be in the fixture to make those connections without human intervention.
And then design for manufacturability - knowing how to build the boards and stick them in cases and minimizing the amount of fiddly things that have to be done so it's more a matter of build the board, stick it in the test fixture, wait for a "PASS" from the automated tester, shove the board in the case that self-aligns and close it up.