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Ask HN: Manufacturing small electronic devices?

10 points by epicviking ↗ HN
The hacker community has been a great help getting me from components to prototype, but I haven't really found much about the mass production process. Has anyone gotten a small electronic device mass produced? Is there anything I should be aware of? Who should I talk to? Is it going to be as expensive and difficult as I think it is going to be? Are there any books or blogs on the subject I should check out?

5 comments

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revorad
What kind of device do you need? You'll have to give more details to get a useful answer.

Get in touch with some people whose electronics products got funded on Kickstarter. Also have a look on http://www.quirky.com.

epicviking
Small sensor that can record some measurements than plug into a computer USB port to upload those measurements. Doesn't really need to be super precise or anything, price is the major constraint here.

I will contact some kickstarted folks, good idea there.

thanks.

Rantenki
Depends on your margins. Companies like Enigma (used them, happy, not affiliated in any way) can do turnkey manufacturing and take away the supply chain/procurement headaches. OTOH, if you can handle procurement and manufacturing internally, or co-ordinate multiple vendors and do final assembly in house, you can save cash (if everything goes perfectly).

Enigma: http://www.enigmacorp.com/ was good to me, YMMV.

I have tried to go the in-house route as well, and got KILLED on procurement. Without existing relationships, I had multi-month leadtimes on a lot of parts. Again, YMMV.

epicviking
Ideally I think in house would be the approach I'd take. The device in question isn't particularly complicated and the components don't exactly have to be top of the line. I have no experience working with vendors though.
curt
My specialty is creating consumer electronics and web/mobile applications that seamlessly integrate. Have quite a lot of experience with this. Check out my blog, it's in my profile, wrote a popular article here on HN (it's also on my blog) on how to and the tools to use when designing, prototyping, and manufacturing consumer electronics. If you have further questions feel free to email me, done it enough I can usually figure out what you'll need to do pretty fast.