Turning your prototype into consumer electronics

General project help for Adafruit customers

Moderators: adafruit_support_bill, adafruit

Please be positive and constructive with your questions and comments.
Locked
User avatar
jonny5ive
 
Posts: 47
Joined: Mon Jul 22, 2013 2:54 pm

Turning your prototype into consumer electronics

Post by jonny5ive »

What happens once you've gotten your prototype working with shields, arduinos, and other pieces-parts, and you decide that now that you've built one, you'd like 50,000?

For your final-final version, you might not need a USB connector or wireless antenna on your Arduino, for example, and likewise there might be a lot of other little components that you're not using and wouldn't want to pay for 50,000 times.

So when you're at this point, ready to take your project off the makerdesk and into production, wat do? Who are the companies out there who will help see you through this? What is that phase of development even called?

User avatar
adafruit_support_rick
 
Posts: 35092
Joined: Tue Mar 15, 2011 11:42 am

Re: Turning your prototype into consumer electronics

Post by adafruit_support_rick »

You're moving into the 'production prototype' phase. If you're going to make 50,000 of these things, it's worth your effort to design your own PCBs. There are fabricators who will take your board designs and make your 50,000 units for you.
But first, you will probably want to make maybe 10 or 20 units, to see if your custom design actually works the way you want it to work (alpha testing). then, pass them around to some friends for feedback (beta testing).

When you're sure your design is right, then you can pull the trigger on the full run of 50,000 units.

User avatar
adafruit_support_mike
 
Posts: 67446
Joined: Thu Feb 11, 2010 2:51 pm

Re: Turning your prototype into consumer electronics

Post by adafruit_support_mike »

You'll also want to think about things like component normalization and assembly testing.

Normalization means reducing the number of kinds of components on a board, but not necessarily the number of parts. If you're using 1k resistors elsewhere in a circuit, it can be economical to replace a 470 with a pair of 1ks in parallel. That's one less reel of parts to buy, load into the PNP machine, and program.

By the same token, you want to bulletproof your design against component tolerance variations. If you use 5% resistors, expect them to add up to a 10% error at least some of the time, and decide whether your circuit can meet its performance requirements when that happens. Ideally, you want to design so the worst possible combination of variations will stay inside the good zone.

For testing, look for ways to throw away units as early as possible. If your assembly process has five steps, there's no point in wasting time, money, and materials doing steps 2-5 on a unit that failed at step 1. Figure out how to spot the failure and remove that unit for rework or discard before throwing too much extra money into the trash bin.

Make a list of what every part needs to do and how the signals should look at every trace on the PCB over the range of acceptable input. Make an even longer list of tests you can perform to verify each of those requirements. Then go through the list and rank them from most critical to least critical, in a strict 1-2-3 order... no choosing 12 items and calling them 'class 1' or something.

Start at the top of the list and design test fixtures for each item. Decide whether (or more likely, where) you need to add test points on the PCB to make the tests easier to perform. Look for ways to reuse parts of more-important tests in less-important tests. If you come up with a good idea lower in the list, take it back up to the top and work down again. Look for ways to use things like an Arduino or RasPi to automate the tests so you can just plug the board into a fixture, press a button, and get a go/no-go light at the end.

Consider the possibility of adding extra traces and components to the panel (multiple PCBs) if that makes testing easier. If you need a 5v supply to all the boards, put a power jack and a 5v regulator on the edge of the panel and run traces to each board that will snap off when you break the units away from the panel.

Go to the assembly house and have a face-to-face meeting with the people who'll be doing the work. Find out what they expect from you, and what you can expect from them. Get their feedback on ways to make assembly and testing work better.. they'll have seen and tested more boards than any single designer could do, and will have strong opinions about what's better and worse.

Locked
Please be positive and constructive with your questions and comments.

Return to “General Project help”