Re: How do I even manufacture a device ?

srinivasan.murali@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
Hell All,

I am a newbie to the field and I am kind off intrgued on how people
manfucture small electronic devices. That is, say, I have an idea: to
make a "calculator" kind of device that can take the amount of time you
run as an input and gives the calories burnt as output.

How would I manufacture such a device ? Do I write a computer program,
give it to some manufacturer (say, in China) or should I sit and
design the hardware blocks ??

Any help would be greatly appreciated (I am kind of really curious :))

thanks
srini

It's usually a two step process (at least):
Step 1: Prototype your design. You'd typically use off-the-shelf
components and hand build it on a breadboard or PCB. This proves that
your concept works and gives you an actual hardware platform to write
any requied software (microcontroller, FPGA etc) on. For more advanced
stuff (high speed and complex stuff like a PC motherboard for example)
simulation and real-world PCB design are required here.

Step 2: "Design For Manufacture". This is where you repackage and often
redesign your product to use lower cost parts and shape your boards etc
to get hte form factor you need. The goal is to make it easy for
someone to manufactue for you, and to have the product look you want
(important for consumer products for example). It is not uncommon these
days for the "design for manufacture" part to take most of the time and
effort.

For your exampe of a calorie calculator, it would require a
microcontroller and it would work at low speed, so this is something
you could easily cobble together a prototype for, even on a breadboard.
You'd use say a $10 Flash microcontroller in the prototype, but in the
final design you would switch to say a $0.50 OTP or mask micro in a
different package and al surface mount parts to lower your volume cost.
Then you need a fancy cutom case etc.

Most design engineers hate stuff that requires custom moulded cases and
tooling, as then it basically become mechanical engineering, so we like
just putting stuff in a standard Jiffy box and be done with it!

Dave :)

.

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