General > General Technical Chat
Single person full product design
NiHaoMike:
--- Quote from: fourfathom on July 14, 2023, 06:47:35 pm ---For a bicycle light? It's way easier to bring a AA or AAA battery to the already-installed light than to remove the light and bring it inside to your charger.
--- End quote ---
Why add extra steps of removing the batteries from the device and putting them in the charger, then reversing the whole process? Qi charging is just a matter of placing the device on the charger, as simple as it gets until long range wireless charging becomes a thing.
Also, a decent NiMH charger is fairly expensive, while lithium chargers are cheap thanks to economy of scale.
doobes:
NT
Infraviolet:
NiHaoMike, reply #40:
You can get multi-cell NiMH chargers for stacks of series cells. You can then have a wire which plugs in to a device to let such a chrarger be connected. Cell removal only happens when cells are worn out and old, that is when having the standard form factor helps, you can take them out and get new NiMH AAs to fit in their place. If you want a device to "last forever" you're better of focusing on easy replacement of parts with generically available spares, rather than attempting to have things which never wear out. Charging could also be done entirely with onboard circuitry, you'd use a wire, or an inductive coil system to simply supply 5V or 12V constant voltage, and inside the device the charger would convert this to the mroe specialised requirements of actually charging the cells. Again, cells would only come out individually if/when they wore out, for charging they'd remain inside and in series.
coppice:
--- Quote from: e100 on July 11, 2023, 06:30:06 am ---Has anyone made a gadget from start to finish doing everything themselves including the mechanicals?
As an example I'm thinking of the humble LED bicycle light which on the surface appears easy but if you write out the list of requirements it's as long as your arm.
For starters it has to work in a high vibration, high humidity environment with extremes of temperature, keep the rain out, be able to be operated while wearing gloves, have a visual indicator that is visible day and night, not catch fire when dropped on the ground and so on.
Can one person do this kind of project or do you really need a team of specialists?
--- End quote ---
Very few products are truly designed from the ground up. Almost everything is built from components. What you can do on your own, without subcontracting aspects, depends a lot on the product and your skills. For a bike lamp I think a good experienced plastics mould designer could cope with everything. Anyone not skilled in mould design is going to struggle with that part. For something that can use an off the shelf case, but has greater functional complexity, different people will probably be able to cope with the entire thing.
Smokey:
I'm assuming the question implies contract manufacturing and sourcing components when available. Otherwise there are an infinite list of show stoppers.. Are you making your own silicon wafers? Are you smelting your own iron? ....
With that said..
The short answer is yes, I've done consumer electronics devices from start to finish by myself.
The long answer is that it took many many years to learn all the skills required there. It will almost always be quicker to marker to put together a team of specializations to do each thing. Solo is inefficient.
Best advice if you want to do it all is to go work for a really small company where you have the opportunity to learn how to do everything. Get the experience on their dime.
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