Electronics > Projects, Designs, and Technical Stuff
What differentiates a commercial product from a hobbyist project?
Marco:
--- Quote from: MosherIV on July 11, 2020, 09:08:35 am ---Commercial product designers have to consider liability.
--- End quote ---
Incorporation, degrees of separation and plausible deniability all remove them from liability in a way a hobbyist designer/seller can not. A commercial designer should consider the liability of the corporation, but even though language wise professional is synonymous with high quality ... practically it is not of course. That they should doesn't mean they won't.
But they made the more important step of professionalism, they did their best not to be personally liable. The true sign of a professional.
So first things first, incorporate.
Wolfram:
The reliability requirement for commercial products is often a lot higher. For many hobbyist projects, it's not a disaster if the hardware fails after 100 hours of use. If you have tens of thousands of units sold to customers, then even a moderate failure rate in the field can eat up your whole margin and reputation.
Then there is documentation, writing a proper user manual for the product can be a lot of effort. Customer support as well. Multiply by the number of official languages in the regions you plan to cover.
Packaging of the final product, stocking and logistics can also be a huge effort. Designing a printed cardboard box with foam inserts that protects the product in shipping and looks nice, while not adding too much to the cost, is a project in itself. If the production time is long due to component lead-times, then you need to stock more units to cover the expected demand. This can take a significant investement up-front, and if there are several versions of the product you have to do this separately for each version. The risk here is being stuck with large volumes of product which doesn't sell. You can also add some margin to cover for stuff that gets damaged or lost in transit.
Mr. Scram:
--- Quote from: Wolfram on July 11, 2020, 10:08:20 am ---The reliability requirement for commercial products is often a lot higher. For many hobbyist projects, it's not a disaster if the hardware fails after 100 hours of use. If you have tens of thousands of units sold to customers, then even a moderate failure rate in the field can eat up your whole margin and reputation.
Then there is documentation, writing a proper user manual for the product can be a lot of effort. Customer support as well. Multiply by the number of official languages in the regions you plan to cover.
Packaging of the final product, stocking and logistics can also be a huge effort. Designing a printed cardboard box with foam inserts that protects the product in shipping and looks nice, while not adding too much to the cost, is a project in itself. If the production time is long due to component lead-times, then you need to stock more units to cover the expected demand. This can take a significant investement up-front, and if there are several versions of the product you have to do this separately for each version. The risk here is being stuck with large volumes of product which doesn't sell. You can also add some margin to cover for stuff that gets damaged or lost in transit.
--- End quote ---
Conversely, hobbyists can tackle projects that would never fly in commercial life. They can often afford to spend endless resources on a labour of love.
Mechatrommer:
--- Quote from: Wolfram on July 11, 2020, 10:08:20 am ---The reliability requirement for commercial products is often a lot higher.
--- End quote ---
not necessarily.. planned obsolescence is keyword (and professionals are very good at this)... my personal diy stuffs usually outlast commercial product far longer, one example is my real wooden table here, not the wood scum stuffs that can only last for a year. one can argue i probably comparing with cheap hunglow commercial stuffs, fine. commercial products that can last as long as my table here probably costs 10X higher or more than my diy BOM.
Wolfram:
I mostly agree here, hobbyist projects can be built to standards that would often be impractical for anything commercial, but most of the failures are in the circuit design itself. Lack of ESD protection on external inputs, little to no EFT and EMI filtering, fragile communication interfaces that would fail all common conducted immunity standards, switching regulators cascaded without any consideration to the overall stability and so on. I've seen some truly horrible commercial products too, and some amazing hobbyist projects, so it's not a universal truth, just a trend. I'm trying to argue against the idea that a working hobbyist one-off is anywhere close to being ready for the commercial market as far as electrical robustness goes, unless special attention has been paid to this. At least this is my experience going from doing electronics as a hobbyist, to designing electronics for mass production.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version