Electronics > Projects, Designs, and Technical Stuff

What differentiates a commercial product from a hobbyist project?

<< < (4/7) > >>

aheid:
From personal experience, a key difference is that commercial products are completed...

Mr. Scram:

--- Quote from: Wolfram on July 11, 2020, 10:38:14 am ---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.

--- End quote ---
It goes both ways. I've seen enough shit pushed into production because time ran out. Can we pretend it functions? You're done. Ship it.

tggzzz:
The overriding principle is as others have noted:

* amateurs think about how something will work
* professionals also think about all the ways something can fail, and address thoseAnother aspect is that commercial products are created by teams, and in a good team one person's weaknesses are avoided because another person has the compensatory strengths. Amateur products have "suboptimal" aspects that mirror their creator's skills and interests.

Not all commerical products are created by professionals, unfortunately.

TheUnnamedNewbie:
Next to DFM/EMI and so on, another factor that applies in a lot of cases is that a commercial product will be engineered. (Note that I'm not saying 'built by engineers', nor that hobby projects are not done 'well' or anything).

In a hobby project, you have more room to do stuff 'because it will probably be fine'. EG, for RF/high frequency/communication products (my field), in hobby-projects, there are a lot of stuff that is just done 'cause it will probably work. This is not the case in larger commercial products: everything is simulated. Transmission lines? Completly simulated in a 2.5D/3D package. Antennas? Fully modelled, verified with effects of surroundings (case, positioning of device on tables etc,...). Power delivery networks? Simulated, including the parasitics of the different packages. Filters? Full analysis over variability. What about variations due to temperature? Power consumption/cooling? Simulated in a (thermal)CFD package.

And there is just more expertise in the design. Not only because most people involved are doing it for a long time and as a job, but because there are more of them. You have someone who focuses on say PCB design. A few people who focus on power-delivery. People who focus on the antennas and transmission lines, etc etc. All together, these people will have much more combined experience than a single hobby designer could ever have.

But as always, this is the ideal, or the 'this is how it should be' case, and you will find lots of examples of things not being done like that.

Oh, and design-for-test. Especially in the case of ICs, this is a big, big deal. There are entire teams of tens or hunderds of engineers working at the big IC design houses who spend their entire day thinking about how they will make things testable/verifiable. I seem to recall some statistic that showed that for smaller analog ICs, almost 50% of the production cost was in the testing. Not the silicon, not the packaging, not transport - just making sure the thing works.

srb1954:
In my experience as a HW design engineer, designing and making a working electronic prototype, to the stage that a hobbyist might do, is a relatively small part of the work involved in getting a commercial product to market.

A lot of the additional work that goes into a commercial product is internal documentation for the design, product qualification, product certification, service, component procurement and manufacturing information. When estimating the project budget I used to allow at least 25% of the total budget for such documentation. This can amount to quite an amount of time and money as commercial product development budgets usually work out much larger than anyone expects.

Another major cost factor is the mechanical design of the packaging which can be quite expensive and time consuming, particularly if you require a custom plastic case for your product.



Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page

There was an error while thanking
Thanking...
Go to full version
Powered by SMFPacks Advanced Attachments Uploader Mod