Electronics > Projects, Designs, and Technical Stuff

What differentiates a commercial product from a hobbyist project?

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redgear:
Thank you for every one that replied. There is so much to learn from this thread.

poorchava:
You'll also see a situation, where there's a CPU running at right below 100MHz. This is because acc. to IEC 55022 / CISPR22 if you have anything cvlocked above 100MHz, you need to do radiated emissions up to 3Ghz, , while otherwise only up to 1GHz (IIRC). If you have something really nasty that you can't remove or it's costly, then sometimes is makes sense to reduce clock rate to not have to scan that range.

As for EMC, the most common stuff you'll see are ferrite beads, common mode chokes and capacitors in weird places (eg. between DGND and AGND, which de facto are at the same potential). There are also snubbers around anything switching (fets, diodes etc). In most low power (say <10...20W) the resonanse frequencies go well into 150+MHz range where they get caught by radiated emissions testing.

Bassman59:

--- Quote from: unitedatoms on July 11, 2020, 04:50:36 pm ---The enclosure. It takes 2 seconds to tell if something is made for sale vs for fun.
Us hobbyists are not able to think in 3 dimensions to make mechanically sensible things. As long as 2D board is finished the project is over.

--- End quote ---

This is the truth.

The design team for commercial products always includes a mechanical engineer to do the enclosure and the thermal design. At the day job, our ME gives me board outlines and envelopes, and this drives connector placement and a whole host of things. I don't have to worry about how the holes and slots will get cut into the metalwork.

For my audio home projects, I spend more time trying to find enclosures that will fit, because that drives circuit board size among other things. And I choose connectors and indicators that need easy-to-drill holes rather than require milling. And I keep playing with various front-panel design software so that if it turns out that I want to build more than one or two of something, I can have those metal parts made.

And the enclosure seems to be the most expensive part of the design.

Bud:
Many commercial products are just assembled board kits , no enclosure at all or just a flat acrylic cover plate.

aiq25:
Others have mentioned great things. One thing I would like to add is hobby projects sometimes have reliability issues and/or do not have an worst case circuit analysis (WCCA) or stack up performed. Working in automotive for example, we need to ensure a robust design and need to have worst case circuit analysis completed as well a through validation testing of the HW (and if applicable SW) before releasing a product.

For example, I seen a lot of boards from Adafruit that would fail WCCA horribly. A lot of manufacturers have reference designs that actually don't pass WCCA (Texas Instruments being of them and I have had a lot of discussion with TI about this professionally). Hobby projects typically copy reference designs and don't do much analysis and testing on their own.

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