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What differentiates a commercial product from a hobbyist project?

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--- Quote from: redgear on July 11, 2020, 07:24:00 am ---Many of the commercial products can be DIYed using an Arduino or something. Cost, grade of the capacitors, resistor and interference filters are what I could think of. What else?

--- End quote ---
One word... Meetings

Concept meetings. Design meetings. Project meetings. Customer meetings. Marketing meetings. Planning meetings. Redesign meetings. Governance meetings. Supplier meetings. Subcontractor meetings. Budget meetings. Quality meetings. Reading the minutes from the last meeting meetings. Another change in the specification meetings. We need to change the subcontractor again meetings. The project manager just had another "great idea" meetings. The customer hates it even though it is what they asked for meetings. Why did we have to fly a thousand miles to spend ten minutes meeting these clueless idiots meetings.

That's the real difference.

 :popcorn: hobby <> salaried  :horse:

AndyC_772:
Commercial products are, first and foremost, designed to meet a business need. They exist to make a profit for those people who design, build and sell them.

If that business requirement can be met by lashing together a few off-the-shelf boards and hiding the mess in a box, that may be just as valid as something engineered to the 'n'th degree and signed off by a dozen committees before going into a million safety critical products. It's simply not possible to say that "commercial products all require... <thing>", because "commercial products" is such an enormously wide category.

For some, the component cost is a complete non-issue. In others, shaving off every fraction of a cent is essential. There's no universally applicable rule.

The same goes for documentation, process and sign-off. If you're making an automotive ECU with authority over engine and brake control, then of course the design must be completed according to prescribed procedures, documented, tested and so on. On the other hand, if you're making (say) a protocol converter for laboratory use, with the expectation of selling a few hundred a year, then no, it won't have been through any of that.

It's perhaps more useful to look at what defines a hobbyist product, and there are some common elements:

- designed primarily for the fun of it, not because it's expected to be commercially viable. Profitability is a nice-to-have, not essential.
- overall scope limited by the time and resources available to the person developing it.

There are plenty of other attributes which people might be tempted to apply only to hobby projects, but they're not really differentiators...

- likelihood of containing egregious design errors due to lack of knowledge and experience - definitely not limited to hobby projects only.
- poor quality of documentation - though commercial projects tend to suffer more from bad translations and an excess of unnecessary warnings, rather than simply not existing at all.

dbctronic:
Ah, yes, there is the labor of love factor.

I am spending almost all of my retirement hobby time making something that may have no chance at all of actually working, but I'm doing it because it's forcing me to learn a great deal about two things I've wanted to pursue for a long time: magnetics and achieving somewhat precision machining with inexpensive tools and handmade rigs. I'm also learning a lot of electronics, designing and building custom devices. It has most certainly achieved these goals, and continues to do so. And of course, any serious learning effort always leads you down unexpected learning avenues. No telling what you may discover when you aren't rattling down the old standard pathways to immediate success.

For example: want to make a simple graticule for a motion observing telemicroscope? Sending out artwork to an optics production lab is expensive. Try making lines on glass or plastic by various methods--the results tend to be just horrible, wandering grooves with chipped, raised edges and gouges. Or--

1. Clamp a straightedge bar at least a half inch tall onto a piece of plastic.
2. Stand a single edge razor blade up against the straightedge.
3. Press down very lightly, and move the blade about 1/4 inch.

Beautiful, perfectly straight lines--look professional at 120X magnification! Wouldn't likely have discovered it if I were under time constraints.

H713:
Age also matters here. Some products, like the famous Phase Linear 700, had almost no protection in them. Output device shorts (pretty common failure in these amps)? Here's 90 volts to the speaker terminals. This is not an uncommon thing to see, and even into the 90s many amps had little more than speaker fuses for protection. And these are technically consumer products, in many cases.

dbctronic:
The comment above about meetings is true. About the only meetings I have in my workshop are when I grab a flyswatter and go after the horseflies!! When I was a tech writer, I had to meet with programming or engineering staff from time to time. But I watched the daily parade of drained engineer and programmer faces coming down the hallway, with that half mile stare that said 'another meeting over with!'

As for documentation, I write drafts first (black box specs), then go in for a rough design and first round testing (white box specs). Then, add important reference data as appendices. Then document the math needed for the design in more appendices. Then revise the white box specs, and re-revise and retest the design. By the time I have the project done, I have a pretty good document too. It's the only way I can keep track of all that stuff! My current main project already has a stack of handwritten notes almost an inch thick, not counting the stuff I've rewritten, condensed down, and thrown out. And it has several side projects to go with it, all also documented.

My approach isn't great for impulse gratification, but it's a real sanity saver, and as I get older, the memory aid becomes increasingly important. It definitely prevents lots of do-overs.

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