[TriEmbed] Learning Curve

[Fred Ebeling]

Very insightful.  As a professional engineer for many years, I find
that the path from “Maker” to “Engineering” can be very surprising 
to the designer, especially when it comes to the “realities” of the cost
of manufacturing the product.  Items that many forget about include:

Cost of parts, the difference between 100 and 1000 pricing
Cost of shipping the parts to you and then stocking them (inventory)
Cost of manufacturing – especially the cost of testing
Costs of putting them into a box, label and ship them
Documentation – product brochures, manuals, support in the future 
Final the quality of life as you have all these “Need to be done now” in your life.

Fred Ebeling
ECP Designs


From: Christopher Svec 
Sent: Wednesday, April 15, 2015 9:35 AM
To: burrsutter at gmail.com 
Cc: triembed at triembed.org 
Subject: Re: [TriEmbed] Learning Curve

Great! That leads to another question: which ecosystem?

I would classify the products you've listed (Arduino, RaspPi, Spark, etc.) as mostly from what I call the "maker" ecosystem, meaning they're "batteries included" products useful in prototyping and product/experience exploration. And the products you've called out are definitely the top ones in that ecosystem.

Another ecosystem is what I call the "engineering" ecosystem, meaning embedded products intended for high volume and high reliability products; it's anything you might want to manufacture and ship a bunch of (and not have them fail in the field).

The "maker" and "engineering" ecosystems can both create a product that does the same thing, but cost, design time, scale, reliability, etc. will be quite different.


Does that make sense?

(See? I love questions! :-) )


-svec

Chris Svec
Senior Principal Software Engineer
iRobot

On Wednesday, April 15, 2015 9:20 AM, Burr Sutter <burrsutter at gmail.com> wrote:




I think that is a perfectly fair question...my focus is on learning at this time, trying to understand the overall ecosystem.  

On Wed, Apr 15, 2015 at 8:20 AM, Christopher Svec <christophersvec at yahoo.com> wrote:

  Yes! I totally agree about the growth of our once-very-niche industry.

  Another question to consider is "what are you trying to do or accomplish as an end-goal?", in addition to the "where to invest time & energy to learn" question.

  You can spend the rest of your life testing & learning each new platform or dev board or widget that comes out - and there's nothing wrong with that at all! Especially if pure learning is your goal.

  But is that what you're after?

  (I'm a fan of frequently backing up and asking the big picture "why?" questions.)

  -svec





  On Wednesday, April 15, 2015 8:05 AM, Burr Sutter <burrsutter at gmail.com> wrote:




  The world of embedded microcontrollers has seen some dramatic growth (from my perspective) and it is tough to figure out where to invest my learning time & energy.  


  I have followed this path so far:
  1) Arduino
  2) Raspberry Pi
  3) Spark Core
  4) Intel Edison (just using it as a Linux box so far)
  5) TI SensorTag
  and played a bit with the NXP LPC1768 running mbed (http://mbed.org/)

  Mostly I have been simply playing with the various "developer kits" where my mission is on detection and connection - trying to understand what can be sensed and how to get the data back to the cloud.

  How do you all feel about mbed? Is that worthy of expending dozens/hundreds of hours of learning time? And if so, which of the various ARM/mbed-based hardware vendors are interesting to you?





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