Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
As it turned out, the market for these electronic shortcuts and the tools to work with
them was far larger than Nathan had envisioned at SparkFun's inception. In turn,
SparkFun had to scale up its circuit board assembly operations to meet that demand. It be-
came clear that we weren't going to be able to do so with a few tweezer-equipped as-
sembly technicians and that electric skillet. Instead, the scale-up would require the right
tools, clever yet practical designs, a little luck, and a lot of effort to pull it off. The follow-
ing subsections lay out how SparkFun learned to dial in and scale up its operations over
time to continue to meet that ever-growing demand.
The Process
As any manufacturer will tell you, and as you read in
Chapter 5
,
The Design Process: How
toGetfromNothingtoSomething
,
itcantakesmonths—ifnotyears—oftrying,failing, re-
designing, reconfiguring, and trying again to make any assembly or manufacturing process
a successful endeavor. If you decide to try your hand at manufacturing your own product
and owning every aspect of that design, five critical manufacturing focal points must be
given serious consideration as your production plans take shape:
Design for manufacturability
Equipment selection and implementation
Supply chain/purchasing
Resource planning and scheduling
Testing and quality control
Each of these principal elements must be continually revisited and refined, as the cir-
cumstances surrounding each will change more often than expected, no matter how good
your implemented control processes are. These five manufacturing design components are
discussed here by highlighting how each was addressed when SparkFun agreed to work
with two talented and creative designers, Jay Silver and Eric Rosenbaum, when the Kick-
starter campaign for their MaKey MaKey kit grew beyond their expectations.
In early 2012, SparkFun agreed to collaborate with Jay and Eric. The MaKey MaKey
kit is an interactive and educational circuit board leveraging resistive touch. SparkFun's
role in the project was to serve as a guide for Eric and Jay in designing their circuit board
and associated electronics kit for ease of manufacturing and, in addition, to assemble the
first production run of MaKey MaKey boards and kits for them. Early planning for the
project assumed that this idea would raise $25,000, their original funding goal, on Kick-
starter. This amount was considered sufficient to manufacture 300-400 MaKey MaKey
boards and kits, a number easily in line with the volume that SparkFun was equipped to
handle at that time.
