Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
13.
Troubleshooting from Your Design to Your
Manufacturer
Kipp Bradford
“Things were going badly; there was something wrong in one of the circuits of
the long glass-enclosed computer. Finally, someone located the trouble spot and,
using an ordinary tweezers, removed the problem, a two-inch moth. From then
on, when anything went wrong with a computer, we said it had bugs in it.”
—Grace Hopper
Debugging the manufacturing process starts with understanding the manufacturing process.
Many of the most common manufacturing problems are easily avoidable, with a little
knowledge of what it means to manufacture a product. If you have ever backed a project on
a crowd-funding site that involves manufacturing, then you are all too familiar with an
email that sounds something like this:
Dear supporter, thank you for your support. Due to unforeseen circumstances,
our ship date will not be what we promised. It will probably take us several extra
months, if we are lucky, to figure out why we cannot get our product manufac-
tured. We hope to resolve these issues and actually deliver a product to you.
Eventually.
You might think to yourself, “What are the designers doing wrong? Will my product
ever get delivered? Why didn't they see this coming?” After you support your second or
third or fourth crowd-funded project, the weekly update emails announcing another delay
or production problem become background noise in your inbox. If and when the projects
do ship, your expectations have been set so low that you forget what the project was all
about in the first place.
The actual emails that you receive will probably go into much greater detail about
where the product is in the manufacturing process and which specific problems are cur-
rently being debugged at the current phase of production. Many of these emails refer to
critical details being out of spec, such as the product's finish not being correct or parts not
mating properly. It might seem as if these are engineering or technical problems, and they
are—but the cause of all these problems comes down to one simple and nontechnical issue:
communication. Herein lie some of the benefits of manufacturing an open source project.
Communication is generally easier with transparency and openness. If all of your designs
