Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
Manufacturable Designs
The first step in manufacturing a product is to design a product that can be manufactured.
Chapter 12
,
Accelerate from Making to Manufacturing
, covered design for manufacture
(DFM), but that's not what we are talking about here. DFM is primarily a process of op-
timization to reduce the time, cost, and complexity of a product while maintaining or im-
proving quality and function. It concerns primarily how the product will be manufactured.
Before you get to that stage, you should be concerned with “what” you are manufacturing.
Is your product something that can be manufactured in the first place? Are its parts readily
available? Can the manufacturer correctly read the files you've sent? Do you require pre-
cision thin-wall machined plastic or complicated multipart injection molds that are hard to
make? Are your traces too small or too close to the edge of your PCB? These are important
questions to answer in the design phase, as you read about in
Chapter 5
,
The Design Pro-
cess: How to Get from Nothing to Something
,
but are rarely considered until it's too late.
Can You Source It?
Many open source designs start off as a hand-assembled single prototype made with very
specialized components or parts from SparkFun or Adafruit. In production, finding off-the
shelf components available from multiple distributors is a better path to success than using
parts from a single supplier that may or may not want to work with you.
Consider the example of the Wireless Sensor Mote shown in
Figure 13.1
that I de-
signed and manufactured for Google in 2013. I had inherited the initial open source design
from colleges at the Data Sensing Lab. With only about four weeks available to spin a
new design and all the software already written, there could be no changes to the bill of
materials.
