Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
(Source: Image CC-BY-SA SparkFun Electronics)
Figure 13.7
Note the wire soldered onto the board connecting the two different ground
segments together.
Anecdote: Hackable Hardware and Its Discontents
Amanda Williams and Bruno Nadeau
The following advice on designing hackable hardware was written just
a few weeks after we returned from China, where we were supervising
the first manufacturing run of our first product ever. We set out to make
a smart and expressive lamp that people can customize and reprogram
easily. Clyde (yes, we gave it a person name) comes with autodetect-
able sensor modules that allow people to change his behavior without
programming. His firmware and hardware are also open source and Ar-
duino compatible, so anyone from a newbie to an expert can find inter-
esting ways to modify our creation. Not many companies make con-
sumer electronics that are truly modular, accessible, and hackable at the
hardware level. And there's a reason for that: it's not easy. Here are
some challenges we ran into:
Modular hardware is more expensive to manufacture. If we made
all the decisions for our users and built everything into one self-
contained board, we would have had much lower manufacturing
