When [Bunnie] talks, we listen. He is a fount of product engineering knowledge, having seen many of his own products through from concept to market, and frequently helping others do the same. Of course having the knowledge is one thing, but he is also an accomplished speaker who knows what is important and how to share it in a way which is meaningful to others. The latest example of this is a pair of Engineering Talks he gave at Highway 1.
It’ll take you less than twenty minutes to get through the two videos. The first focuses on documentation for manufacturing. What do you need to include on a bill of materials sent to the factory? [Bunnie] has a set of gotchas which illustrate how vital this is. He also discusses how to handle design changes once the manufacturing wheels are already in motion. The second clip covers how Design for Manufacture relates to the actual cost of a production run. We hope there are more of these clips in the publishing pipeline so we’re keeping our eye on this channel.
The two videos are embedded below and at the time of writing had just a couple dozen views each and only one comment between the two of them. It seems sacrilege to say this, but we agree with that YouTube comment; these videos are gold.
Want to check out one of [Bunnie’s] latest projects? It’s a radio-based interactive badge.
the first video screams ISO… I like it
A good way to avoid the BOM/MFG problems mentioned in the first talk is to use SeeedStudio prototyping service to build your prototype run. These guys are great and will ask you before taking any decision and will pin-point your BOMs problems or any MFG problems. They will even challenge your test methods to make sure you’ll end up with a good working product.
We use SeeedStudio to manufacture the LOGI boards (LOGi-Bone, LOGi-Pi …) and they are great.
About LEDs and current: check out this neat chip: Semi NSI50010. low quantities: 200cts.
20cts*
but +-30% on the current…that’s a lot of an active part…
I love videos like this, especially as it gives you the opportunity to learn from experienced people! I’ve seen projects where the inexperience of teams building products was so obvious that it made me wonder if they have done *any* research at all. I mean, we live in a world where people like Bunnie, Dave Jones, etc. share valuable information so that we may learn from their experiences and mistakes. Thanks for these videos!
Most important lession i learned in my experience? Communication is key. There are a lot of experts in very different fields involved if you really want to get an idea to be sold as a high-tech product on the market. The most important thing is to get these experts on board as early as possible, keep them in the development loop and gather theyr knowledge and feedback to make your product the best it can possibly be for every involved party. From the component manufacturer over distributors, production/assembly, testing, QA, all the way down to the end customer there is quite a long chain of people involved, usually spreading over a multitude of companys and countries, and getting them all to pull on one string is really the hardest thing in successfully designing a product.
Check out his write ups for the videos on his blog. Very interesting.
http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?page_id=2812
Thanks for posting this link–excellent info from Bunnie, as always!
THANK YOU SO MUCH!
I am about to enter production for some lights and am a complete EE rookie and have been self teaching everything. I have learned alot along the way and this video was very valuable!!!!
I once had a manager in Operations that told me that my BOMs had too much detail and it was a waste of time going to that detail level. My designs worked out great, but not surprisingly, I was laid off about a year later because Operations was losing buckets of money and had been for years prior.
Put time and effort into you CAD data.
I just booked these two videos under my manufacturing guide lines as my “Bunnie compliance” checklist.
Excellent, thanks for sharing!