Prototyping on Bald Engineer

How to Turn Your Arduino Prototype Into a Manufacturable Product

Wed, 30 Mar 2016 14:00:33 +0000

This week’s post is from my friend John Teel. I asked him to help answer a common question I receive: " How do you make an Arduino project into a product?" His experience as an electronics design engineer and serial entrepreneur is ideal to talk about going from prototype to product. He has developed tech products that sell in the millions of units. John now helps entrepreneurs, startups, makers, and small companies bring new electronic products to market. Check out the company he founded, Predictable Designs, and his free cheat sheet - 18 Steps to Market for Your New Electronic Product after reading his excellent post below. Dreaming of bringing a new hardware product to market? Perhaps you think your product will make the world a better place, or maybe you just dream of making millions of dollars.

Electronics: Introduction to Breadboards

Wed, 18 Dec 2013 23:32:05 +0000

Soldering every circuit you build probably isn’t practical. At some point you are probably going to want to use some type of temporary method to connect different components together. One of the popular methods is using a breadboard. This simple (and cool) looking device only needs a few instructions before you can begin Layout of a Breadboard There are various colors, shapes, and sizes that breadboards come in. However, they all generally look about the same and have the same basic functionality. The board shown in Picture 1 is a pretty common “medium” sized breadboard.

Prototyping quadrotor arm mounts with MakerBot Replicator 2

Sat, 27 Apr 2013 22:45:27 +0000

While practicing the Quadrotor’s motor mounts on a Shopbot gave me experience in how to register two sides for milling, I didn’t want to invest the time required for the arm mounts. So I decided to make use of the MakerBot Replicator 2 to print physical samples in PLA. Time per piece went from about an hour to about 15 minutes. This is the first time I used the Makerware software, which looks to be a much prettier version of ReplicatorG. The workflow for using the software is a little bit more straight forward than ReplicatorG. For example, a single “Make” button generates the Gcode and Scd Files