Creating a finished product

Projects Discussion and Showcase Product Design
4

Has anyone ever sold a home made microcontroller and made it look like it rolled out of the factory and not your garage?

My product isn't microprocessor based, but yeah I've been producing goods in-house and they look just as good (and even better) than my competitors.

Let me tell you, the design, electronics and PCB is the EASY part... enclosures and packaging will be the hardest and expensive part! -- but this is what your customers will see - the packaging and overall look.

You can take several routes here.

  1. Buy a pre-fab enclosure, and CNC mill it yourself (assumption is you have a CNC machine). The CNC machines makes all your work look consistent, exact.-- without manual labor or manual mistakes. Cons: Expensive, have to buy the CNC machine, you'd have to learn CNC stuff, and it's another "to-do" item on your busy day. Pros: Other than the initial CNC machine investment ($1K+), you can produce enclosures "on-demand" and cost per unit is reasonable.

  2. Buy a pre-fab enclosure, and have someone else manufacture your front and rear panels, or send them the enclosures you bought and let them CNC it. Cons: Expensive, Expensive and Expensive! Pros: Outsourcing, no worries, frees up your time. But your unit costs will be very high. Can you price your product to recoup this?

  3. Have a metal shop design and make you a custom case. This is probably going to be cheapest per unit piece, but will require the most capital outlay. You'd have to order several hundreds to bump the price down. Pros: You get exactly what you want, cheapest price per unit Cons: Big money invested... and if this is for a new product, you don't know yet whether your product will sell or not. So could be risky.

If I were you, I'd go #2... then down the road do #1 .... then #3.... (assuming your business is still alive).

So you start out with the most expensive option #2, and as your product sells and you got money rolling in, you'll have the money to do #1...
then as you get more and more orders, you'll have plenty of money but not enough time.... so you go to #3.

Makes sense?