I'm a software engineer but am very curious to learn about the process of designing and manufacturing a "physical" thing. What would be a good roadmap for someone who dreams about building a factory?
Walk every aisle of your local Best Buy or MicroCenter. Do a mental calculation of how would this hardware product be 10x better with (present day’s) latest software trend.
Eg can I make this blender 10x better by bolting it to an LLM? Can I make this coffee machine 10x better by adding on a coffee+distilled water+third wave salt subscription? Can I make this network router 10x better shipping it with an invisible-to-normies tailscale + Speedify + 5G SIM card for ultra low latency, highly reliable zoom calls from the middle of nowhere using fast open and MPTCP?
Why 10x? Because if it’s not a 10x better experience the switching costs (aka “activation energy”) will be too high to gain market traction before you run out of funding and die.
Stack rank your items by categories such as “will this increase usage from once every 9 months to 9 times a day (ie smoke detector to co2 environmental sensor)”. “Does this have have a viral k factor that the original didn’t (access control for package delivery in door locks)”. “Does this unlock a recurring revenue stream that previously wasn’t there?” (smart decoding of video feed events). Etc.
Narrow your list down from 220 to 5. Build some prototypes. Test your market amongst fellow founders. Find the one niche vertical that has surprising utility and becomes a runaway success which exceeds your ability to fabricate in your living room using arduinos and off the shelf parts until you’ve exhausted Best Buy, Amazon, Spark Fun, and Adafruit’s supply of said item and you need to make your own version.
Get partnered up with a second rate design firm in one of the flyover states that has weird connections for manufacturing in this space from a random guy you met a JS conference three years earlier that cold calls you. Launch a successful crowd funding campaign. Raise funding. Fly to China to meet some contract manufacturers.
Pick the wrong contract manufacturer based on your own inexperience and your design firm’s prior relationship. Have things go terribly wrong because one didn’t use glass reinforced abs instead of regular abs because injection molded tools are expensive and a lot of tooling adjustments boil down to “guess and check”.
Move to China. But like not the cool part like Shenzhen or Shanghai - like a semi-obscure part - like Yiwu. Have way too many hot pots over Mao Tai trying to find a T2 vendor that knows how to injection mold helical gears. Learn some gutter slang from an obscure dialect of Chinese like Gan. Fire half a dozen T2’s. Hire five more. Fire three more. Refine it down to one final T2 that’s giving you problems. Eg try to find a paint vendor that can match the white on your injection molded part to the white on your metal part.
Nope out of the first paint vendor who can actually do this because of sketchy work conditions like a half naked infant running around the factory floor wearing 开裆裤.
Almost rage quit.
Question why you’re pirating grad school text books on material science from Turkish warez sites instead of taking that aqui-hire to AirBnB when they were like 12 people. Make a futile effort to give out safety equipment to T2’s regarding hearing and eye protection because you begin to question how everything is done in this country.
Nearly burn out again.
Begin to see the light. Parts fit. Production is scaling. Find a critical flaw. Fail.
Then do it all again until you succeed or run out of money.
Get an apprenticeship at a local machine shop. Work insane hours doing manual repetitive labor. Get injured and pressured by your employer not to file workman's comp. Cope with medications, prescribed and otherwise. Join a union (if your employer allows one to exist). Continue working and wondering what life would be like outside of manufacturing.
Join a local makerspace and learn tech like machining, PCB's, printing (3D, vinyl, etc.) through classes they offer. Learning by doing (and especially making mistakes) has no real substitute.
Alternatively, you could get yourself a "classical" engineering degree in Mechanical, Materials, or Electrical. Wouldn't expect it take you less than 3 years full time even if you're fresh out of school with a B.S. in C.S., but mine's been valuable.
Message me if you want to help me build out my factory. Are you in the US?
I don't know whether this'd be possible for you and your situation, but have you considered trying to start one?
Try to find other people who might be interested, and get some of the basic equipment a makerspace would have... and then work on some projects with the other people. If you can't afford the some equipment, perhaps ask some local businesses etc to sponsor the makerspace.
I'm a machinist who got a CS degree in large part because I am also passionate about manufacturing in the US. Perhaps we should chat. I think my email address is in my profile here.
I enjoyed MIT's Fundamentals of Manufacturing course, on edx [0]. The team talk about casting, injection molding, 3D printing, and a couple of other ways.
Great suggestion, MIT also has a deep-dive into Additive Manufacturing, which are all different miniature factories. https://learn-xpro.mit.edu/additive-manufacturing. 3D printing really helped me make the leap from virtual --> physical products.
It depend on your goal. To learn commercial manufacturing requires a different path than how to DIY something. It’s common to conflate the two, but they are very, very different worlds.
I worked for Autodesk making the most used design software in the world for a dozen years, but didn’t understand design in the context of the manufacturing business until later joining a medium sized US PCB fabricator with a vertically integrated software stack — from the layout software to the drill machines and everything between.
There are a surprising number of comments here suggesting starting with playing with or working on ERP software. That is a great way to crush any sense of joy or curiosity you may have about the idea of manufacturing.
Start by physically building something, then layer in processes to be able to build things repeatedly, and then finally layer in ERP software to manage those processes.
On physically building something, if you’re starting from software knowledge, one way to go is to tinker with a microcontroller project using development boards and then spin your own board using KiCAD and design an enclosure with FreeCAD. Just navigating the process of sourcing parts and managing fabrication at hobby scale will let you start to build context and understand tradeoffs.
Please use commercial CAD to design stuff - FreeCAD as you first CAD will tend to do to your love of CAD what ERP will do to your love of manufacturing.
(CAD is one of the areas where the open source revolution has not yet happened. Martyring ourselves on the cause of FreeCAD won't help that happen, unless we're also prepared to dive into its code base, which is unfortunately chaotic and stagnant)
Some better options:
1) OnShape has a free offering for hobbyists. It's a solid parametric modelling engine excellent for mechanical designs. It also has acceptable freeform modeling capabilities. The free version is good for open source and learning, but all your designs are public. The paid version is somewhat hefty at $1500/yr, and is required for commercial projects and private designs.
2) Rhino3D has a free 90 day trial, and a comparatively low price ($1000, one time). While it's clunky for traditional parametric mechanical design, it has freeform surface modelling capabilities that make it great for styled product designs, and can compete with much more expensive surfacing software like Autodesk Alias. For simple enclosures it's fine. It also has the Grasshopper graphical programming system, which let's you create beautiful algorithmically generated designs which are useful for artistic work, product customization, and modern architectural designs. Finally, the ShapeDiver service lets you use Rhino/Grasshopper designs for mass customization products online, where the customer can change the parameters that generate the product, and preview the design in real-time.
Disclosure: I own a product design firm built on top of plain old Rhino. I don't use onshape, grashopper, or shapediver in my business operations, but would if I had a business need. I'm not affiliated with these companies.
That is fair and probably the right approach for mechanical CAD. For schematic and layout, KiCAD actually has become a joy to use over the last few releases. There are certainly still some weirdnesses and quality of life issues against something like Altium, but the team seems to be rapidly closing the usability gap.
I support this question - I work at IKEA as a software engineering leader, but I'm always curious about many things so last year I visited one of our factories in Poland when I was there on holiday, just to see it.
Glad I did, as not only can I do the software leadership part - I've now seen end-to-end some of our processes as I've also done some time of the shop floor, and I've been to our prototype labs - so now I can also talk 'the business'.
I have a pretty good understanding of how we develop, build, more and sell products - so for me KALLAX isn't just a product name and data but a real thing.
I’m a dev team lead for company that implements ERPs (specifically Odoo) across a bunch of different industries. By virtue of that, I’ve managed to wrap my head around a lot manufacturing processes and associated workflows (replenishment, raw material procurement and forecasting). Before this, I couldn’t tell you a thing about manufacturing processes!
If you’re so inclined, spin up an instance of Odoo CE or have a play with the Manufacturing module on a build at runbot.odoo.com
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Walk every aisle of your local Best Buy or MicroCenter. Do a mental calculation of how would this hardware product be 10x better with (present day’s) latest software trend.
Eg can I make this blender 10x better by bolting it to an LLM? Can I make this coffee machine 10x better by adding on a coffee+distilled water+third wave salt subscription? Can I make this network router 10x better shipping it with an invisible-to-normies tailscale + Speedify + 5G SIM card for ultra low latency, highly reliable zoom calls from the middle of nowhere using fast open and MPTCP?
Why 10x? Because if it’s not a 10x better experience the switching costs (aka “activation energy”) will be too high to gain market traction before you run out of funding and die.
Stack rank your items by categories such as “will this increase usage from once every 9 months to 9 times a day (ie smoke detector to co2 environmental sensor)”. “Does this have have a viral k factor that the original didn’t (access control for package delivery in door locks)”. “Does this unlock a recurring revenue stream that previously wasn’t there?” (smart decoding of video feed events). Etc.
Narrow your list down from 220 to 5. Build some prototypes. Test your market amongst fellow founders. Find the one niche vertical that has surprising utility and becomes a runaway success which exceeds your ability to fabricate in your living room using arduinos and off the shelf parts until you’ve exhausted Best Buy, Amazon, Spark Fun, and Adafruit’s supply of said item and you need to make your own version.
Get partnered up with a second rate design firm in one of the flyover states that has weird connections for manufacturing in this space from a random guy you met a JS conference three years earlier that cold calls you. Launch a successful crowd funding campaign. Raise funding. Fly to China to meet some contract manufacturers.
Pick the wrong contract manufacturer based on your own inexperience and your design firm’s prior relationship. Have things go terribly wrong because one didn’t use glass reinforced abs instead of regular abs because injection molded tools are expensive and a lot of tooling adjustments boil down to “guess and check”.
Move to China. But like not the cool part like Shenzhen or Shanghai - like a semi-obscure part - like Yiwu. Have way too many hot pots over Mao Tai trying to find a T2 vendor that knows how to injection mold helical gears. Learn some gutter slang from an obscure dialect of Chinese like Gan. Fire half a dozen T2’s. Hire five more. Fire three more. Refine it down to one final T2 that’s giving you problems. Eg try to find a paint vendor that can match the white on your injection molded part to the white on your metal part.
Nope out of the first paint vendor who can actually do this because of sketchy work conditions like a half naked infant running around the factory floor wearing 开裆裤.
Almost rage quit.
Question why you’re pirating grad school text books on material science from Turkish warez sites instead of taking that aqui-hire to AirBnB when they were like 12 people. Make a futile effort to give out safety equipment to T2’s regarding hearing and eye protection because you begin to question how everything is done in this country.
Nearly burn out again.
Begin to see the light. Parts fit. Production is scaling. Find a critical flaw. Fail.
Then do it all again until you succeed or run out of money.
(this is applicable to most questions about why business processes suck)
On my read it's at "2nd rate design firm in a flyover state"; a buy once//cry once here could make the "move to china" step unnecessary.
That said, I'm coming at this with webdev knowledge. I'd appreciate input.
And would you like help?
Deleted Comment
Alternatively, you could get yourself a "classical" engineering degree in Mechanical, Materials, or Electrical. Wouldn't expect it take you less than 3 years full time even if you're fresh out of school with a B.S. in C.S., but mine's been valuable.
Message me if you want to help me build out my factory. Are you in the US?
Try to find other people who might be interested, and get some of the basic equipment a makerspace would have... and then work on some projects with the other people. If you can't afford the some equipment, perhaps ask some local businesses etc to sponsor the makerspace.
There's info out there on how to set one up https://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+setup+a+makerspace
https://github.com/CrealityOfficial
Maybe worth a look to see if the parts are available where you are?
Even if not, you'd probably learn a lot just by trying to hack one together from the parts that ARE available.
Desperately need that kind of help. Contact info?
[0] https://www.edx.org/learn/manufacturing/massachusetts-instit... the course bills itself at 14 weeks of 4-6 hours, that would be right if I did the homework to the fullest, but I consumed the course material in half that during a given week.
I worked for Autodesk making the most used design software in the world for a dozen years, but didn’t understand design in the context of the manufacturing business until later joining a medium sized US PCB fabricator with a vertically integrated software stack — from the layout software to the drill machines and everything between.
Start by physically building something, then layer in processes to be able to build things repeatedly, and then finally layer in ERP software to manage those processes.
On physically building something, if you’re starting from software knowledge, one way to go is to tinker with a microcontroller project using development boards and then spin your own board using KiCAD and design an enclosure with FreeCAD. Just navigating the process of sourcing parts and managing fabrication at hobby scale will let you start to build context and understand tradeoffs.
(CAD is one of the areas where the open source revolution has not yet happened. Martyring ourselves on the cause of FreeCAD won't help that happen, unless we're also prepared to dive into its code base, which is unfortunately chaotic and stagnant)
Some better options:
1) OnShape has a free offering for hobbyists. It's a solid parametric modelling engine excellent for mechanical designs. It also has acceptable freeform modeling capabilities. The free version is good for open source and learning, but all your designs are public. The paid version is somewhat hefty at $1500/yr, and is required for commercial projects and private designs.
2) Rhino3D has a free 90 day trial, and a comparatively low price ($1000, one time). While it's clunky for traditional parametric mechanical design, it has freeform surface modelling capabilities that make it great for styled product designs, and can compete with much more expensive surfacing software like Autodesk Alias. For simple enclosures it's fine. It also has the Grasshopper graphical programming system, which let's you create beautiful algorithmically generated designs which are useful for artistic work, product customization, and modern architectural designs. Finally, the ShapeDiver service lets you use Rhino/Grasshopper designs for mass customization products online, where the customer can change the parameters that generate the product, and preview the design in real-time.
Disclosure: I own a product design firm built on top of plain old Rhino. I don't use onshape, grashopper, or shapediver in my business operations, but would if I had a business need. I'm not affiliated with these companies.
Glad I did, as not only can I do the software leadership part - I've now seen end-to-end some of our processes as I've also done some time of the shop floor, and I've been to our prototype labs - so now I can also talk 'the business'.
I have a pretty good understanding of how we develop, build, more and sell products - so for me KALLAX isn't just a product name and data but a real thing.
If you’re so inclined, spin up an instance of Odoo CE or have a play with the Manufacturing module on a build at runbot.odoo.com