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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: November 29th, 2023

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  • Combination of Digikey, Amazon… I’m starting to look at mouser and Alibaba as well. I use McMaster Carr for hardware components. My two thoughts are:

    1. they’re not good for mass production because they have a markup. However, if I find a good product through them, I’m sure I can just reach out to the manufacturer of the parts… however…
    2. picking the right part is a bit tough. For example, let’s say you want to step down from A/C to DC voltage. Well, I see transformers all over the place in terms of price. And while I can certainly come up with constraints such as what’s the input voltage range and output voltage and current range, I can’t help but wonder if I’ll be making a mistake picking the wrong thing. And for DC motors, honestly I thought they were supposed to be super cheap, but on Amazon they’re usually $10-$15 and even then I can’t find one with my torque requirements. So on the one hand, I thought 12-24V DC motors were way cheaper (maybe incorrect assumption), and on the other hand they’re hardly cheaper than similarly sized stepper motors… which is confusing to me because I thought stepper motors were generally much more expensive.

    So either my expectation of how much they cost is wrong, or companies usually get really cost effective suppliers that I can’t see from my own searching.



  • Thank you! Yes, proof of concept is designed in CAD and functionally working via 3D printing, off the shelf hardware, Arduino based software I programmed. However, it doesn’t make sense to ship an Arduino in each product because the cost of an Arduino is high since it comes with a plethora of I/O that for a broad set of use cases.

    So migrating to a purpose-driven board seems to be pretty standard. Yes, I believe I would want to get help on that, as the time it would take me to learn PCB design and part selection might be much longer than I could afford.

    But at least the scope of that part is clear.

    But for things like DC motors, AC to DC converters, even down to a particular capacitor or switch… how do you go from off the shelf parts to an optimized set of cost effective parts?