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Coffeewine | 5 months ago

It's a pretty rough headline, clearly the author had fun performing the test and constructing the thing.

I would be pretty regretful of just the first sentence in the article, though:

> I ordered a set of 10 Compute Blades in April 2023 (two years ago), and they just arrived a few weeks ago.

That's rough.

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geerlingguy|5 months ago

That's the biggest regret; but I've backed 6 Kickstarter projects over the years. Median time to deliver is 1 year.

Somehow I've actually gotten every item I backed shipped at some point (which is unexpected).

Hardware startups are _hard_, and after interacting with a number of them (usually one or two people with a neat idea in an underserved market), it seems like more than half fail before delivering their first retail product. Some at least make it through delivering prototypes/crowdfunded boards, but they're already in complete disarray by the end of the shipping/logistics nightmares.

milesvp|5 months ago

Seriously. Imagine the fractal nature of software problems (you do need firmware right?), and add that on top of a layer that has poorly documented errata and non standard peripheral variants. I'm currently making a board to solder onto an existing production run because we finally found the 1 sentence in a 1700page data sheet that explained why many of our MCUs are overheating. Had the datasheet simply labeled VREFP as VDDA, it probably would have triggered a review of the power schematic. Oh, and the CPU overheating was masked by component variation, and CPU binning, which means the overheating wasn't obvious on any of the early prototype boards...

And then, there's the sourcing problem. Components that looked like they were in big supply when the hardware was specced, can end up being in short supply, or worse end of lifed while you're trying to get all the firmware working.

maartin0|5 months ago

Not completely related, but do you know if hardware kickstarters typically have any IP protection? I'm surprised there haven't been any cases of large companies creating patents for ideas from kickstarter at least that I've seen