For small to medium size hardware companies that want to make their products easy for customers to repair and tinker with, and at the same time make it difficult for competitors to to copy the design, what are the options?
Adafruit has succeeded here, I think mostly due to the great online community, innovative support, and the large volume of products they offer. But some Kickstarters have been ripped off by Chinese firms, sometimes before the Kickstarter even ships.
I see a few options:
- Build a brand and community around the product(s)
- Lock the firmware down and make tinkering available through the use of an API or scripting (less flexible as firmware cannot be open sourced, and doesn't allow for better repair and tinkering)
- File and enforce patents (expensive)
- Tie to a cloud based service, i.e. Philips Hue (annoying if that's not the main product being sold)
If others have put more thought into this would be happy to hear your thoughts, or read any resources you are aware of.
Used to be an EE and couldn't afford a house in a major metropolitan area. Went into FW/SW and now I can. Not saying that's the case for everyone, but that's what worked for me.
Sunfolding (YC S17) is mixing rigid parts with soft pneumatic actuators to build solar trackers. This a real commercial product that is being deployed to customer sites.
Sunfolding | Sr. Embedded Systems Engineer | San Francisco, CA | ONSITE Full-time
Together, our team is taking an entirely new approach to solar tracking, including work on innovative actuators made from mass-manufactured polymers that use pneumatic systems as a replacement to traditional mechanical drives, and rugged integrated controls to drive, test, and collect data for solar installations.
What we need:
You will create and maintain production-ready software and firmware for rugged control systems deployed on solar plants. As we scale, you will have opportunities to evolve controls for our unique hardware platform for best-in-class reliability, adaptability, and performance. You must have knowledge of and experience with developing a broad code base that is modular, well documented, and maintainable. Knowledge of multiple programming languages and target environments is a requirement.
An ideal candidate will have a balance of creativity, interpersonal skills, dependability, a rigorous engineering background, with the ability and desire to build high performance machines that last for decades in remote, harsh environments.
This video is an excellent analysis. I love the detail these investigators went into to uncover the software development practices during the early 2000's at Toyota. I really hope the automobile industry has taken this to heart and is creating more process around the software that our lives depend on.