alt Hacker NewsCongrats on an impressive achievement and milestone. This is a great outcome, great work, and an indication of how far the hardware industry/tooling has come.
This feels though a little to me like building a simple SaaS service, and deploying it on a managed cloud service, and concluding all software is really easy!
This project is near to (if not at) the easy end of the hardware product difficulty/complexity spectrum. Some great choices were made to keep it simple and therefor easy.
An alternate take-away: "If you keep things simple, hardware doesn't have to be as hard"
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Agreed. At someone who works primarily in hardware, it is definitely hard. A midi-to-bluetooth recorder is practically a software project in a fancy box. There is very little physical complexity to deal with here, which is what makes hardware difficult- the interaction between firmware and the "real world".
Congrats though, making a half-million a year business is a massive accomplishment! The headline just irked me a bit, haha (but, it got my attention, so I guess you win there)
I don't entirely disagree. Just one sample point. But there are certainly much more simplistic hardware products out there. I'm often envious of them.
Here's a good example: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=brick+smartphone+blocker&ia=web
That underrates the difficulty in keeping things simple.
It is mentioned elsewhere here that a lot of time was burned on unused firmware features. It takes surprising discipline to cut stuff and still deliver.