Every piece that you
have to artfully jiggle
into place will present
a problem on the
assembly line.
SOURCING COMPONENTS
IS COMPLICATED
If you’re prototyping electronics,
sourcing components is usually a
matter of visiting an online supplier,
ordering a few of each, and receiving
them within a day or two, ready to
assemble. Shopping for components can
become more complex when working
with factories. It centers around a Bill of
Materials (BoM), which specifies what
components and quantities you need,
and possibly includes target prices and
assembly notes. The BoM is necessary
to get quotes; it’s usually wise to send it
to several different factories to compare
their estimates. It is also possible to
source components from a third party,
though you may prefer to keep your
supply chain simple (more on that in the
next section).
Settling on a final BoM may require
more prototyping. Locally available
components can be equally good but
much cheaper, making it worthwhile to
tweak your design to test them out. In
our case, we redesigned our PCBs late
in the game because our microprocessor
suddenly became expensive and
difficult to source. We made our board
layout compatible with two different
sizes of the same processor, which
gave us more flexibility in sourcing.
That revision saved us about $2,000.
Sourcing difficulties can happen for a
variety of reasons: A large company
might be buying up huge quantities, a
fire at a factory might destroy stock, or
a politically motivated clampdown on
imports can limit supply.
KEEP THE SUPPLY
CHAIN SIMPLE
Clyde is composed of several different
sorts of parts: injection-molded plastic,
die-cast aluminum, silicone, PCBs (with
dozens of different basic electronic
components), and gooseneck tubes,
not to mention USB cables and power
supplies. Each of these pieces comes
from a different supplier. Some of them
require surface treatments to make
them shiny, color them, or prevent rust,
which can involve a subcontract with yet
another factory. With this many moving
parts in our supply chain, it’s practically
inevitable that a single manufacturer in
our critical path will create major delays
for everyone if they run into a problem
or fail to deliver on time.
If we had it to do over, we would
have designed with simplicity in
