Category: Manufacturing Blog

A lot of crowdfunding projects fail to deliver the product. Some inventors hold strong responsibility to deliver the product, but it usually still takes a long time. Unlike movie or art crowdfunding projects, the industrial product campaign comment area often appears a lot of impatience and complaints about the delay, refund requests, or even accusations of liars.

As an inventor, the fantastic side of Indiegogo is that you don’t have to get an MVP (minimum viable product) to be qualified to launch a campaign. As long as you state the development stage of your product (concept idea stage, prototype stage, production stage, or shipping stage), you are good to go ahead with your idea, video, or drawing. In this way, you don’t have to figure out the product’s engineering mechanism about how to operate and supply chain knowledge about how to integrate and make. 

Most often, the inventor is still able to show a fully or partially functional demo prototype to convince the backers of its capabilities of shipping. However, most inventors either unfortunately run out of money targeted for production along the way of development or run out of schedule-timeline in the struggles of solving the manufacturing bottlenecks created in the design. Is it truly inevitable to cause delays or failures in product delivery?

For example, a crowdfunding project called Drumi, which is the world’s first foot-powered washing machine, experienced 7 times improvements after the crowdfunding campaign closed. Whenever they update the design, new problems are to be fixed, and thus the team keeps posted on shipping delays. Drumi team spent 3 years developing multiple prototypes to validate the design before it launched crowdfunding in Nov 2015 and they assume they can finish the production in 6 months after crowdfunding. It turns out that they only delivered by the end of 2018. The reason why Drumi, or many other crowdfunding campaigns, faced this situation is that no manufacturers have the existing experience to produce this kind of new product. So the team has to put efforts into solving the design manufacturability issues so that it can proceed to tooling for production, as well as confirm the specification of every component so that it can pass function reliability test and build fixtures for production.

Indiegogo has been working hard to help the campaign keep its shipping promise. Indiegogo launched Indiegogo for Entrepreneurs Expert Directory, on the prototyping and production sector, LKKER SCM is one of the Indiegogo recommended experts who help transfer new products to high-volume manufacturing. 

 

From the development side, LKKER SCM helps with the selection of components, especially avoiding components with shortage inventory and discontinuation plans. It’s very common to see some inexperienced inventors’ heads ached for the hyped component prices or long lead time of components because they pick up components with unstable stock or lack of securable sourcing channels. For startups with weak buy power in the electronics components market, the choice is more important than efforts. Located in Shenzhen Huaqiangbei, and familiar with multiple electronics products across industries, LKKER SCM can design PCBA at a fair price, advise cheaper component alternatives and provide a one-stop sourcing solution.

From the tooling side, LKKER SCM helps the inventor with DFM (design for manufacturing) analysis to ensure the design can be made by various tooling technology properly and the design can achieve a good yield rate without assembly interference. As a member company of LKKdesign Group (China’s largest industrial design house), LKKER SCM has been trained for 12 years to carefully consider the product design details and grind the production process to guarantee the design product quality and user experience.

Nowadays, more and more backers show attention to the supply chain validation of crowdfunding projects. Especially for those projects with a high amount of raised funds, there’s high pressure on the order delivery. Therefore, the supply chain has become the last draw for a crowdfunding project. For example, in the campaign OCTO Versatile Titanium 18-in-1 Carabiner w. Window Breaker, the campaign owner, who is a designer, lists LKKER SCM there as an endorsement of supply chain experience. In the campaign GPods: The World’s First Earbuds With Light Control, LKKER SCM, as the designer, completely share the design, development, and pilot run process documentation to help increase the confidence in shipping. 

Good products deserve waiting. But good business can’t wait. Avoid the design traps. implement design for manufacturing, and complete your product today!

 

Every year LKK receives a lot of inquiries from inventors about getting help with prototype making for the crowdfunding campaign. Here are three frequently asked questions: 

How Much Is Needed To Turn Idea Into A Physical Prototype

Despite time and investment varied among different product categories in terms of product development, LKK categorizes 3 types of investments as below so as to help inventors better plan their budget: 

The first investment comes from function engineering costs. Before developing product functions, you would need to finalize a product function definition and check the realization feasibility of each function as a whole. If you can’t even succeed in finalizing a specification or feature description document in the product planning stage, you would never be able to have a cost control view. Changing or adding features along the way of the product development will be harmful to cost control. If you are looking for serious function engineering costs, make sure you have a serious product requirement document first.

After confirming the function that you need to realize, if you are an engineer, you can probably save this function engineering costs with your own work. If you are not, you would need to hire professional engineers. The standard work for the engineer includes PCB layout design, component selection, circuit diagram design, software coding, testing, and debugging. The engineering cost will be counted by the hours that would need to complete the work. Different engineers, subject to their skills, have different hourly rates. However, majorly, it is function complexity and technology maturity that determines the function engineering cost. Meanwhile, if your product has many features to integrate, even if those features are common to see, the engineering work is large and thus the cost will be high. LKK always advises inventors to plan merely necessary features for a new product because excessive features lead to a waste of investment. In addition, if you are trying to apply new product technology to a new product, additional cost you will need to plan for technology validation.

To test the defined function, you will need to invest in the production of 1 to 2 pieces of PCBA. Cost includes PCB board cost, component cost, and manual soldering cost. Again, you can either source and DO IT YOURSELF or outsource Onestop. The PCBA production cost is very minor compared to the cost invested in the engineering process. After you realize the function, you will need to have a beautiful product enclosure to make the product attractive in its look. 

The second investment comes from design costs. Based on the product function, product use environment, and probably an investigation into potential customers’ preferences and existing competitive products, the designer will further work on the product design and mechanical design. The standard work for designers includes defining product shape, product color, product material, product finishing method, product assembly method, product structure, component selection, etc. If you are a product designer, you can probably save this cost with your own work. If you are not, you would need to hire a professional product designer or work with a design house. 

To verify the design, you will need to invest in the production of the product enclosure and some of the mechanical parts. Factory prototyping costs varied subject to the product size, finishing requirement, and production difficulty (precision requirement, processing steps, required machine, etc). You can learn about different prototyping methods here. 

A lot of inventors, when coming to hire designers and engineers, face difficulty in managing the design and engineering process themselves, assessing the deliverable qualities, or ensuring coordination between product design and product engineering. Product development project management is indeed heavy and professional work. LKK always advises clients to focus on what they excel in. If you are not good at product development, find a OneStop house that can help you streamline the product development process and help you with the mitigation of risk in design and engineering. Learn more about LKK OneStop service here. 

Can I get a unit cost reference? 

As long as you have a well-defined function document, you shall be able to get a cost range as a reference. Just be careful about the factors that would affect your costs such as component real-time cost, order quantity, quality requirement, etc.

If you have a design drawing, BOM (bills of materials), and electronic files, then you can get an accurate unit cost as a reference.

Need to get a quotation? Send your project details here .

I have only a very limited budget before crowdfunding, how can I realize the product?

Do it yourself or find someone who has skills in engineering or design in your network or freelance platform. The pros are that you can do it cheaply compared with working with a company. The cons are that you need to assess the work quality by yourself. If you can’t control the work quality and eventually you find that the prototype factory can’t use these workpieces and turn them into a prototype, it’s a waste of money and time. So, make sure you are competent in product development and always make smart choices in selecting partners to work with.

Leverage your main budget in product design and get the maximum marketing effort. Having beautiful product rendering, beautiful sketches, and product rendering videos is a key to attracting backers for your campaign. At least with product design, the prototype factory could make the enclosure for you to take a look at and you can use that to create content for the campaign. Learn more about LKK design service here. Regarding function engineering, realize features as much as possible with your remaining budget. The showcase features that you have completed in the campaign so as to win more confidence in your capability to complete the product function development.

Tell your budget and check out professional advice on to what extent can the product project completed with this budget. Inquiry NOW

In today’s world, hardware innovations have become more accessible and frequent. Traditional electronics products nearly have no secret technology and boundaries that can keep other electronics engineers from copying anymore. The main battlefields of hardware have been shifted to industrial design and key advantage on function components such as patented chips or sensors. 

Apple Airtag is a good lesson to learn how nice industrial design and Apple’s own U1 ultra-wideband chip can make a traditional Bluetooth anti-lost product refreshed in the product definition.

Before Apple AirTag came out, the anti-lost product market has a lot of Bluetooth anti-lost flagship products such as Tile Bluetooth anti-lost tag and various pet or children trackers. LKK is also one of the active product developers in the anti-lost product market. Here’s one of LKK’s anti-lost product development and manufacturing portfolio LKK pet tracker.

Traditional Bluetooth anti-lost product is based on low-power Bluetooth 4.0 technology and its functions were mainly used for finding objects and alarming. The AirTag is like a button as a whole. It is small, exquisite, and beautiful, which is in line with Apple’s design aesthetics and can be paired with Apple mobile phones to find objects with the accuracy of centimeters.

This article focuses on disassembling this product.

There are a few design innovations in the Airtag:

The button battery holder design has a negative contact at the bottom and two positive contacts next to it. Even if the battery is reversed, the contacts are all positive and will not cause a short circuit.

The Airtag also has a speaker design. There is a copper coil in the middle of the mainboard, combined with the magnet and diaphragm on the back cover to form a small speaker so that AirTag can emit sound, which is convenient for users to find.

AirTag’s mainboard adopts a circular PCB design. Is it very similar to Apple’s spaceship headquarters? The PCB layout is quite compact.

It has Apple’s U1 ultra-wideband chip, which is Apple’s self-developed chip that is already been widely applied in Apple mobile phones and Apple Home speakers. It supports ultra-wideband technology, has strong anti-interference ability, high positioning accuracy, and has a transmission distance of about 10 meters. This technology means that the orientation information of AirTag can be directly viewed on the mobile phone to achieve more accurate positioning.

There’s also Nordic Bluetooth low energy SoC (NRF52832) on the board. It supports multi-protocol, Bluetooth 5.0, NFC function, built-in Arm Cortex-M4F processor core, adopts WLCSP package, and the peripheral circuit is very simplified;

GigaDevice 32 Mb serial NOR flash memory (GD25LE32D) can also be found to store AirTag’s firmware information; In addition, there’s DC-DC step-down converter from Texas Instruments (TPS62746), Maxim Class-D audio amplifier (MAX98357B), and five pieces of 100Fμ6V Tantalum capacitors in the AirTag ring PCB.

 

In sum, Apple Airtag is the most multi-component integrated device in the current anti-lost product solution.

The disassemble is conducted by Shunsheng Cao (@eefocus) and the original Chinese content has been edited and translated by LKKER SCM.

Learn more:

1. LKK Industrial Design Service 
2. LKK Electronics Engineering Service
3. LKK Anti-lost Product Case)