Building and Manufacturing Hardware

Congratulations on making it to the final chapter of this book. The previous two chapters focused on considerations for when your hardware or IoT start-up scales and you have to manage many customers. This chapter will focus on what you need to consider when you want to move from breadboard-based designs to prototypes that can be deployed in the real world, and considerations for getting your final hardware product certified.

By the end of this chapter, you will have learned about building hardware from prototypes, getting them manufactured, and the need for certification.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Designing more compact hardware
• Designing printed circuit boards
• Manufacturing hardware
• Understanding the need for certification

Designing more compact hardware

We used development boards throughout this book, and we specifically chose Arduino boards because they are designed to a high standard. While you might find a few of the Arduino MKR boards being used in real-world applications, the majority of real-world applications do not make use of a development board. But let’s begin with our development boards.

Proof-of-concept (PoC) prototypes

If you are done with your design and find that you have pins to spare, then there is an opportunity for a smaller setup. Even if you don’t have pins to spare, if you made use of a breadboard, then there could be an opportunity for a smaller design. You certainly can’t ship a solderless breadboard into the field. The DuPont cables frequently used in solderless breadboards are likely to shake and come off.

This is where protoboards come in handy. These let you position your components and solder them together using wires. At this point, you will...

Designing printed circuit boards

PCBs are designed using EDA software, similar to, and in a lot of cases the same as, the ones used for schematic design. The primary difference here is that you need to place the components and connect them using circuits. All of this has to fit within the dimensions of your chosen board, so PCBs have layers. The board itself is non-conductive, with the circuits etched on using copper. The connections between components are called traces.

The copper traces are thinner than the wires that you worked with during the prototyping phase. Since traces are electrical conductors, they mustn’t cross each other. This is called a collision. You may notice from electrical schematic diagrams that wires jump over each other. That is the same principle that applies here. However, since traces are etched onto the PCB, they can’t jump over each other on the same plane or layer. Instead, they jump to a different plane and then continue their journey...

Manufacturing hardware

There are two parts that you will need to manufacture:

• The PCB
• The Enclosure

Let’s consider these in detail.

PCB fabrication

There are a large number of PCB fabrication providers and you can pick any one, depending on where you live. If there are none within your geography, then you may look to Asia. You will need to send the fabricator a file that it will use to print out the PCB. Most fabricators accept Gerber files.

Most PCB fabricators will only manufacture the PCB. This will require you to solder the components yourself. This could be a problem if you make use of tiny SMD components. Some fabricators can solder these components for you and send you the finished board. This is called PCB assembly.

You can find PCB manufacturers online. Here is a list of a few that might interest you:

• JLC PCB
• PCB Way
• Seeed Studios
• Sparkfun Electronics

With your PCB done, let’s consider enclosures.

Enclosures...

Understanding the need for certification

Every electrical product must undergo certification. The specific certification required depends on the country in which the product will be sold. Just as you design with manufacturing in mind, you must also design with certification in mind.

You need to wait until your product is ready for market before you certify it. Any changes to the product, including the enclosure, will normally require recertification.

While certification will be done at the end, it is important to consult a certification expert at the point of preliminary production design.

Here are some certification bodies to be aware of:

• Federal Communications Commission: This US-based regulator certifies all electronic products, making sure that the electromagnetic radiation from those products is within acceptable levels and doesn’t interfere with the operation of other wireless communication devices.
• Underwriters Laboratories (UL) or Canadian Standards...

Summary

You have made it to the end of this chapter, and also the end of this book. In this chapter, you learned how you can take what you have built using Arduino and maybe some breadboards and convert it into a prototype that you can test. After initial testing, you learned about the various phases that your prototype needs to go through before you can manufacture it for sale.

Congratulations, you have made it to the end! I hope you build something awesome.

Further reading

To learn more about the topics that were covered in this chapter, take a look at the following resources:

• Learn to design PCBs: https://predictabledesigns.com/academy/
• EasyEDA: https://easyeda.com/
• KiCAD: https://www.kicad.org/
• Altium Designer: https://www.altium.com/altium-designer
• DipTrace: https://diptrace.com/diptrace-software/
• Fusion 360: https://www.autodesk.co.uk/products/fusion-360/overview