

Hardware Hackathons Are Hard - janineyoong
http://octopart.com/blog/archives/2014/2/hardware-hackathons-are-hard

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nicholas73
As a hardware engineer, let me define what hard is when it comes to hardware
vs. software. I wouldn't say hardware is harder in any way conceptually
although of course both have degrees of difficulty. The main difference is
that the "activation energy" of each step is greater, so you have to be more
confident, deliberate, and determined when you are building.

A step like assembling components and wiring together a breadboard is small
but non-trivial amount of effort. So you won't find many people who just play
and see what happens (which probably won't work anyways).

A step like designing a PCB is as long as designing any piece of software,
except you don't get to see the results until you're done. Well unless you
have a fancy expensive commercial software that does simulation as well as
layout. But it's still far from quickly throwing up a webapp and getting
motivated with insta-results.

You might get some inspiration, then have to horribly dig through Digikey or
some other catalog to find your parts, then wait for them to be shipped.

You might also find that some parts are not cheap. Not unaffordable for an
engineer, but maybe you'd prefer the nice dinner over a slight probability of
a future product. So time you could spend building sometimes end up being used
to decide whether to spend the money.

Basically, in hardware you get bogged down in details that have little to do
with designing, whereas in software you can just sit down and go.

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leoedin
If you want to appear to have done a lot in a hardware hackathon, you need to
do as little hardware as possible. Take a few preexisting modules and start
writing software as soon as possible, because developing new electronics -
even simple circuits - is hard and incredibly slow paced. Even once you've got
4 or 5 figures worth of lab equipment stacked up next to you, you're still
going to be tearing your hair out because something isn't working like it
should, and the tools available are very, very limited.

I suppose it might be fun to spend a weekend combining a few of the cheap
sensor chips available with an rPi to make a web-enabled sensor of some
variety, but the scope for what you can do is so much smaller. The novel stuff
will inevitably be in software. If you want to do something really interesting
it will take weeks or months (and often years). Chips will die unexpectedly.
That seemingly simple power supply circuit won't work. You'll short something
out and the blue smoke will taunt you. It can easily take most of a day just
to connect up a fairly simple prototype board. You can spend a week slowly
building a wiring harness.

~~~
sliverstorm
Or, in my case, you wind up taking 36 hours to learn how to mount QFN sensor
chips instead of the 12 hours you budgeted.

Half of the time is spent removing and remounting the chips and inspecting the
joints with a microscope

Half of the time is spent querying the device using the uC as your host, and
fearing that the problem is in your test software and not the solder job.

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cushychicken
While I think his conclusion is pretty correct, I have to disagree with some
of his premises, particularly where he says prototyping is difficult (or more
difficult than software). My reasoning is mostly based on the fact that a
great product (or the proof of concept for one) can be based around something
like UI/UX improvement, and that's pretty easy to achieve with modern
technology (Nest and Fitbit both being great examples of this - simple
concepts well executed in reasonably simple hardware platforms). There's tons
of capacity to make some really cool HW prototypes in a weekend, or even an
afternoon - we do live in the age of the $50 Linux Dev board, after all.

~~~
michaelt
It depends on the people and how flexible they are in what they want to
achieve.

If your goals require you to drill a hole and you don't have access a drill
your options are fairly limited!

~~~
joezydeco
There's the catch, don'tcha think?

We've reached the intersection of cheap/easy development boards combined with
a business philosophy of "slap this API on this premade stack glued to this
other stack running on this VM and we're ready for our Series A".

Adafruit and Sparkfun and the like with all the cheap and easy-to-connect
modules have enabled us. They've led us to believe that hardware hacking is
easy. Just wire this camera to this accelerometer to this Rpi and we're in
business!

Does anyone really expect to be etching PCBs in a hackathon? Is a simple
breadboard setup good enough to win?

~~~
cushychicken
>Does anyone really expect to be etching PCBs in a hackathon? Is a simple
breadboard setup good enough to win?

Yeah, I'd say so. As I've mentioned to other folks in this thread, I feel
hardware hackathon entries are more "proof of concept" than "prototype".

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janineyoong
Here's the recap of the hardware hackathon that Electric Imp hosted last month
on the Firebase blog: [https://www.firebase.com/blog/2013-12-19-electric-imp-
hackat...](https://www.firebase.com/blog/2013-12-19-electric-imp-
hackathon.html)

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ruchir_21hj
In any case, its great to see growing number of hardware hackathons. The
hackathon kit seems to be a right solution as of now.

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neuromancer2701
Is there a good resource to find Hardware Hackathons? East Coast?

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CompleteMoron2
they arent hard - you know whats hard? Realizing the winners always already
had a prototype (software or hardware) and really just practice their sales
pitch for two days for the win

But hey - we now all know you dont win by actually starting the day of the
hackathon

~~~
ansimionescu
As a student who's been at several hackathons (and won some of them), fuck
those guys!

