this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2023
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I thought I would learn to design electronics. Turns out the tools for that are expensive. Also enclosures to make anything look good often cost more than the electronics. Then you've got to get the boards made at a factory if you want them looking slick, so you've got to make 5 or 10 of every project at the very least -- or your wasting perfectly good circuit boards.
I found a neat hack to fund my hobby though. Turns out you can just call a lawyer and after some paperwork, you're the owner of an engineering company! For less than the cost of a high-end oscilloscope! What a wild world we live in.
This stuff absolutely doesn't need to be expensive. I was doing electronics for a long time now. I guess I am at professional level but I never got regular 9-5 job doing electronics, I was always doing odd jobs like repair, design, construction.
I only recently got modern tools for this. For years my books, parts, tools and methods were mostly from 70s/80s that I got from various public dumps. That was 10 years ago though, now these places are closed.
If you need to do something really fast and cheap - draw a pcb with sharpie and use ferric chloride to etch it. Modern oscilloscope is a luxury. Since I was working mainly with audio stuff I had a diy amplifier with a speaker connected to it that I used to listen to waveforms.
A lot of tools can made by hand too. There is a ton of old projects for old atmega microcontrollers. One of the best projects like this was sold as generic chinese made "multipurpose tester" which - last time I checked - was not properly designed when looking at the original. Original would this one - https://www.mikrocontroller.net/articles/AVR_Transistortester But everything necessary for this project is here - https://github.com/svn2github/transistortester/tree/master
Ah, some context -- I live in Vietnam. We don't get tools or books from the 70's and 80s from the trash. New Chinese stuff is pretty good and not a fortune, although at the start I really couldn't afford even that. I was making like 240 US dollars a month in those days, and working 60 hours a week, so I had no free time to do labor-intensive things (or pursue hobbies at all, really). That's why I wanted tools so much I suppose : to do fewer labor intensive things so I could use my mind more.
AVRs are my favorite chips! I use the Attiny10 all the time (USD 0.36 per chip). AVRs have really nice assembly language and datasheets, they are a joy to work with! Attiny10 is maybe a bit difficult to do with the sharpie method. I bet you could with some practice and a very fine pen though.
I etch PCBs by hand at home sometimes these days, because I almost exclusively use SMT. I can usually do a board start to finish in 45 minutes, for iterating rapidly a few times before being satisfied with it. Toner transfer works really well on a gas stove + a big metal plate! However, I can also get boards made at a factory for 15-20$ with a 3 week lead time. That's usually much cheaper than a few 45 minute runs, so recently I've just been sending it off to the factory without etching + testing first.
The main cost is time, overall. I'm not wealthy, time is still super expensive to me right now, I'm in the finishing steps of bootstrapping myself out of poverty. An engineering company was a tool to monetize my interests, so that I could pursue a middle class life, without giving up the control I insist on having over my time and work. Really, it was the only way I could have pursued all this tech stuff at all.
Actual physical tools to do more work faster and more reliably was also really important. Having a company also gives me a 30% discount on tools -- no 10% VAT, and no 20% corporate income tax on the amount of profits it ate up (only if I'm legitimately using it for client work though).
Anyway that's a little slice of my life :)
Have you tried 3D printing enclosures? There's a bit of up front cost if you don't have a printer already, but after that the material costs are pretty cheap. It's really cool to be able to make a custom enclosure with all the cutouts, integrated standoffs, panel markings, etc all in a single print.
Yeah, I've tried that! It was more of a journey making my work more presentable, than it was making it more functional, if we're being honest.
I invested some proceeds from an early client work to buy an SLA printer. It uses acrylic, with good dimensional accuracy, but it's very brittle. It was a painful expense at the time, nearly 800$.
I considered it a marketing cost -- I can't present things to clients with wires hanging out. Prototypes have to look awesome. I also sometimes use it to print basic clockwork, board game pieces, whatever I might personally consider fun. Mostly client cases though. I've had very good success with black plastic, which I polish down to a very smooth matte finish using fine emery paper soaked in water. I also emboss the client's logo on the case. I rarely paint it, but do sometimes add labels.
Another good investment was a decent used DSLR (135$) and some antique lenses (because they were very cheap and better than midrange modern ones). When I deliver physical prototypes, I also deliver product shots good enough to use professionally e.g. for marketing or to show the CEO / investors. A high-end ancient macro lens cost me 10$ and has paid itself off many times.
Finally, I also bought a rugged waterproof plastic suitcase filled with foam. Similar to a "pelican case". These are used to deliver prototypes to meetings and demonstrations.
I would classify this as 'theater' more than 'technology' -- but generally the management understands the former better, and they are the ones making purchasing decisions. So I give them a show, and the detailed documentation goes to the engineers only.
For my own stuff, I design it to fit in standard engineering enclosures. One of the local retailers has a quite good selection of aluminium and ABS ones. This is much more robust than any form of 3D printing I have access to (and it's cheap -- a nice ABS box starts at like USD 0.50). FDM printing would be OK, but I don't have the budget or space (actually space is the expensive thing in Asia) for a second printer.
The other thing I like doing for my own stuff is using solid and thick brass sheets, for no reason at all. Family ancestral shrines use a lot of brass here, so it's less expensive here. It's heavy, and chromed industrial buttons on brass panels looks glorious. Makes for great robots too. At least when I have an extra 15$ to spend (I'm quite stingy -- being poor in the past will do that to you).