Brady has dived into hardware during the last year.
It all began with the Arduino. Almost an accident in the way it changed the world. Open-sourced, cheap. Designed for students.
Now is a great time for experimentation with hardware. That’s why we have the quantified self, and connected homes…
Prototyping is now “solved”. Anybody can prototype a hardware project. Don’t even need to know basic code.
Circuit Stickers. Stickable circuits that you can put all over the place. Crowdfunded. Trouble shipping. Building and shipping thousands of products is hard. Prototyping is just the beginning. You can’t walk into a factory, show a prototype and have it made.
That kind of scale requires rigour, teaching other people how to build your complex product perfectly thousands or millions of time.
Open Source hardware business models. Challenge: being copied. Challenge 2: the prototype is not your documentation. AWS for manufacturing.
Third, products like SmartThings or ThingSpeak. Gadgets that don’t talk to each other. Need for open APIs.