Re: to Hugh Message #21 Posted by Garth Wilson on 9 June 2006, 3:20 p.m., in response to message #20 by john
Quote: After all, Open RPN has only published drawings so far after how many years?
Has it even been two years? The major job is software, which a small number of people (I'll guess 3) are working on, and they have full-time jobs elsewhere. Sure, you collect information on available parts and on manufacturing possibilities, and come up with drawings to make sure you have a pretty solid idea of where you're going. But then what's the point in having hardware ready long before there's software ready to run it? Some people here are way too geared toward high-volume consumer electronics where a company decides it's worth putting a huge amount of resources into developing something in a matter of months to hit a very narrow market window with a product that will be considered obsolete a few months after it's introduced.
But here we're talking about a niche market, not a high-volume consumer market. In our company's niche market, one of our most popular products, even this year, is one we designed in 1993. Even though I'm looking forward to designing an improved version in the next year or two, its performance advantage over the competitors' units is what keeps it popular. Although our most complex product took me about ten months to design in 1994, it probably only had 5% as much software to develop as OpenRPN's new calculator. Some things just take a long time.
When I design a product, I often do most of the hardware design first, but then let it sit while working on software. I usually make a partial workbench prototype for proving certain ideas. That prototype, which visually bears little or no resemblance to what the final product will look like, can be changed with soldering iron and wire-wrap tools. But I don't commit early on to the manufacture of things like 12-layer printed circuit boards that cost a lot to tool up for. Why? The available embedded computer parts (usually meaning microcontrollers) offer a lot of possibilities, even with the function of individual pins; but you can't have everything on every pin. Sometimes after I plan to do things a particular way, as I get into the details of a 200-page data sheet (as is necessary in the programming), I find I have to back up and change something in the hardware design to get where I wanted to go with it. When there's little uncertainty left in the more hardware-related portions of the software, I might finish-up printed circuit board designs and get those going at the board houses so we have boards ready about the time the software is done and 99% proven on the bench prototype. There might be a software bug or two to fix after that, but they won't require hardware changes.
I've talked to a ton of our customers who built their own airplanes. Not one of them, to my knowledge, finished in two years, and some were around ten years. You can't just take the mentality that only those things that offer instant gratification have any value. I believe you'll have more success if you don't insist that success be instant, or that it be measured by what would fly with stockholders who only care about quick profits, or even that false starts along the way mean failure. I'm backing Hugh.
By the way, our own website has been in serious need of work for the last few years. Unfortunately for a 5-man company where everyone wears a lot of hats, taking time to work on the website means taking time away from other important things, like filling a large order for a dealer who's in a hurry. OTOH, a better website would bring in even more business. It's a catch-22. I don't think Hugh has any obligation to those of us who have no investment in the project to keep us up to date on every detail; and spending the little time he has outside his full-time job on it would only slow the progress we are anxious to see.
Edited: 10 June 2006, 4:33 a.m. after one or more responses were posted
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