from Hacker News

Building big systems with remote hardware teams

by irsagent on 3/8/23, 3:23 PM with 20 comments

• by pjc50 on 3/9/23, 1:22 PM

  > All of that to say, the cost of building small boards is really low. A single prototype run that saves a "real" board re-spin pays for itself immediately. Enabling software development before "real" hardware lands pays for itself immediately. Even when things don’t work out, the cost of failure is low; we lost a few hundred dollars and some engineering time, but learned something in the process.

  Yes. This is the absolutely central aspect of modern software development, and it's good to see the same being applied to hardware through cost and iteration time reductions.

  The modularity is interesting as well: it's basically building their own Arduino-like system of pieces.

• by stn8188 on 3/9/23, 3:31 AM

  This post was a great read and it's exciting to see companies prove that hardware design can be done remotely. The real gem here though is the silkscreen on those boards, that was great to explore and laugh!

• by hbogert on 3/12/23, 8:41 PM

  Listen to Oxide's podcast "Oxide & Friends", it's awesome if you're in this space of datacenters, servers, networking etc.

  Last episode was about doing their own networking, and it's not some whitelabel $hit, they go to the firmware level and are trying to open up stuff like a server's BMC. (jesus christ those things are horrendous.)

  [1]: https://www.techopedia.com/definition/15941/baseboard-manage...

• by c_o_n_v_e_x on 3/9/23, 3:08 AM

  Love their hardware prototyping strategy. Unit testing makes so much sense, but I've rarely seen it done in hardware.

  I'm curious how big their hardware team is?

• by panick21_ on 3/8/23, 10:48 PM

  Pretty cool how fast prototyping PCBs is. In a few years maybe you can do that with chips as well, with FPGAs you already can. I bet in a few years the have costume RISC-V in a few days for a few 1000$ as well. Next step, in house mini fab.

• by al2o3cr on 3/9/23, 3:17 PM

  The test boards remind me of this old article from Sparkfun, about how they use pogo pins to build custom testing jigs to verify products.

  https://www.sparkfun.com/tutorials/138

• by drewcoo on 3/9/23, 11:08 AM

  How does the hardware talk?

  If it's not via software, I'm willing to bet the hardware is not remote. Or if not exactly software, it's contractual signaling, which we can model and understand and MITM in software.

  If it is by software, we can model these problems just like software. Known problems with known solutions. With the understanding that individual systems may incur side effects (like hardware bugs or . . . UI!).

  Most of this is not about hardware and a lot of it is unproved conjecture. There is also a smattering of hardware-specific knowledge (this wears out that way!) that is not about building large systems, but about problems in the small.