HACKER Q&A
📣 bhu1st

Hardware product design, where do I start?


I want to design/build/manufacture a very stripped down version of Dakboard [1]. Using Photo Frame like the ones available in Amazon for a display[2]. It needs to pull calendar data or images from an API and render it so that customers always sees a latest monthly calendar.

I once thought of contacting one of those manufacturer of the Photo Frames and ask them if they can do the necessary tweaks. But I'm not sure what details to give them.

What is the prep work necessary for this? I've absolutely no idea where to start but it's one of the project ideas that I come back to again and again and want to get it done no matter what.

Where do I even start at this? Any pointers would help tremendously.

Thanks HN.

[1] https://dakboard.com/site

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Digital-Picture-Storage-Auto-Rotate-Remotely/dp/B09GF3HYM8

  👤 dusted Accepted Answer ✓
Your question is so broad that my answer has to be as well.

Start by making a working prototype.

You can probably finish the software without any custom hardware, at least the non-hw-specific parts (which is most of it in this case).

Then when it's working, start thinking about making it into dedicated hardware..

Find out what minimum specs you can make your software for (if you're just one dude, consider something like an ESP, that should be able to drive the display just fine).

Then you need to ballpark what BOM price is.

If an OEM has a similar enough product, probably photo-frame manufacture already has, and your product can be more or less reduced to either some custom firmware for one of their models that has wifi.

Alternatively, consider if what you want to build already exists.. Something like an Airtame or Chromecast app could be paired with any monitor in the world, you pick a few models and sell together with your software ?

actually.. what are you even asking?

Get some idea what the initial costs will be, contact investors, form a company, throw other peoples money into the idea..

Honestly, it's not for me, but some people just love doing that, and they're awesome at it.

👤 atiti
Recently saw a guy do a really cool E-Ink display for smart homes here:

https://github.com/Madelena/esphome-weatherman-dashboard

He lists out the materials and code he used. He went with a low cost / low power ESP32 microcontroller. This is fine if you mostly want to do lower resolution, static stuff. Here you could design something that'd run off batteries for quite a while.

If you're into fancy animations, maybe some videos, then you'd need to go with something a bit more beefy, closer to a Raspberry PI running some sort of *nix, potentially with some browser to render beautiful pages :)

Obviously there's significant price difference between the two approaches, but there's also some pros and cons you'd need to consider.