Accelerating Hardware Prototyping for Startups and Small Companies

Products are becoming more complex, and startups must find ways to streamline and accelerate development. Rapid hardware prototyping and open-source microcontrollers are changing the industry. This article provides a brief look at the benefits, products, and processes you can use from concept to production that can give smaller businesses the resources to compete in the electronics industry.

Benefits of Prototyping Your Hardware Product

Electronic product design encompasses many engineering practices including software, power, and mechanical components. Logically, businesses aim to save money, time, their brand image, and increase quality by prototyping products before sending them to production. Prototypes help catch mistakes and reduce cost later in production. They provide a way to fail fast, iterate, and evolve a product.

Hardware product prototyping allows companies to find and fix technical challenges and gives a better understanding of how end-users interact with their product in real environments. It also suggests how a product fits into the market. For example, excessive temperatures are not ideal for operating electronics. A working prototype may find that the hardware is trapping heat, or there is a hot spot on a printed circuit board (PCB). Changing the hardware design to include vents might solve the problem. With access to rapid prototyping and digital manufacturing using CNC machining, injection molding, 3D printing, and sheet metal fabrication, companies can move quickly from one iteration to another with limited production runs.