Electronics Design Services: How To Transform Your Idea Into A Prototype
Why Prototyping in Electronics Design Is So Important
Prototypes are a critical step within the hardware product development process. It provides many benefits including saving both money and time. Even major companies like Microsoft and Ford use prototypes & electronics design as part of their overall development process to bring products to market.
Top Reasons for Electronics Design Services & Prototyping
1) Collect accurate requirements: Nearly half of all project costs are caused by rework as a consequence of having inadequate requirements. When a working prototype is developed, the functionality can be demonstrated to help solidify the final design's requirements.
2) Understand the problem from a technical standpoint: When a functional electronic prototype is developed, it allows you to address both anticipated and unanticipated technical hurdles in the design of a device. These solutions can then be applied to a system's design that is more elegant when moving to your final chosen solution.
3) Help to resolve conflict: Proper prototyping can provide a path for quickly generating multiple variants of the same feature. These variants can then be benchmarked against each other to provide valuable insight to the upsides and downsides of each approach. This can help significantly reduce production risk by giving assurances to the design choices that have been made.
4) Build financial backing: Having a prototype helps demonstrate your idea's feasibility. This will allow you to better gain traction amongst investors by helping to tell the story of your product and instill confidence that you can actually bring your idea to market.
5) Easily file more patents: Although it is not required any longer, prototypes are still the safest and best way to show "reduction to practice." Furthermore, in order to have a patent claim that is not just approved, but that is also defensible in most cases you will need to have some intimate knowledge of what aspects of your product should be claimed and how those claims should be depicted. Having a physical prototype is often an effective way to navigate these nuances.
Custom Electronics Designs Are Quicker and Cheaper Than You May Realize
With changes within the global marketplaces and advances within rapid prototyping technologies, it is now possible for custom electronic design prototypes to be produced faster and cheaper than ever before.
With all of these changes, it often doesn't make sense to bother with one-off hand-soldered development boards and breadboard designs which can be unreliable and offer less insight to a final product. Since every project & customer will have different requirements, Tamarisk can leverage its in-house design & manufacturing services, in addition to overseas partners to offer bespoke solutions that are custom-fit to your financial and time restrictions while never making compromises on the product's quality.
Why It Is So Important to Get Your Prototypes Right
During the electronics design/prototyping stage, you have the opportunity to trial various features & iterate on an accelerated basis to quickly improve the design. The prototyping stage is also when you can figure out exactly how to architect your product, and your prototype's design architecture in a lot of instances directly impacts the means by which your final product's features will be produced. For that reason, it is absolutely crucial to carefully plan how your prototyping process will be conducted.
We approach the prototyping stage seriously; by leveraging an extensive breadth of in house and networked industry experience we can produce high-quality electronic prototypes that enable customers to put their focus on user testing & demos, as opposed to having to deal with low-level debug issues. In some instances, we have even been able to create high fidelity prototypes within just a few weeks, and for as little as low as a few thousand dollars.
Why Testing Your Electronics Prototype Is So Important
Once your prototype has been designed, produced, and assembled you’ll have your finished prototype. However, that doesn't mean the prototyping stage is finished. Now your design needs to be tested. It really cannot be stressed enough how important it is to test your design.
One of the most valuable things gained from creating your first prototype is having the opportunity to learn from its design. If you decide to forgo deep testing, you’ll likely overlook some of these learnings that can be extracted from your prototype.
Be sure that your prototype is tested based on the exact functionality you developed it for in the first place. Whether it’s technical validation, demos for potential investors, or user testing, it is crucial that a set of tests are designed specifically for your product.