Most of you, if you are a hobbyist or an electronics engineer, might have already thinked about designing and selling your own idea. But the way from the idea to the finished and even manufactured product is not easy in every case. So, in the following text, I am going to give you a short overview and tell you my experiences while turning my own ideas (AZEnvy, VU-Meter) into reality.
First of all, while having the perfect idea, it’s important to firstly make sure that the components you need fulfil your needs. Therefore, its quite good to study the datasheets, whether the voltage, the pinout, the package and so on fits within your expectations. After that, its good to create a general PCB layout, so that you can get an idea of how big the printed circuit board would be. With this step you can see some mistakes in your components-choose, or some other dimensional problems.
While choosing your components, it’s always important to look at the price per unit for your components. There might be a cheaper version of your chip, resistor, capacitor etc. which does the same job as the component before.
The next step is to finish your pcb-design: Make sure that the lanes are correct, that every component is aligned correctly and that your pcb looks great. For the customer and even for you, it's good to have an nicely designed silkscreen, so that it’s clear what’s the job of the individual component. An easy entry into the world of designing pcb′s might be the software EasyEDA for you. The software offers thousands of footprints of components for you, which makes it much more accessible for newbies. Even an 3D visualisation is possible.
After you are sure that everything is designed correctly, you can order the first small batch of your PCB′s. Test your pcb concerning voltage peaks, general functionality and possible errors. If everything works perfect, you can start with spreading our products all over the world!
To find the best manufacturer might be sometimes harder than designing the product itself. The first possibility is to get your components yourself and the pcbs (from an manufacturer) and to solder and ship it yourself. (small batches) If you want to sell larger batches of your product, you can find production and assembly services (for example PCBWay) that are going to ship it for you. The other opportunity is to find an local electronics distributor. Show your products to others and ask them if they want to sell it for you.
I hope that the article could help you to distribute your product!
Warm regards
Niklas Heinzel
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