Hardware is really hard

Originally published on Substack.

Hardware is really hard.

I didn’t fully appreciate how hard it was until I built and delivered my first AIoT hardware device to a customer seven years ago.

Getting a hardware product to market isn’t just about designing a circuit board. It’s everything that comes with it: PCBAs, enclosure tooling and fixtures, wiring, antennas, manufacturing, testing, and quality control.

Then there’s the software stack: device drivers, embedded software, cloud services, SaaS platforms, mobile apps, deployment, and ongoing maintenance.

Every component has dependencies. Every small change can create unexpected problems somewhere else. Success requires all of these pieces to work together as a single system.

That first product taught me a lesson I still carry today: building hardware is difficult, but building hardware that works reliably in the real world is even harder.