How do people "productize" their ESP32 projects? (Edit: not talking about mass-producing something, I just want a self-contained unit rather than a board with a bunch of wires sticking out)
I see a lot of pages where they show some bare-looking board, but in the real world you want to package that up.
If you're a software guy like me, you would likely prefer to pay a bit extra to just have that tidied up for you rather than fiddle around with stuff.
If you're more of a acrylic guy, then you take your laser-cutter, cut out some shapes, drill a few holes and bam you've got a box.
If you got none of these and just want a bare-necessities box, you use an Altoids Tin that costs about $25 for 12 tins... and they have these kinda useless mints in them though. So you buy those boxes, then you throw away the mints and shove your project in there.
There are a lot of companies that make electronics enclosures. Some of them are waterproof. Usually they have a couple pre-drilled mounting flanges to screw in the board as well, and then you'd drill your own external holes for input/output as necessary. Here's a couple manufacturers, and you can usually find stuff on e.g. adafruit and digikey as well to save on shipping if you're buying dev boards or other parts from them already.
There are lots of options. Most of what you see they don't: this is a one off project for the hacker and if others find it useful great, but not the goal. As such packaging isn't needed, sometimes you shove it in a box.
If you want something nice, that can be done, now you need to pay someone (could be yourself!) to design a package. ESP32 is designed to be easy to put into your own products, this means design a circuit board and case to fit each other, and so on. Then you buy the ESP32 chips in bulk and assemble them onto the circuit board. The board you buy for a prototype is officially only a reference board and not what they expect you to ship (though shipping the board is common: they are small, cheap, and someone else did the hard board design)
I mentioned M5Stack above. An alternative is to buy an off the shelf display, e.g., from Polycase -- an outfit I've used a lot and mount your board inside.
There are literally tens of thousands of off the shelf electronics enclosures for every likely possibility. From massive control panel boxes measured in multiple feet, to watch-sized enclosures with straps for items designed to be worn on your wrist. You'll find something suitable no matter what.
AliExpress has a number of companies selling the "generic black rectangle" that looks a bit like an Apple TV now. I've been meaning to buy a couple and see what they're like to work with, because that's the overall effect I really want - something that looks like a router or generic company product.
I don't work for them, I just really like their products and own about 10 of them. Downside, the documentation is rudimentary so you should enjoy steep learning curves (but not too steep - The ESP-IDF and MicroPython docs will get you through most problems).
You get a "product designer" (?) who designs a case. If your product is "standard enough", you might skip this step.
Then, you reach out to local manufacturers and ones from bigger markets. You get some samples, you check if things work like they should. If you like it, order a smaller batch. Design a quality assurance workflow, or find a specialist who can help you with that so that the manufacturer doesn't ship you 20% faulty products.
Get your products onto the shelves of a brick and mortar store, and/or create a website, sell on Amazon and other portals.
Talk to your customers, listen to their feedback, improve every step a little.
It sounds overwhelming.
I worked for a small smart home startup, and I learned that, for example, in Shenzhen, there is a whole industry ready to help entrepreneurs realize their dream products, and at every step of the way, you can contract someone to help you. In our experience, the Chinese service was both much better, cheaper, faster than European offers.
I mount the board on some nylon standoffs through a takeaway box lid. The rest of the takeaway box is the enclosure. I drill some holes through the takeaway box for wire ingress and egress.
I use a tupperware container if I'm feeling fancy.
I wouldn't call it "productize", but when I wanted to give an ESP32 project to a friend who would be using it, I did these things: designed and printed a case for the ESP32. The ESP32 is soldered into a perma-proto and all wire connections are soldered to the ESP32's terminals (I don't use a solderless breadboard, or Dupont wires, once I'm done with the design). The perma-proto is screwed into posts in the case (as are several daughterboards). The user-controlled potentiometer is also soldered into the perma-proto and is tightly screwed into the case. There's a power jack screwed into the case, and all wiring in/out of the case goes through a "cable gland" and the cables, outside the case, and wrapped into nylon sleeve with strain relief. And an on/off switch.
For some projects that use 120V AC directly, I've purchased nice receptacle with fuse, and grounded the metal casing. But I don't feel comfortable distributing those.
I have also been known to encase an entire project in clear epoxy (the first "maker" project I did, thanks to an enlightened shop teacher in the 1980s, was a nightlight using only 3 components, encased in epoxy; they work some 35 years later!)
Some things I can think of to go further: designing my own PCB instead of using perma-proto. FInding better temporary connectors (duponts are not reliable). Eliminating the ESP32, replacing it with simpler logic circuits when possible.
I am a huge fan of M5Stack. Take a look at the Tough or Core units. You get an ESP32 with couple of peripherals (speaker, buzzer, real-time clock) and a TFT touchscreen all in a case. Water-resistant in the case of the M5Stack Tough.
I've shipped a couple of consulting products based on them and it really cuts down on the work I need to do in order to build product.
That's exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about. You could take those and plug them together and be basically ready to go, rather than "just" investing in a bunch of 3D printing and soldering and lord only knows what else. Maybe it costs a bit more, but that's fine - you get something that you can use somewhere besides sitting on your desk with a bunch of exposed wires.
You can design both a circuit board and a case with Fusion360, which is free for personal use. Use JLCPCB to assemble the board for you. You can 3D print the case yourself.
It took me about 20hr to learn how to use Fusion360 and make a simple circuit and case this way.
If it uses Bluetooth you're theoretically on the hook for thousands of dollars if you want to sell your ESP32 project as a product. (IANAL; it may take a lawyer to truly understand if you have to pay or not.)
ESP32 modules (read: not just the packaged ICs) are pre-certified in most markets. This is the main advantage of shelling out for these more expensive modules instead of just integrating it all yourself. It's also why many of the IOT products which use ESP32s use modules and waste a lot of area rather than the much smaller ICs: certification is a nightmare for small scale products!
But 3d printing with JLCPCB is really the most convenient way unless you need a lot of parts (thousands) or the material properties of the UV resins would not be enough (high-temperature, outdoors, etc).
There are plenty of enclosures available on AliExpress and Amazon. But a cheap reprap 3d printer is a general tool like a screw driver or hammer, albeit more complex for sure. But the learning curve isn’t absurd, it’s basically buying something plugging it in and loading filament then printing a downloaded STL. It gets harder when it needs calibration and maintaining, but it’s not an unknown dark art - there are a billion helpful discord groups.
But once you have it and know how to maintain it, anything where you’re like “man wouldn’t it be nice if I had a physical object like X” becomes a relatively solvable problem. There are lot of materials with many different properties. When you skip into a zone of material or print you can’t afford the equipment for, there are a bazillion print shops.
The harder skill frankly is the 3d modeling. But I find openscad is sufficient for almost everything and then for the rest I use Build123. They’re both parametric code driven design tools so fit well inside a software project (better than GUI tools, and more easy to be precise with). Openscad is absurdly easy, build123 is more advanced and requires Python skills as well as effort to learn the conceptual model.
I sort of felt the way you seem to once upon a time until I said screw it and figured it out one day. Now I feel like I lived most my life hobbled for want of this tool.
So, yeah, overkill for printing an esp32 enclosure. But doing so unlocks a lifetime of possibilities.
That is why so many amateur projects look ugly: making a pretty package is a whole new skill set. 3d printing is the easiest acceptable solution, but it isn't the best. Best would be a custom designed injection molded housing, but that is even more work to design.
Nothing about making a nice presentation is beyond what amateurs can do. However it is a lot more effort and so most decide it isn't worth it.
I don't care if it's "beautiful" or ultra-compact or looks as nice as some Apple device. All I want is to buy one thing without wires and an exposed board.
If you want to sell a more finished commercial quality project and don't want to print your own, there are places that will fabricate one for you (but in low quantities, having them 3d print it probably cheaper)
The simplest I can think of is this: https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/sparkfun-electron...
use a step drill or other large-diameter bit to cut holes for cable glands, dremels to cut rectangular holes for power switches, and drill and tap holes for standard brass standoffs. IMHO everybody should have at least one cordless drill and drill bits, as well as an M3 tap. Then use Cable glands for wires going in/out, and nylon sheathing for the cables outside the box.
If you take the time to make the holes nicely, the result often looks good enough that non-makers will think you are a god of manufacturing.
There's a lot of files running around with existing models for common projects, so you probably don't need to design your own enclosures a lot of the time unless you want to.
And printers have gotten cheap, like $99 gets you a jumping off point into the hobby.
Do people not just sell like "complete package" things?
The board in the article is $13.49 ( https://www.amazon.com/dp/B072HBW53G ). If you could get an enclosed, complete thing for $20, including the board and whatever you need for it to run, that'd be much less of a PITA than "brand new hobby" or "find someone to 3D print stuff for me locally and deal with that whole hassle".
The thing about enclosures is that they are pretty design dependent. Nobody knows what you are hooking up to your board or what the intended purpose is. Some boards do have generic type cases, e.g. raspberry pi cases.
I'm well aware. I think of the $99 printer as a filter - either it's going to catch your interest enough to justify jumping to a $600+ printer, or 3d printing isn't for you and you aren't out much.
I look if if I can find some already assembled things and try to build an project around it. For example I used an pictureframe to build a nice neopixel thing, I also documented it on my website, https://mikub.me/post/(1)/
So what I do is I usually look around what everyday objects could become nice enclosures for microcontrollers and such things.
You shouldn't productise anything with ESP32, its just an overprized bloated hobby pcb, very unprofessional.
See my comment below on how to productize this: use a 4 cent off the shelf microcontroller on a 10 cent pcb or much better: make a custom chip with all the sensors on board but with $25K minimum Capex but tiny Opex
Not everything is going to be sold @ qty 100,000. I deal with the other end of the spectrum: 1 unit to maybe 25/year. At those quantities, speed of development and assembly is the most important criteria. Unit price is not.
You shouldn't productionize an esp32 dev kit but you should absolutely productionize an esp32 on a board you've designed that has the specif features to do your thing (whatever that is).
no, the ESP32 is a SoC, a bunch of chips in a package on a PCB. not a bare microcontroller chip. It is already a product with several resellers: ip, fab, packaging, exporter, distributor, retailer and a very high profit overhead of at least 2.7 times the costprice
You're absolutely wrong on a number of points. A SoC stands for "system on a chip", it refers to a single die (if you want to get pedantic, there are multi-die packages but this does not apply here) package, a "bare chip" if you will.
The ESP32 is a SoC. It's available in QFN packaging (Quad Flat Pak No Lead).
The ESP32 is available included with a number of "modules" (and of course devkits). These modules are designed for production use and it can be economical to do so. You clearly don't have the foggiest idea about these product lines so don't seem to be in a good position to comment on the economics.
Why would you need to sign an NDA? There are decaps readily available. Most ESP32 models have a separate die for the flash memory, but everything but the flash (that is uC, WiFi, BLE, and peripherals) is on a single die, which sounds like a SoC to me (The definition of SoC devices have always included devices with off-die RAM and Flash). These aren't "a bunch of components on printed circuit boards" as you initially claimed.
I like wood. It is pretty much everything you want for something like this - super durable, very easy to work with, and depending on what you pick, cheap and pretty, too.
Plus, woodworking is very satisfying by itself. And also easy to get started with - for small box-like things like this you only need a few cheap hand tools.
If you're not wiring anything but power, LilyGo T-Dongle-S3 is an ESP in a USB-A thumb drive form factor complete with a shell and optionally a 160x80 color LCD.
You shouldn't productise anything with ESP32, its just an overprized bloated hobby pcb.
See my comment below on how to productize this: use a 4 cent off the shelf microcontroller on a 10 cent pcb or much better: make a custom chip with all the sensors on board but with $25K minimum Capex but tiny Opex
This is silly and reductive. You make different design for manufacturing choices at different steps of product development and volume.
In some cases, you may luck out and find that a widely available dev board is actually a really good match for your needs, in which case, run with it. You'll cut out a lot of NRE and get your product in customers hands faster. Once you've shown that you can sell in volume, do a DFM pass for V2 to minimize cost. OP probably fits this case, as all they need is Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, depending on their eventual power solution.
If you find that you're taking a dev board and soldering a lot of extra components to it, then I agree, you want to move to a custom PCB before doing any real volume. But you still might make a dozen first cuts with this and a 3d printed case to see how some product beta testers respond.
I'm certain that an ASIC wouldn't be cost effective for all but very large operations. Even if you could get it at the same price, it would massively increase time to market, and if you need to scale production fast you're shit out of luck. Not to mention you'll probably need multiple iterations, especially if you're sticking a Bluetooth modem and a bunch of sensors in it.
Using an off the shelf MCU and off the shelf sensors saves you all those headaches.
As others point out: you could hire someone to do it. Based on my custom 1 cent ASIC (custom chip) I would design, test and build your (moisture or other) sensor for €3000 excluding tax and price of all the needed tools. Usually more like $6000 because they want to outsource all the problems (like mass production and sales) to me
it is not a joke, you can do as low as 1.10870 cent per custom chip or 2 cent per off the shelf chip. 0.03 cent is impossible, the minimum size of a chip is .625 mm2 and that sets the minimum price.
Designing one for $3K is possible because I already have a tested chip design that I just have to modify for you.
A master student project is usually a free design with a free tapeout at Google MPW, Mosys of Europractice.
You seem like a very smart and capable person, and for an industrial buyer your proposal makes a lot of sense. For a hacker (who is often a hobbyist or amateur looking to build something simple quickly) a versatile SoC at $5/unit also makes a lot of sense.
I have to say you are hurting yourself with your communication style, because it comes off as very dismissive and arrogant. I bookmarked your presentation in case I need it in the future, but a 4 hour video is not a great way to hook people who are not sure if they are interested or not.
if you like to know more about it: morphle at ziggo dot nl to make a video conf appointment and get a demo. Or ask email questions, but that takes more effort for us both.
You're selling yourself drastically short asking for just 3k unless your plan is to wrap the entire project in a week. I don't think I've ever managed to even setup a new tech library in under a week, let alone design and verify anything.
I see a lot of pages where they show some bare-looking board, but in the real world you want to package that up.
If you're a software guy like me, you would likely prefer to pay a bit extra to just have that tidied up for you rather than fiddle around with stuff.