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I have been working on a small project that uses the Netduino. The project is basic and I am a beginner. I bought an enclosure and made the device look pretty cool. I showed this to some store owners and they wanted to purchase a few dozen. Exciting, but.... I used a Netduino Plus2 and never use any of the networking features, USB or power barrel. overkill choice. So I thought perhaps using a netduino Mini would make more sense however they want to buys dozen of these. The question: What does the typical roadmap look like for a netduino project going from Prototype to retail? China? What do Netduino engineers do to engineer the product to a small but reasonable market. Aside from the business aspect (copyright, FCC, etc..) what has anybody done to take that next step?
Thanks! And thanks to the community for helping me with this project.
If you're making a few hundred (or perhaps even a few thousand), using the Netduino 2 (without Ethernet) is probably a good choice. In volume, that board is actually less expensive than the Netduino Mini.
If you're making many thousands of units, you could also hire an electrical engineer to create you a derivative board that integrates your electronics. The design files are open source, so if you go this route there is no need to pay royalties, etc.
Thanks for the insight. That makes sense if I am going to roll my own production line. Is there a resource (blog, website, etc..) that describes the process of going from prototype to retail? The Netduino is great, and than you for responding!
We don't have a blog about going from prototype to retail, but if people are interested we could create a thread detailing the process with one of our own products (prototyped on Netduino).
That would be a good idea. Making a retail product in a limited production would a cool forum. I am sensing that I am heading into an area where experience is really import. It would be very helpful for a forum to help weight in on decisions where I may be buying thousands of dollars worth of Netduinos, boards, etc... and then be told "Oh, don't do that...do this...". its one thing to spend hundreds on a prototype because of the mistakes, but when you have your final "product" ready to sell through some local stores, a lot of questions begin to form. Mounting, cases, marketing, package, etc. I think on a small scale it would be cool to do, but the mistakes when ordering lots of quantity would really take the spark out of the fun (there is a punn in there sorry ).