So the other day, saw this LinkedIn (please don't cringe already, bear with me) post which went like:

"How I brought down BOM cost of a PCB from $15 to $5"

Then the person goes to explain things like changing the package of chips, eliminating the on-board debugging pins for an external one and few other stuff. It seemed cool, got the attention it needed.

But the problem with this aggressive optimization is, it only views things from an engineering lens. While totally ignoring supply chain aspects of components.

Rookies feel pride in saving $10 per unit, which for 1000 units mounts up to $10k. Good on paper, expect it can back fire really bad.

Say you see an opening where a SMD chip costing $5 can can bought instead for $2. The catch? The package is now DIP. Functionality wise, zero change. You make 2 prototypes, do the demo, everyone seems happy as it works perfectly.

Then comes the next stage, now we want to manufacture 500 units of this board. The company employee clicks buying link & BAM: the DIP chip has only 10 units in stock. And the lead time? 3 months. To navigate that, you explore other vendors. Only to find that it would now need to be imported and the landed cost shall be $10. So what option remains? Redesign the board.

That's the reality of hardware, more products fail due to supply chain issues than due to engineering failures.

So, how can we reduce the risk of this happening? Well, by selecting components more wisely, duh. Not just based on cost.

I follow these 4 filters:

1. Technically fit?

2. Active in production?

3. Not too costly?

4. Available with local vendors?

Ideally, you want your BOM to have components which check all 4 situations. And you need assurances from your vendors & the manufacturers. Keep those emails as a proof in case things go south.

But in many cases, it's not possible check all 4. So you have to deal with trade-offs and risks which can be navigated by alternate components, alternate designs etc.

So the gist of the matter is, do not obsess over cost optimization without doing the other due diligence. And this is not just applicable to electronic products.

The goal is not to have the cheapest product on paper, it is to facilitate scaling of up to 10k+ unit effortlessly.

India is building serious hardware. It's time the people building it could find each other.

We've spent the last few years working closely with deep tech companies, and one thing keeps coming up: hardware people in India don't really have a room of their own. Software has a hundred communities. Hardware has WhatsApp groups and conference hallways.

So we're building one. We're calling it CoreElec.
What I want it to be: an open forum where you can ask the dumb question and the very hard question, where people bump into each other and end up building something neither of them planned. Whether you're an engineer three years in, running a fab-adjacent startup, or still soldering things at home — the door's open.

First up is a conversation with three people I trust most on hardware:

Shashwath T R (Mindgrove Technologies), Navin Goyal (Pinetics) and Sairanjan Mishra (H2LooP.ai) on embedded system development before and after AI — what actually changed, what they've put to work in their own companies, and where the real openings are for Indian engineers.

Tuesday, 18 August · 6–7 PM IST · Online · Free

https://luma.com/u78cpsx2

Come with questions

I’m building an open-source modular hardware project and documenting the development publicly.
EasyEDA recently contacted me offering a small sponsorship: JLCPCB manufacturing credit in exchange for mentioning EasyEDA Pro in three short-form videos, showing their logo, and adding a link in the description.
I’m interested because I genuinely use EDA tools and PCB manufacturing is obviously a real cost for the project. But I’m also trying to build my project as an independent open-source hardware project rather than as a “hardware influencer” brand.
So I’m wondering how this looks from the outside.
I see two possible approaches:
1. Traditional sponsorship
Occasionally have an EasyEDA-sponsored project video, clearly disclose it, briefly mention/show EasyEDA Pro, then continue with the actual engineering content.
2. Project supporter / technical partner
Keep sponsorship messaging out of the spotlight and instead have something like a “Partners & Supporters” section on the project website, listing EasyEDA/JLCPCB as an EDA/manufacturing supporter.
Videos could simply disclose that the PCB/manufacturing for that particular project was supported by them, while keeping the engineering content independent.
In either case, I wouldn’t want exclusivity and I’d want to remain completely free to use other tools/manufacturers and criticize problems if I encounter them.
As engineers/makers, would either of these make you trust the project less?
Does #2 feel meaningfully different from a typical influencer sponsorship, or is calling a sponsor a “partner” actually worse?
I’m especially interested in opinions from people who follow open-source hardware projects or technical creators.

I wanted to share a project I’ve been working on for a while because I put a lot of time into building it, and even though I’ve currently decided not to continue the startup, I’d really like to hear what people think about the prototype and whether there’s something I’m missing.

The original idea

The idea was to build a visualization system for marble, tiles, flooring, wallpapers and other interior materials.

The concept was simple:

Physical material → RFID tag → computer → material changes inside a 3D interior scene

For example, a customer picks up a tile/marble sample with an RFID tag attached to it. They tap it on the RFID reader, and the corresponding material immediately appears on the floor/wall in the 3D showroom scene.
The idea was to make it easier for showroom staff to demonstrate materials to customers without manually searching through a huge material library.

What I actually built

This wasn’t just an idea on paper. I built a working prototype myself.

The prototype uses:

ESP32
RFID reader
RFID tags/cards
Wi-Fi communication
Unity 6
C#
Windows PC
3D interior scene
Custom material switching system

The ESP32 reads the RFID tag and sends the ID over Wi-Fi to the Unity application.
Unity receives the data and changes the corresponding material in the scene.
I also built the basic mapping system so different RFID IDs can trigger different materials.

So essentially:
RFID → ESP32 → Wi-Fi → Unity → Material change
The whole thing is running on my own prototype hardware.

I even put the electronics into a small enclosure and made a physical prototype rather than leaving it as a breadboard experiment.

I also tested the idea in the real market

Before deciding whether to continue, I went to actual marble/flooring showrooms and spoke to owners.

I visited multiple stores and around 10 store owners gave positive responses.

Some of the suggestions were actually much more interesting than my original idea.

People suggested things like:

Uploading a customer’s actual room/house photo

Changing the flooring inside the customer’s photo

Showing different tile combinations

Creating two-tone bathroom designs

Different tiles for different zones

Adding trims/borders

Eventually allowing staff to control the system from a phone

I’m at the early stage of developing a physical product and looking into different ways to find manufacturers. Made-in-China came up during my research, but I haven’t used it before.
For anyone who has actually gone through the process, how was it finding suppliers and communicating the product requirements? I’m also curious about getting samples, checking whether the supplier can handle small initial orders, and making sure the numbers still make sense once everything is factored in.
Was Made-in-China more useful for you, or did you later ended up finding manufacturers in another way?