> - How did you find companies that make the parts (pcb, enclosure)?
For the PCB, it came down to who could meet the specs that I needed for the board. I recall the three important specs being BGA pad spacing, wire thickness, and wire spacing. The ICE40 was the aggressing chip IIRC. I ended up using nextpcb.com.
For the enclosure, I think I just Googled some and had 3 different manufacturers make the same enclosure, and chose the best one to mass produce. I ended up using mfgproto.com.
> - How do you assemble all the parts (do you do that yourself or did you find a company to do that for you)?
For the PCB, I had NextPCB do PCBA, except for the BGAs (which I soldered myself, 500 of them!) and motion sensors, because I didn't trust mailing my high-value stock to China during Chipageddon. That was likely a mistake -- in the future I would have them assemble everything, because their process isn't designed for how I wanted to do things, and soldering that many BGAs sucked.
For the final assembly I did everything by hand (insert PCB into the enclosure, screw in PCB screws, connect battery, add battery shims [to prevent rattling], add RTV gasket to the backplate, screw in backplate screws, add lens adhesive, focus lens while streaming images). It's a ton of manual labor!
Would you mind sharing some of your prototype to production journey?
- How did you find companies that make the parts (pcb, enclosure)?
- How do you assemble all the parts (do you do that yourself or did you find a company to do that for you)?