What's the next step going from Dev board to production?

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mzincali
 
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What's the next step going from Dev board to production?

Post by mzincali »

HI. I'm curious and am not sure where to post this question. I've been using a Dev board (ESP32 Huzzah). I'm getting to the point of wanting to create a few hundred units to test the market, with a goal of a few thousand or more sales.

How do I go from Dev board to production? Do I engage Adafruit to make a production board? Are there services that can easily take an Adafruit Dev kit and base a production board on it? Are there examples or documents on how this is done?

Thank you!

mz

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Re: What's the next step going from Dev board to production?

Post by adafruit_support_bill »

There are lots of PCB houses that will do small production runs for reasonable prices. But you will need to supply CAD files for your board design. We do not offer custom design services. If you want to find someone to do the PCB layout, you could post that to the Jobs board: https://www.adafruit.com/jobs

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Re: What's the next step going from Dev board to production?

Post by mzincali »

Thank you. If I wanted an "Adafruit ESP32 Huzzah" clone, would you be willing to license your CAD and other docs? It might be a better starting point for me to approach PCB houses.

I do notice that you state that the Huzzah is a dev kit with possible issues and only meant for developers, so I would need to figure out how to address those issues...

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Re: What's the next step going from Dev board to production?

Post by adafruit_support_bill »

I do notice that you state that the Huzzah is a dev kit with possible issues and only meant for developers, so I would need to figure out how to address those issues...
The full text explains it pretty well:
Please note: The ESP32 is still targeted to developers. Not all of the peripherals are fully documented with example code, and there are some bugs still being found and fixed. We got many sensors and displays working under Arduino IDE, so you can expect things like I2C and SPI and analog reads to work. But other elements are still under development. This board is designed for use with the Tensilica toolchain (ESP IDF) so we recommend that for better hardware-support coverage.
This is an early release of a new board with new software - much of which is not fully documented. It is intended for experienced developers that want early access and are capable of working through issues and figuring things out for themselves.

All of our boards are open source. We do not have board files for this particular board published yet. However, complete CAD files for most of our other ESP32 boards can be found on Github. Terms of the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike license are included in the license.txt file in the Github repo. https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit-ES ... eakout-PCB

Edit - Actually the Espressif ESP32 Development Board board is designed and manufactured by Espressif. We do not have schematics for that and they are not ours to license.

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