Article URL: https://chipweinberger.com/articles/20260719-hardware-is-not-so-hard Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48966713 Points: 269 # Comments: 117

First, I finally had the piano recording device I’d always wanted: a fully automated device that captures everything I play, no human-involvement required. And second, after a career in software, I got to build hardware. It was super fun. 2500 units have already been sold, and counting! People genuinely love it! And it’s able to stand on its own feet as a business. In my eyes, that’s a success. For my first blog post, I want to reflect on the biggest surprise I encountered creating Jamcorder. Coming from a career in software, I expected building hardware to be the hardest part. Electronics design, plastics, manufacturing, fulfilment, component shortages, etc, etc, etc. I kept waiting for something to get me by surprise. A scrapped production run (my worst nightmare). Or component sourcing issues, perhaps? The hardest part of building Jamcorder was still, by far, the software -- roughly 200K lines of code spread across the firmware, app, and manufacturing tooling. It took over 3 years and many long nights in a pre-LLM world.