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Technology
Friday, December 6th 2019, 10:05 AM CST
It can be hard to believe it, but with the power of technology and the internet, the world is your oyster. With enough knowledge about how things are made, you can create anything. All it takes to bring a product to the market is enough focus and determination to do so.
If you can afford the costs of mass producing something, you can succeed as a businessperson. However, you shouldn’t ever start a project like starting a business without a clear vision of what you want. Don’t ever start mass producing something without knowing what you want out of all your work.
And most importantly of all, make sure to have a solid business plan in place. If you don’t have an idea of how much of a product you need and how much it can cost, you may get laughed out of the factory. To be taken seriously when trying to mass produce something, you need to appear serious to your business partners.
To learn how to be serious about producing a product and successfully bring something to the market, keep reading below!
Anyone Can Start Mass Producing Anything
There was a time when mass producing something was only possible for people who were well connected. They knew who to reach out to when they needed something made. This class of people was wealthy and competitive, and worst of all, there weren’t many of them.
That meant that there wasn’t much competition, so there wasn’t much innovation. Luckily, the internet changed all that and it connected the masses with factory owners. With the dawn of the internet, anything could get mass produced with just an email and a money transfer.
Manufacturers must compete with each other to attract inventors and designers looking to bring their visions to life. And that means it also doesn’t cost as much to make something on such a large scale. And to learn more about what the modern manufacturing landscape is like, keep reading below!
It Helps to Be Multilingual When Manufacturing Items
The internet didn’t just make it easier to get things manufactured. It also brought the manufacturing industry onto the international scene. If you want to get anything manufactured, you may need to reach out to people in Europe, China, or beyond.
With mass production services found almost anywhere, it’s up to you to be prepared for anything. Try to learn as much about as many languages as you can, so you can speak with potential business partners. It also helps to learn how to quickly translate things you may not understand with technology, or with interpreters.
Connect with People Beyond Business
Good business isn’t just about turning a profit; it’s also about connecting with people. Business is about bringing groups of people together who share similar interests in a certain market. Don’t be afraid of getting to know manufacturers on a personal level and to talk to them about their lives outside of work.
You may learn about different cultures and countries, and you can get a better deal on a manufacturing contract. Just by asking what someone is doing after work in a chat room, you can make a new friend across the world.
Find Manufacturing Services You Can Trust
The first step of mass producing anything is to find a manufacturer you can trust. There are tons of manufacturers across the world, and they’re all competing for your business. Some will try to lure you in with cheap prices and promises of quick turnarounds, but you may not be able to trust them.
They could use unethical labor standards as a way to keep prices down, and you may indirectly support their practices by doing business with them. They could also simply lie about their prices, their quality, or how quickly they make things.
The best way to find a manufacturer you can trust is to shop around and do your research. In the business world, knowledge is power and luckily, the internet contains everything there is to know. Before reaching out to anyone, spend some time researching your options and figuring out which manufacturers are worth the effort.
Distributing Items Is an Entirely Different Skill Set
After sending designs to your manufacturer and producing everything, your manufacturer will need to send it somewhere. Chances are, you won’t thousands of your product stored at your home. You need to send it to a distribution center where you can send your product from.
Be sure to include an address along with your designs that your manufacturer can send your products to. And make sure you can trust that location to protect your items while they’re in storage. However, some distribution centers will do more than just store your products.
Try to find a center that will automatically send your products to customers, too. That way, you can focus on managing your company without getting lost in the minutiae of selling products.
Marketing Is About Nuance and Presentation
After you manufacture your products and have a distribution plan in place, it’s time to let your market know the product is up for sale. It’s time for you to connect your company with an audience that you’ll be able to turn in customers. And to do that, you need to market yourself, your company, and your product.
There are several ways to do that, and they all work together. A social media campaign will build your brand and attract attention, while inbound marketing will give you an edge against your competition. It’s hard to create an effective marketing plan since there are so many aspects of it to manage.
Yet, by creating a good marketing plan, you’ll have to order more products almost immediately. And you’ll be able to do it with all the profits you make!
Anyone Can Make Anything with Enough Work
Mass producing something used to be impossible for the average person. Now though, it’s something that’s available for anyone with enough focus, determination, and vision to make it happen. All it takes is an internet connection, and you can make your dreams come true.
Of course, there’s more to the business world than that! To learn more about how to successfully bring a product to a market and build a company, keep reading our website here!
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Ultimate Guide to Switch Debounce (Part 1)
They taught me a lot of things at university. Unfortunately, they neglected to mention the topic of switch bounce. If you are a practicing engineer working with electronic systems, you will almost certainly have run into this problem. If you are new to the field, you can be assured that the delights of switch bounce are lurking out there waiting for an opportunity to bid you a cheery “Hello!” Be afraid; be very afraid.
If they think about it at all, most non-engineers visualize the operation of a switch as being similar to dropping a chunk of Play-Doh on a wooden desk. When the Play-Doh lands, it goes “splat” and stays where it is. In reality, operating a switch is more like dropping a ping-pong ball onto the desk. In this case, the ball will bounce multiple times before eventually settling down. Similarly, when we operate a switch, it also bounces one or more times before coming to rest in its new state.
This switch bounce occurs both when the switch is closed and when it opens again. It also occurs in toggle switches, rocker switches, pushbutton switches, and so-forth — pretty much everything apart from the switches most of us never use anyway, like mercury tilt switches, for example.
In the case of a light switch on the wall, we don’t notice the fact that it bounces because everything occurs too fast for it to register on our eyes and in our brains. It’s a different story when the switch is connected to a microcontroller (MCU) that can sample its inputs millions of times each second. In this case, the MCU may see the switch being toggled as comprising multiple events. If you were in charge of pressing a pushbutton every time someone entered a room for example, then the MCU might count each press as comprising anywhere from one to twenty (or more) events.
Just to increase the fun and frivolity, each switch is different. This not only by type, although that may play a factor; switches of the same type can behave in contrary ways. Even worse, an individual switch may vary its characteristics depending on the temperature, humidity, time of day, direction of the prevailing wind, and the color of your plaid polyester golf trousers.
If a switch is connected to some safety-critical or mission-critical system, and the system’s designers haven’t adequately addressed its switch-bounce characteristics, then the chances are that someone, sometime, is going to have a “very bad hair day.”
If a system can be negatively affected by switch bounce, then someone is going to have to deal with the issue, either in hardware or in software. Now, if you aren’t a designer working in the trenches (perhaps you are a manager, bless your little cotton socks), you may mistakenly assume that, since we are all aware this is an issue, we are also all cognizant of the answer to the problem. Would that it were so; unfortunately, there is no “one size fits all” solution.
The way things used to work in the not-so-distant past is that junior engineers were instructed as to the switch-bounce solution(s) favored by their more senior colleagues. In turn, those fonts of knowledge were instructed by their mentors, and so on and so forth deep into the mists of time. As a result, there are now so many solutions scattered around the internet — where most young engineers now go to satiate their craving for knowledge — that it makes your head spin. On the bright side, some of these offerings actually work; on the downside, their working may be due to chance rather than design.
How bad is this problem? It’s rampant. Have you ever pressed the Up or Down channel selector on a TV controller, only to have it skip through multiple channels? If so, the controller’s designers probably didn’t account for switch bounce as well as they thought they had. Just a few days ago as I pen these words, I was discussing this issue with the legendary embedded guru Jack Ganssle, who said, “I agree about people not knowing this stuff. In fact, I own a small FM transmitter that is hard to turn off because its power switch bounces so much.”
I asked Jack to elucidate (it’s OK, he’s a professional), and he replied as follows: “We live pretty far out in the country, and my hearing protectors, which have an FM receiver, can’t get Baltimore’s classical station. In the olden days, a half-dozen vacuum tube radio would be all one would need to listen to the radio. Instead, I now use an old iPhone that streams the station. The phone is plugged into a 100 mW FM transmitter that broadcasts on an empty frequency to my hearing protectors when I’m using noisy tools (tractor, sawmill, chainsaw, etc.). So, instead of a half-dozen vacuum tubes, I’m now using the 100 billion or so transistors in the iPhone! The transmitter itself is a cheap Chinese device. When I press the power button to turn it off, half the time it goes off and then comes on again — a classic case of switch bounce.”
Just What is a Switch?
Before we proceed, we should perhaps note that, in the context of electrical engineering, the term “switch” refers to a component that can “make” or “break” an electrical circuit, thereby interrupting the current or diverting it from one conductor to another.
We should also note that there is a mind-boggling variety of switch types, including toggle switches, rocker switches, slide/slider switches, rotary switches, pushbutton switches, tactile switches, micro and limit switches, knife switches, magnetic switches, reed switches, mercury switches, smart switches, and… the list goes on (you can peruse and ponder my Switch Types column to see images and discover more).
Hardware vs. Software
As we alluded to earlier, there is a wide range of solutions one can use to address the switch bounce problem. One approach is to pre-process the switch signal in hardware so as to pass a “clean” (debounced) signal to the computer. An alternative technique is to feed the “dirty” (bouncing) signal from the switch directly into the computer, and to “clean it up” (remove the bouncing) in software.
Prior to the introduction of the microprocessor circa the 1970s, there were relatively few computers around, and these were typically of the mainframe (“big iron”) variety. Just renting a mainframe computer circa the mid-1960s could cost tens of thousands of dollars a month (goodness knows what buying one would cost). Thus, at that time, price was not an issue with regard to a solution to debounce the switches; what was an issue was consuming precious memory and clock cycles.
Although the mainframes of the 1960s were physically large, they were extremely limited in terms of memory and performance (at least, they were by today’s standards). For example, the IBM System/360 Model 30, which was introduced in 1964, came equipped with only 8 to 64KB of memory and could perform only 34,500 instructions per second. Not surprisingly, programmers at that time didn’t want to waste any of their precious memory or instruction cycles doing something so mundane as debouncing switches (the situation wasn’t helped by the fact that the programmers probably weren’t aware of switch bounce in the first place).
The solution of choice, the crème de la crème (as it were) of hardware debouncing solutions was to use… but no! There are so many tasty tidbits of trivia and savory nuggets of knowledge pertaining to the myriad hardware and software solutions available that we will save them until my next column. In the meantime, do you have any stories you’d care to share regarding problems caused by bouncing switches?
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