*Hey there, you’re probably reading this right now! I’m in your head, spooky! *
Anyways this goes out to everyone.
I’ve got an idea for an electronic thing and really would like to make lots and attempt to set up a business. However, I have no knowledge of that part of tech. I’d love to hear an overview and maybe help set up a wiki regarding the road to manufacturing. I think it would be a valuable resource. This community depends on the inventiveness of each other. Things like the Proxmark antenna by @TomHarkness, @Devilclarke new access controller, Dangerous Things itself! Anyways I’d love to hear all about it, and work on setting something up.
there are some basics but generally you start by making a prototype of your thing… ensure the design works… then when you decide to turn that into a product, you’ll have to make decisions about what’s called DFM - design for manufacturing. This process can be brutal because you might discover that your thing you made can’t be manufactured as it’s designed for much less than what you thought you’d want to retail it for. Generally speaking you will want your finished cost price, complete in a box with manual or whatever else, to be 25% of your MSRP (retail price). Some people think 50% is enough, but not if you want to deal with distributors wanting their own cuts, unforeseen labor costs, transport costs, and tons of other little gotchas along the way… 25% of retail cost is a good target to try to hit.
Then there’s other questions like, are you going to fulfill yourself or pay a fulfillment house? Who will be shipping your stuff out to customers? Will you partner with distributors?
Generally speaking, consumer electronics as a category is a razor thin margin space… tough to operate in as a general rule. Post some info about what you want to make, who your customers are, what you think you could sell it for and I can give you my opinions.
I don’t want to give too much away, not trashing open information, just a design that could be big. I’m also still trying to figure out if I’m infringing on a patent.
So basically, wearable payment band. It would be low profile and using a technology that allows it to work at any swipe style card reader. It also doesn’t need approval by EMV because it just requires you to add your card details locally.
My biggest concern is figuring out how to embed a board and battery completely in the silicone armband.
I’d like it to be one piece with 4 protruding pins for charging and data. That seems hard to do though
Just a heads up, this won’t work worldwide and won’t work forever. Samsung did this in one of their phones for Samsung Pay, they don’t bother in their newer models I believe.
In Australia, it would only work on old machines that don’t support chip cards (which we’ve had for years, let alone contactless EMV which is everywhere)
I haven’t swiped a card in probably 5 years. If you try to, it doesn’t process and just says ‘insert card’ - only if it tries to communicate with the chip 3 times and fails will it accept the mag stripe, so would have to carry a placeholder ‘card’ around to make it fail, defeating the purpose.
It’s a great idea, but its been done, you won’t sell any in the land down under, and I imagine it’s only a matter of time before all machines and countries get updates and it becomes e-waste, sorry to say.
I stand corrected, they must have just removed it in some models/international variants. All glory to the USA and their state of the art 1970’s technology!
Hey, Not all that backwards, They have some pretty modern tech.
The iPhone is only 2-3 years behind the technology trends and locked down with propriety accessories…Despite that, the Marketing is fantastic.
Also, you can’t argue, their military is actually state of the art
Yup, I’m capitalizing on the slow adoption in the US. Even the newer readers still have the swipe part and using my Note 9, I don’t need a dummy card, so that part should be fine.
Fair enough, I’m just not sure of the profitably of designing, tooling and manufacturing a product, let alone importing, distributing, marketing and supporting said product, that depends on a legacy feature that only works in one (albeit sizeable) market.
Could work out nicely, but could also be dead in the water before too long, seems like a big gamble.
I know what you’re getting at… there was some device that existed to be easily built to “blast” out swipecard. Unfortunately, nobody uses magstripe-primary readers anymore and you’d have to do sketchy stuff to get the reader to accept magstripe secondary.
I still have the bits to build it too… Can’t remember it’s name though. EDIT: Oh, it’s a magspoof.
Hope everyone is still staying healthy!
