This Slide decks walks through our journey of building an IoT Product from an Idea to Production. We've shared many of our lessons learned along the journey, the resources available in India and pitfalls to avoid. This talk was given on the occasion of Global IoT Day.

1. Building IoT Products
From Proto  Production
Syed Anwaarullah
PotentialLabs

2. Agenda
• Our Journey of building an IoT product
• Idea  Proto
• Selecting the right prototyping platform
• Leveraging Open Source Designs
• Proto  Production
• Getting stuff done in India (#MakeInIndia)
• PCB Design, Manufacturing & Assembly
• Outsourcing to China ?
• Turnkey solutions, SeedStudio
• Crowdfunding?
• Lessons learnt & key takeaways

3. 3 categories of IoT Products/Solutions:
•B2B
•B2C
•B2Dev (Dev2Dev)

4. Problem Statement / Opportunity

6. Idea…

8. The H/W Dev Life Cycle

10. Selecting the right Hardware…
• Understanding regulations of target market
• Dev product, less hassles, no FCC, ROHS etc
• For Industrial, use pre-certified devices/radio (eg: Particle)
• Bare requirements
• Eliminating the Arduino Board
• Use the Arduino Brain
• Why Arduino?
• Arduino Uno? Leonardo? Mega? Yun? Zero?
• Use more powerful bare-metal processors/controllers
• STM, AVR, PIC etc

11. Selecting the right Hardware…
• Look for Open Source Hardware
• Build atop existing designs instead of starting over from scratch

12. Open Source Designs

14. Blindly copying over…
• Don’t do it because it’s “cool”
• SMD
• Voltage Reg
• Do we really need that feature?
• Can we improvise/strip it?
• Using Arduino Bootloader?
• Arduino USB VID/PID License owned by Arduino.cc
• Derivative products cannot use Arduino.cc VID/PID License

15. PCB Design
• Open Source PCB Tools
• Prevent Vendor/Tool lock-in
• Proprietary licensed tools
• Eagle PCB, Zuken CadStar, KiCad

17. Get the PCB Source files, not just the Gerbers!

18. PCB Manufacturing
• PCB manufacturers in Hyderabad
• ELITE PCB - ECIL
• Production Grade in India
• PCBPower.com

19. First PCB 

20. And 5 more iterations…

21. PCB Assembly – Manual
Stuff Required:
• Tweezers
• SMD Paste
• Fine tip soldering iron
• Lots of patience (lots & lots)

24. PCB Assembly - Automatic
•Pick n Place Machine
• SMD Stencil
•SMD Reflow

26. SMD Stencil and Paste Application

29. Turnkey Manufacturing, China

30. The “I” of IoT

33. Crowdfunding?
Bootstrapped
Validation and feedback
Initial traction
Funds for Production
Why not? Why not?

36. B2C, B2B Product Dev – At a Glance
https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*gel9HLQw0YY7_nKIVzcLHQ.gif

37. Customized Raspberry Pi Manufacturing?
https://www.element14.com/community/docs/DOC-76955/l/raspberry-pi-customization-service

38. Key takeaways
• Maintain a BOM from start
• Crystal example

39. Key takeaways…
• Understand MOQ/Shelf-life/Retirement before locking into a
component

41. KISS in H/W
https://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2016/03/screen-shot-2016-02-16-at-2-52-49-pm.png

43. Important References
• Bolt.io link to complete H/W life cycle development
• https://blog.bolt.io/the-illustrated-guide-to-product-development-
part-1-ideation-ab797df1dac7

44. • Dragon BOM
• https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dragon-standard-
bom/bnckhnfojkacpjkpkjmeejnldeikfmdf

45. IoT Development Community – Hackster.io

46. Getting IoT Prototyping Components
• http://store.potentiallabs.com

47. Discussions…
Thanks 
syed@potentiallabs.com
It’s been a long ride…