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I don't know how you came here, but if you asked yourself:
How can Elon Musk build better rockets and cars at such lower cost?
Then you are at the right place! I can help you do the same in your company.
The secret is called First Principle Thinking.
It can be applied to a product, a process or a whole company. It means moving outside of your charted territories, which can be scary, but I’m here to guide you and to help you overcome the challenges you didn’t expect.
Once we’re there, however, you’ll have a significant advantage over your competition who didn’t dare taking that leap.
This is not an all-or-nothing decision. We can gradually explore if it fits you needs and your mindset. But we need to start somewhere.
Mechanics
What most people do
What we do
Development according to the waterfall model, where everything is modeled first, then drawings are created, then offers are obtained via email, contracts awarded, and only at least one month later do you have the parts to test.
Agile development mostly operates without drawings. Orders are placed online, and the parts arrive within a week. As much as possible is internally 3D printed, and the prototype is ready for testing the next day.
Many CNC parts are made of metal, which could last for decades, but who knows if we will even need the machine in 5 years? They cost a lot of money and take a long time to manufacture.
Only essential parts are manufactured from metal. The rest is 3D printed in PET, which also lasts for years and can be replaced within a day if it breaks. This approach is much cheaper and faster.
They assume that compressed air is readily available and expect the customer to provide it. The prevailing opinion is also that “compressed air components are cheaper,” which is often no longer true nowadays. Nobody talks about operating costs.
We avoid using compressed air wherever possible. Electric motors are now so affordable that the component price is comparable. Moreover, motors offer greater precision and lower operating costs. Leaks and kinked hoses are then eliminated as sources of errors.
The philosophy that the problem must be solved with one machine because several machines would cost much more. This leads to a machine that has to run very fast, making it expensive, difficult to develop, and prone to errors.
When high throughput is required, parallelization is an option. The second machine costs only a fraction of the first because the engineering is already completed. This provides redundancy with slower-running machines that are easier to build and thus cheaper.
Electronics
What most people do
What we do
They choose a PLC or industrial controller from an established manufacturer for industrial automation.
We use a widely available processor. This could be a Raspberry Pi, an ESP32, or even an Arduino for simple tasks.
Then, they complement it with modules from the same manufacturer to ensure everything fits together seamlessly. Communication often occurs via proprietary protocols understood only by the industry, which can even incur licensing costs.
We supplement this with modules that do exactly what we need, which we either procure affordably or develop ourselves. Communication occurs via open protocols such as I2C, SPI, RS232, RS485, and HTTP, understood by the entire world.
In the end, what was initially built as a nest becomes a cage because integrating external components becomes difficult, and they become dependent on a single supplier for procurement.
We have multiple suppliers for everything, providing us with the assurance of quickly and affordably obtaining components.
Software
What most people do
What we do
They take the software provided by the hardware component supplier. This usually comes with its own programming language.
We use open-source software and a widely adopted programming language like Python or C++, for which there are countless libraries available.
The software package’s modular nature allows for rapid progress but ties one to the supplier. Moreover, one is blocked if a function doesn’t perform exactly as intended. Despite sometimes high software costs, support is limited.
The abundance of open-source libraries, often developed by reputable companies or universities, allows us to progress just as rapidly, but we retain our freedom. Additionally, we can customize and extend an open-source library if necessary.
Clean version control is often not possible in many of these development environments. You can simply “save as” the entire folder, but you don’t know exactly what changes were made.
We utilize Git, the version control system used, among other things, for the Linux Kernel. This involves millions of lines of code and thousands of contributors. Everything must be traceable.