 Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, depending on where you're joining us from today. Welcome to Engineering for Change or E4C for Short. Today we're very pleased to bring you the latest in E4C's 2016 webinar series on the topic of prototyping on a budget. My name is Yana Aranda and I'm the director of programs here at Engineering for Change, and I'll be your moderator for today. I'd like to take a moment now to tell you a bit more about today's webinar. The cost of developing and bringing a product to market can be significant, especially when ventures might be making thousands of products in order to keep manufacturing costs low. Prototyping is an essential step in ensuring that innovators avoid making very expensive mistakes by testing as many concepts, parameters, and assumptions as the project budget allows before committing to piloting and manufacturing. Organizations developing technology for development often struggle with prototyping on a tight budget. Also, we've invited Ryan Vineyard, engineering lead at Highway 1, to share his insights on the many options to prototype affordably and effectively to get products to market quickly. Welcome and thank you. Before we get rolling, I'd also like to thank the E4C webinar series team in general. If anybody out there has questions about the series or would like to make recommendations for future topics and speakers, we invite you to contact the team via the email address listed on the slide. The webinar you're participating in today is part of E4C's professional development offerings. Information on upcoming installments in the series, as well as archive videos of past presentations can be found on the E4C webinar stage. And if you're following us on Twitter today, I'd like to invite you to join the conversation with our dedicated hashtag, hashtag E4C webinars. Before we move on to our presenter, I'd like to tell you a bit more about Engineering for Change and who we are. E4C is a knowledge exchange platform and global community of over one million engineers, designers, development practitioners, and social scientists leveraging technology to solve all your life challenges faced by underserved communities, including access to clean water, and sanitation, sustainable energy, improved agriculture, and more. We invite you to join E4C by becoming a member. Membership provides cost-free access to relevant and current news, professional development resources, including opportunities such as jobs and fellowships, and a growing database of hundreds of poverty alleviating products in our solutions library. E4C members enjoy a unique user experience based on their type behavior and engagement. Essentially, the more you interact with our site, the better we'll be able to serve you resources aligned to your interests. We invite you to join our passionate global community and contribute to making people's lives better across the world. Check out our website to learn more and sign up. Today's webinar is a collaborative effort with the AF and the ISO, a hardware-less social innovation competition open to individuals and organizations taking physical products to market that will have a social impact. Upcoming ISO-sponsored webinars will focus on issues related to hardware-based solutions and provide practical insights from the ISO Expert Network. As you can see, we have three more coming up in a series, and we hope you'll join them for all of them. Our next webinar is going to be on April 21 at 11 a.m. Eastern Standard Time on the topic of design, testing, and implementation of a life-saving product and resource-constrained settings. We'll be joined by Dr. Steven Harston of Intellectual Adventures. For those of you who are members of E4C, you will receive an invitation directly. And for those of you who are not, we invite you to visit the link listed in our entry register. Now, a few housekeeping items before we get started. I'd love to see where everyone is from today. So in the chat window, I'll please type in your location. And if you don't see the chat, please click on the icon on the top right-hand corner in order to access it. So I'll get started here. I am joining everybody from New York today. All right. And you can also use the chat window to type in any remarks you may have for everybody. Oh, welcome, everybody. A number of folks are here from California, Michigan, Brooklyn, North Carolina. All over we have here in Minnesota. Welcome, everyone. If you want to have any questions for the presenter, please use the Q&A window located below the chat to type them in. Again, if you don't see this, you can access it by clicking the Q&A icon on the top right-hand corner. If you're listening to the audio broadcast and you encounter any trouble, try hitting stop and then start. You may also want to try opening up WebEx in a different browser. Following the webinar, to request a certificate of completion showing one professional development hour for this session, please follow the instructions at the top of the E4C professional development page. The URL is listed. And I see a number of folks have indicated their location. Some of the Q&A do please use the chat window for general comments and the Q&A just for questions so we can keep track for the presenter. And welcome to everybody from New Jersey to Netherlands to Chicago and so forth. We're very excited to have you join us today. All right. And with that, I'd like to introduce today's speaker, Ryan Vineyard. As I mentioned, he is the engineering lead at Highway 1, a hardware-focused startup accelerator located in San Francisco under parent company PCH. He is also the co-author of the hardware startup. Fantastic book. I wish to check it out. He came to PCH through its consulting arm long lab where he developed consumer products for Fortune 500 brands. Previously, Ryan worked at startups in the clean tech and electric vehicle space where he developed novel powertrain, motor control, and thermal systems. Ryan holds a Bachelor of Science in product design from Stanford University. Welcome, Ryan, and I'm going to turn it over to you. Great. Well, thank you so much, Yana. First, I'd like to start by thanking Yana and the hosts at ASME, E4C, as well as the iShow for this opportunity to get information out there about prototyping and a bit about manufacturing. Thanks for the intro and a bit of the background there. So today we're here to talk about prototyping on a budget. This can really be a challenge for anyone, anywhere in the world, no matter what phase of development you're in. A lot of what we'll talk through in this lecture is really about redefining prototyping as a learning tool and not necessarily a rush towards manufacturing and how redefining that can help you get there at a less risky path. And then also address year thing casting, a very specific kind of middle ground process where you can start to get quantity units with more prototyping friendly tools. So quickly, my background, Yana went over a bit of this, but after doing product design at Stanford, I worked with a few clean tech electric vehicle startups around the Bay Area. And then I've been at PCH for four years now, first doing more traditional product development consulting through Limelab, and then with Highway 1 since the beginning, advising 67 startups through six cohorts all throughout the prototyping process on the march towards manufacturability and fundraising. As Yana mentioned, also co-author of the hardware startup. If you like what you hear here, go learn more there. If anyone's interested, shoot me an email. My email is at the end of the presentation, and I can give you a discount code as well. Some good stuff in there about the entire process, not just prototyping and manufacturing, which is definitely what we'll focus on today. So in terms of prototyping, I wanted to start with a bit of a framework. I really like to think about prototyping in two-dimensional, three-dimensional, and four-dimensional. I want to slow down and define these because I think in general, people, and especially startups who might be new to hardware, really jump into 3D prototyping too early and aren't learning enough, partially about the prototyping process, but mainly about their users. So I want to talk through this a little bit. So two-dimensional prototyping. What I mean by that, that really starts with a napkin sketch, the whiteboard idea, the ideation session, the brainstorm with each other. And this is key to really iterate faster. I think a lot of people these days, CAD and 3D printing is so accessible, which is helpful, but staying in 2D to help you ideate and even help you get better feedback from users than you would with a more fine 3D prototype that they might mistake as more of a finished good. 3D is a little bit more obvious. 3D CAD is very powerful these days. Autodesk, I know, is a sponsor of the iShare as well. They have very accessible Fusion 360 software that can help you get in and start making. But I don't want to focus on 3D as much today because I think there's plenty of information out there about it. And four-dimensional, what I mean by that, everyone when I kind of mention this framework is kind of like 40. What's he talking about? You know, four-dimensional, by that I mean your video prototype. And the most common these days is obviously the crowdfunding, the Kickstarter video to really tell your story or message and explain the experience of the product. Because so many hardware products are about the experience these days and the integration with software and really, you know, how it takes an old product and makes it smarter, makes it new. The videos are such a key part of that. It doesn't always have to be crowdfunding. You know, we and most other accelerators have teams prepare a video for applications. So that's definitely also an area where it can be helpful. But in general, a lot of my message here is the four-dimensional prototypes are a really big milestone. They take a lot of investment. They take a lot of time. It's really kind of also a time stamp, a message that will be out there by your company forever. That Kickstarter's up there, whether you did great well or have an odd video. So getting that one right is important because you only get one launch. You only get one of these videos. So the more 2D prototypes, the more 3D prototypes you can make before that, the less risky it will be to getting there. So here's a quick table from the book about some of these processes. I want to hang here for a second. You know, a lot of what I'd love to get questions on in this session are what your challenges are in prototyping. So, you know, this is a quick table. There's obviously many more processes to quickly get some of the acronyms in here. 3D printing. You know, FDM is used at position modeling. You're a typical, you know, glue gun on steroids, MakerBot type 3D printer. And then SLASLS and DLMS are centering processes. And then CNC is machining. But we can come back to this later, but I just wanted to get a bit of a framework out there and get you guys to start thinking about, you know, how can I prototype quicker? Because the question I get a lot when I'm out there doing public speaking is, you know, hey, you talk about 2D prototyping, but I can't possibly do that for my project. You know, I have Technology X, which will take 10 weeks to make one prototype. And I think a lot of that's not necessarily changing your technology or compromising your goals. I think it's just redefining the first prototype you need and what you can learn from it. Because most often your first prototypes, you're really learning from your user, learning about your market, and not necessarily learning too much yet about, you know, the final manufacturing, the production methods that you'll eventually be into. So think about this as we go through and I mentioned some other processes, because I'd love to feel questions about specific projects or processes people are interested in. So to dig a little bit deeper on 2D, 3D, and 4D, and then we'll jump into a great example of taking 3D prototyping further. So 2D prototyping, like I already mentioned, you know, whiteboards, napkin sketches, this is really the origination. And a lot of the benefit that I see there is the collaborative approach. A whiteboard is very accessible. Everyone in the room can go up, you know, there's kind of a low barrier to entry to getting involved in the session. Whereas even if you're staying in two dimensions, you know, if you spend your whole time rendering something in Photoshop and send that around, you know, you're not going to get as much input. People are going to kind of think it's the final idea. They're going to see that you put a lot of work into it. And in some ways they're just not going to want to give you the raw, brutal feedback that you need at that point to understand, you know, which ideas you should be prototyping, which ideas make sense to take out into the lab and keep going to that next level before you move to 3D. And what I want to spend a minute talking about in the upper left-hand corner is foam core. I'm a big fan of foam core. Cardboard can be easier because you can just kind of grab it anywhere. You know, cardboard and duct tape works as well. I'm a big fan of foam core and hot glue where you can just because it finishes a little bit nicer and gives that presentation feel. For those not familiar with foam core or foam board, think of it as like your elementary school science fair presentation posters with that paper with a little bit of foam thickness behind it. And what that allows you to do is start to create two-and-a-half-dimensional forms, more complicated things, but stay in a form that really messages, you know, you're early, this is a prototype, you want feedback, and you know, you can really start to create some complicated stuff with this to get it in front of users. You know, the example in the upper left-hand corner is button layouts on some handheld keyboards. And it would just be a shame for someone to do a rush-to-3D printing and have these complicated shapes and CAD and all these things laid in the design when they could have just, you know, had a 2D gotten the layout, given it to a bunch of users and learned more, and thus moved faster by slowing down and going back to 2D. And two-dimensional gets a little bit more complicated, right? I mean, laser cutters are obviously what's really in the landscape on two-dimension recently. Glowforge is obviously the biggest change in laser cutters lately, if you haven't seen that, check it out, 30 million in 30 days, biggest fastest crowdfunding in history. And a lot of what they focused on is the two-and-a-half-dimension that you'll see after this and how you get more complexity out of 2D. But there's a lot of benefit here, and this is really where you can also start to introduce the electrical, the firmware, the interface, and, most importantly, side of things. Throw in Arduino board in there, have a button in an LED, just some like high-level things to understand how will people interact with the product, what's their expectation. And it's really important to do all of that before you keep progressing. And like I've been saying, you know, two-and-a-half-D has a lot of power. So I think this is a really cool little spider mechanism. And especially mechanisms, you can get a lot of progress in two dimensions and really have some emerging complexity and solve problems. For a fundamental physics standpoint, it's easier to keep it in one plane before you start adding more loads. So all of this makes a lot of sense before you move to 3D. This is, you know, more traditional on the left. We have a wave turning apart. And on the right, we've got, you know, some 3D-printed bunnies, a maker bot, and then a higher res. These are very accessible these days, but again, the risk is, you know, showing a fully 3D-printed part to someone. They might mistake that for, you know, your final manufacturer good and be giving you subtle feedback about, you know, the radius and the color and things like that rather than, you know, the fundamental feature set, the product you're developing and things that can really help you this early in the journey to make that pivot, make that change that will really end up in a much, much better product and growth path long-term. And, you know, this is, to build on the framework a little bit, this is a slide I like to use, kind of my 7-7s rule. You'll notice there are only six on this slide, but I think a lot of this is just because it takes so long to do hardware in more traditional methods, you can move it even faster in low resolution. And what I like to highlight here is a lot of people are aware of the challenge of manufacturing, you know, the bottom of this, like, gosh, it takes seven months, it's a big slog, you know, thousands of dollars, millions of dollars, depending on your scale. But even backing up from that, you know, a test cycle can take seven weeks to get all your prototypes together, integrate, get the boards through bring up and really see what's going on. Just a simple prototype build, just machining, even expedited, that's going to take you a full week. And a lot of what I'm getting at here, too, is what can you learn in a day? Because 3D printing, it's really collapsed the landscape, but it's still going to take seven hours. That's still a whole day. That's still an overnight build. Whereas foam core, you can rip through that within exactly nine to seven minutes, get multiple iterations in front of a user in a day, and of course, wipe board even faster. You know, it's amazing how many ideas you can get through in an hour before you spend seven hours 3D printing one of those ideas, and then you have seven minutes ripping through some foam core. So I think it's really important for entrepreneurs to think about this at any stage in the process. I like to use an example where we were halfway through a $7 million development project at Live Lab for a Fortune Piper company, and I jumped back to foam core when we were already in, starting to even tool some parts because we had a fundamental challenge of, you know, hey, wait, we got a box from an industrial design mechanical engineering standpoint, and foam core was the fastest tool. So, you know, that's a lot of what I'm getting at here is, you know, use the best tools to help you quickly because time is money in this industry. So I wanted to transition from there into talking a bit about manufacturing because that is really kind of the holy grail and long-term goal for hardware startups because that's how you're going to get, these are parts out to consumers. So injection molding is obviously the most common manufacturing process for plastics. I just want to focus on mechanical plastics today because it's typically the long lead item, high cost item on the mechanical side. So the tool you see in the background, I mean, that's just to make a simple whisk and, you know, this is machine hardened steel. You see all the sprues, all the gates, you know, cooling channels are on the side that you can see there. This gets pretty complicated. I mean, the tool in the background would likely be, you know, 10K, you know, maybe down to 5K depending on the options you choose. But there's a lot of complexity there. You want to be refined with your design, done with your design. And the big implication there is that there's just a high cost to iterate. You shouldn't really be learning too much about the form or your product by the time you get to injection molding. By the time you're there, you should really be focusing on the DFM designed for manufacturability and all the little details of, you know, the gates, the sprues, the injection marks to adapt to the process. Because at that point, you're really going to be adapting your design to the process rather than, you know, using the processes that can help your design move faster. And it just takes a while. I mean, typical injection molding can be 10 weeks or more. You know, it's collapsed a bit. You know, 5, 6 weeks is more standard for single-part tools without a lot of complexity or action or sliders or complicated features or what those create. But it's impossible to get injection molded tools in less than a month without a lot of, you know, time, money and relationships. And if it obviously is, you get much lower costs. At this scale, parts can cost pennies up to, you know, dollars. But it's very rare for a consumer product level injection molded part to be more than 5 or 10 dollars unless you're getting up into, you know, automotive washing machines, you know, big old pieces of plastic. You're honestly probably in the 1 to 2 dollar range. So those are some of the trade-offs of injection molding. And I would like to talk a bit about today is a process called urethane casting or silicone molding. So the big benefit here is it kind of flips the equation on a lot of these traditional rules of injection molding in a way that's more friendly for entrepreneurs and more accessible, which is a key point. Injection molding, there's pretty much anywhere you can go, you can find local injection molding resources. But one of the big challenges is especially in the U.S., most injection molders are still outsourcing their tools to China because that's where the knowledge base and the equipment base is. Whereas silicone molding you can do in-house. You know, you'll see a team go through the process in our shop through this case study. So very low setup costs. I mean, you can do this for about 100 bucks depending on how many parts you want to shoot and the materials you want to be using, which really means a low iteration cost. You know, throwing away a mold is not the end of the day. That's just kind of the end of one cycle for you. And short lead times. I mean, you can, you know, if you're really spending full time on this, you can do this in less than a week. And even if you're outsourcing it, which is definitely an option between hand-done urethane casting and outsource injection molding, outsourcing urethane casting, that can be done in 10 days to start having tooled parts coming off real tools for you from professionals. So outsourcing can be a middle ground there. And like I've been saying, it's just a good setup to get you ready for injection molding. Start to learn about the design for manufacturability and the process of molding. You know, silicone molding is a little bit more forgiving. You're going to get more free features on the undercuts and sliders but all in all it is the limitations of the process that you're going to have to start to work around will be much closer to injection molding than when you were spending your part for three printers or machining. Now, the one downside is high unit costs. Because of the materials and the scale at which you're going to have to buy them, you know, you can be paying $20 to $100 per part. But, you know, you've just saved $3,000 on an injection molding tool so that can help you go faster. So now that I've given an overview, I'd love to go through a case study of the urethane casting process and look at a team that we have that use it very well. So FishBit or Current Labs as they're known, they came through our program with pretty early prototypes. You know, you see a bit of the evolution here. And, you know, fundamentally, they started on development platforms that forms our duena boards, like most entrepreneurs and makers do. And what we really help them do in Highway 1 that we have a side is really helping turn technologies into products and become fully formed. So what you see here is kind of that evolution from, you know, a couple sensors strapped to development boards to a more integrated 3D printed enclosure, continual refinement, and then the final form that you see in the bottom right. And so, what we were able to do for the Highway 1, through helping them through port of typing while looking at manufacturability was what we see on slide 24, which is not, you know, completely ready to go to an injection-molded scale, but you can really start to see the details forming here of the gaskets, the details, the assembly, and all of the considerations you are going to have when you go to mass production and what they were able to learn about more by doing urethane casting in-house and starting to see where some of those issues would come up. So, FishBit to step back quickly and explain it's a very common business model that we've seen at Highway 1 and in the social innovation space where I guess I would phrase it as the first product is really going after the first world in order for a larger game to go after the whole world. Their first product is a connected fish tank sensor aimed at people with saltwater aquariums, so highly complex ecosystems. People put a lot of time and money into maintaining them and fundamentally, there's just not a lot of great science and especially connectivity in the space to coordinate your data results with everyone else. So they've been successful at, you know, getting fish enthusiasts interested in this, getting units out there, and a lot of what I'll talk through today is showing what they did as their pilot run, which they clearly messaged on Kickstarter as a pilot run, which was helpful for them to say, we're only selling 30 units that create some amount of demand. It doesn't commit them to shipping, you know, 1,000 units if the Kickstarter goes big, which can be oftentimes more of a burden and a boon to entrepreneurs, but also gives them traction and, you know, really helps them to investors, go back to partners, go back to the market and say, hey, people want this, we sold all 30 units in two days, there's going to be more demand and really get that traction to go to the next level. So that's a lot of why they chose the Kickstarter pilot and emphasizing the low units, but what's really interesting about their product and more of the big company vision is they're starting in fish tanks, in larger aquatic ecosystems. So basically, fish farms are a macro scale of this. So that's an issue where, you know, farming fish in the ocean has become pretty detrimental. Farming fish in farms is not superficial. Again, one of those areas where it's not very data driven. So as they learn from the fish tanks, learn about the ecosystems, increase that technology, leverage it in the fish farms, their end goal is to really increase availability of fresh food, of fresh meat and really help to feed people. So it's something that we've seen common in the social innovation space at Highway 1 is start with a high value U.S. market in order to enable you to develop that technology, develop algorithms and end up going big, going big out there to the world. So now that I've explained a bit about fish bait, I'd love to just run you through the process they went through in urethane casting. So it can start as simply as a 3D printed part. So this is just an FDM part on our machines at Highway 1. Fundamentally, what you're doing with urethane casting is taking advantage of the fact that urethane and silicone do not bind to each other. Silicone is notorious in engineering circles for silicone only sticks to silicone which can be helpful when you're trying to seal things and can be helpful in other areas and it's really helpful here because it allows you to really make a truly softer tool where it's literally out of silicone. So the first path they did of this, they 3D printed the parts obviously did a lot of finishing on the 3D printed parts. They blend the layers, do a lot of sanding to get a good positive as we call it, create a mold around that and then start shooting molded parts from that. So this can start in 3D printing and then eventually lead you to a lot of molds. So the molds I'm showing on slide 27 here, these actually did eventually come from CNC parts just because they wanted the resolution, they've gotten enough 3D printing. But even from a CNC positive, they can get to all these different molds. So you see four or five different molds here that they're able to continually crank parts out. Keep the geometry simple, you'll notice that these are all rather flatish, simple parts and no complexity and that enables them to quickly get into molding, put this in our shop and save time and money by taking a lot of the prototyping and early arguably manufacturing burden into their own hands while learning about manufacturability. So slide 28, we see the team here in action. So this is the CEO and the CTO a late night in the shop. They're basically mixing up the chemicals here. So this is one of the big advantages and really being able to get things and move quickly into urethane casting. So smooth on is kind of the most common vendor for casting materials. In the Bay Area we have Douglas and Sturgis which is a store that sells that and is very informative. This is definitely one of those areas where I would encourage you to go to your local store, go to your local vendor. If you can't find someone local, is the people that know about this really love to talk about it and they want to geek out with you. I mean it's the kind of thing it's not just like going to Home Depot and finding a screw. These are the kind of stores where these guys live and breathe it, they nerd out on it. They want to talk to you about silicone resendometers and they really are the best local experts. So go out to the store, find a spot quite a lot. So this is them going through the process and 29 shows the highly cosmetic parts that they were able to get out. So this is a lot of the benefit is you can start to get some finishing. You're not really going to get the texture that you would in the machine tool obviously but you can make quite a lot of progress here towards something that really looked like a finished design good. Because you're using urethanes and not a lot of other resins you're not going to have as much flexibility like that was definitely concerned with fish bit that they're putting these into saltwater aquariums which obviously are going to be very detrimental and so the seal was something that they bought off the shelf and obviously weren't going to cast because they wanted to make sure they had specific materials to protect the electronics. So in terms of life cycle testing what they did for that in our lab was quickly cast some chips that weren't the full part but basically throw those in salt water add temperature and cycle the velocity to expedite the process and see what's going to wear down but also for them knowing that this is a pilot run a lot of their goal was get stuff out there, get it in the hands of people that they have to replace those 30 units later that could potentially be when they're manufacturing tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of units a year and that's a small price to pay to get out there and show your traction. So slide 30 shows what they were able to get to by the end so just having a lot of different parts having repeatable parts is obviously a lot of it learning that things are always going to be repeatable is something that's good to learn on your own it happens with a vendor and you think it's always their issue that's why it's also helpful as an entrepreneur just to go through this have to go through making the mold have to go through pulling the parts out and learning where the error is going to be where does my design need refinement it's so helpful to learn that yourself rather than going directly to a vendor and leading on them to learn about it when they already know a lot about this process. So that's about all I have today thank you for listening to me talking about prototyping and manufacturing I hope you guys all learned something seeing some great questions come in on the Q&A so I'd love to turn it over to Yana and see which of those we'd like to address and what else we want to cover with our time here. Thank you so much Ryan that was such a rich and concise introduction and now I'd like to invite our attendees to please submit your questions encourage you to submit them to the Q&A window we already have some that have come in but do feel free to add yours so question number one have you got any recommendations for companies which are good with international communications obviously many of us can't knit down to Douglas and Sturgis I guess streets in San Francisco good reference good both with technical advice and dispatch so just for context many of our listeners are all around the world so any insights that you have recommendations for companies would be very welcome yeah I mean my biggest recommendation there would be to look directly to the smooth on source so you know Douglas and Sturgis is our local rep there's a few stores around the area but smooth on is really the brand there's a lot of these materials so it's just smooth SMOOTH-ON go to their website their website totally looks like it was designed in the 90s by GeoCities or something but it's got a ton of information in there it's pretty deep and I believe they have lists of local vendors there but honestly if you can't find a local shop for this I would basically go directly to the smooth on source start trying to call them the other thing is learn from other entrepreneurs so dig into who's doing this process in the area the other thing is vendors like I said urethane casting is a process that it does not scale to level of injection molding but there are ways to scale this higher something I didn't really touch on in the presentation was you can do urethane casting with aluminum tools it doesn't have to just be silicone there's a lot of benefit to that but doing aluminum tools you could get hundreds of parts out of that whereas a silicone tool could be 10 parts best case 50 parts before it dies so going and talking to a vendor that does urethane casting urethane molding lighter runs low volume high mix is a phrase that you hear a lot for these kind of medium size manufacturers so trying to find a manufacturer trying to find other entrepreneurs in your area that have gone through the process we're also just getting directly in touch with smooth on and be my recommendations so in terms of other guidelines relative to urethane casting versus injection molding and you noted that the unit costs can be actually quite high for urethane casting so any guidelines in terms of if you're actually looking at this many units I would recommend going this route versus another? I think like I briefly touched on in the last answer urethane casting does scale a little bit what I would say for doing a silicone mold in-house that's really I mean you could make one part out of it I wouldn't recommend doing it until you really need like 10 or more parts if you're doing one to five just 3D print them get them out there and move quicker but you know 10 to 100 mold it in-house with urethane casting you know 100 to 1000 start to outsource that to a vendor for urethane casting because the other thing too is they're going to have a better idea of the repeatability of that every shape is going to be different every material is going to be different but they should have a much better idea of look at your design and say okay I'm going to be able to get you know 150 parts out of a silicone mold or 5000 parts out of an aluminum mold and here's kind of what those costs and times are going to look like so going to an expert can help you figure out what's going to work in the middle of that and the other option is going to injection molding early for what we typically would call a risk release and basically what we mean by that is saying hey there's a high risk that 20 weeks from now we know we're going to need injection molding tools we might get this wrong the first time you know we have the budget let's make maybe an aluminum maybe not a hardened steel tool but let's make you know a soft tool bridge tooling is what they often call it to basically get some injection molded parts out you can start to do certification then which is another big benefit if you have SEC or UL requirements you're not going to be able to do that with cast parts most likely you're going to need injection molded parts and resin so that can be another option is going to injection molding early knowing you're taking on that risk but also having your back pocket that hey we've got this tool tooled up so anytime we need a part it's now just a dollar not 10 weeks and thousands of dollars of course so I'm going to swing it all the way over to your discussion on 2D prototyping as a great starting point for I love the innovators that are currently joining us and one of the things that we've heard especially in technology for development is how communities often perceive initial 2D very basic prototype as the final product and the impressions are so challenging to change so could you speak a little bit about effective methods for engaging individuals or communities and providing feedback but really helping them to understand that this is part of a prototyping process what is it focus groups is it individual better one on one do you have any thoughts on that yeah that's a great question I think a lot of that is not only in framing your types correctly but as you briefly alluded to phrasing the user groups correctly finding the right users we're going to understand what phase you're at understand what level of input you're really looking for which is pretty accessible these days I mean there's definitely a knowledge out there of what it kind of means to be an early adopter you know not everyone's going to use the phrases you know early adopter most people have heard of crowdfunding these days most people understand the idea of you know waiting in line at an Apple store for an Apple launch you know there's definitely a cachet to getting something first right and so in some ways what you're looking for is the people that want that to the nth degree in your industry you know they're so excited about what you're doing they're not only going to wait outside the store the first time you sell it they want to be having that first prototype they want to have that before anyone else does for many reasons I mean that could just be it's a technology that helps them with a problem you know they have allergies you have the best air purifier they want it now it could also just be you know there that's how they how they look at the world you know the early adopters who just want the first Apple watch want everything off a Kickstarter and trying to find the people that are really really the honest early adopters in your market are going to give you the best feedback on that and then really kind of trying to frame the session something our teams do a lot is is doing control focus groups and that could be helpful because you can see a what feedback are other people giving you can kind of get everyone the same priming to say like hey this is and a lot of times it's not even like hey here's my prototype because again outside world you know prototype to them might mean a prototype is just a one off of your final of your final thing and so a lot of times is just framing it in the messaging it's saying hey here's my idea here's my project here's what I'm thinking where should I go with this you know and it's kind of giving them those open questions as well to really give them the opportunity to do something interesting with your project and say hey what do you think of this where should I go with this what would you want in a product like this and not as a lot of entrepreneurs do when they go out there just trying to validate your own idea just kind of showing them and saying hey isn't this cool don't we think we should make exactly this you know that's what you don't want to do exactly and there's a tendency for that there's nothing wrong with being passionate about their project but at some point when you're far enough along in that you just need to go out you know expose yourself to that feedback and kind of humble yourself as an entrepreneur to say okay well this is what I thought I wanted what do other people want what does the market want what's the right feature set for that what's the right price point for that to make sure that you're not going to have something that's either under featured and so again a lot of that's just honing in on your minimum viable product how long do you recommend that people spend prototyping generally oh man that's the first question I mean I guess the answer would be like one day to ten years I mean it depends on what you're trying to get to the moon or you're trying to you know have a better phone case for your earphones that won't get stuck right like there's a lot of that the way I typically answer that question is it's whenever you stop learning you know it's whenever you kind of get to the point of like hey I just did another focus group but kind of telling me we're already new let's go back in the lab and do another cycle right and that can be the hardest thing for entrepreneurs to do because it's also you're going to have a team you're going to have different opinions you know the works why do we care and the product guy can be saying well we need to go make sure there's a product around this technology so you know within your team we can kind of be a debate to figure out you know what's kind of an incremental benefit of every new person we show this to and also a lot of that can be showing it to new people like great start with the extreme users who you think would buy at the Kickstarter but sort of buyer is it retail and distribution ounces and say hey this is what you guys would want as you get closer because they're going to have an interesting much more data driven view on the market more than the individual use cases. So in terms of sharing your prototype one of the big concerns oftentimes is intellectual property and having somebody else trip off your idea and benefit from all that and manufacturing it and going to market. So the practical advice for entrepreneurs who are out there distributing their prototypes and asking trusted sources should they be considering non-disclosure agreement is there good practices that will position you to avoid being the victim of intellectual property theft. That's a great question. My personal opinion on IP is people overemphasize it in general especially early phase entrepreneurs you know every time we have you know lawyers come to highway 1 and advise and give lectures on this they're always just shocked how obsessed people can be with getting their provisional patents in when they don't have the prototype stuff right. So I guess I would point on a few things here one it's somewhat difficult to include a little bit of abstracting your prototype to 2D abstracting it to foam core because at that point you're really just saying hey I am trying to make a connected blank I am trying to solve problem X right and if that's really the level of conversation you're having with people those ideas are out there and that's something as well as like we've got 7 billion people on this planet if your idea is kind of like hardware part that already exists and you're just kind of adding connectivity to it breaking into the 21st century there's at least 10 other people on the planet working on that 5 of what you've never heard of and 4 of which will never launch right so I think that you know the risk in the hardware market these days is not having that new idea it's refining that idea getting that idea out to market going through and again finding that product that's the right combination of feature sets cost and the experience that you deliver to a user and hitting that middle ground so you know I think that entrepreneurs can get a little bit too precious with their ideas and I would just encourage you to get it out there now at some level it's definitely appropriate where we normally see that NDAs coming into place with users is kind of like a focus group you want to bring them in hey here's some juice and some cookies let's get you on a sugar high and have you tell us how awesome this product is you don't want to start it with a legal downer you know but where it can be appropriate is beta runs so if you're really sending you know your entire product out you know the plastics the boards the embedded firmware which be pretty impossible to rip but if it's totally appropriate at that point to have some sort of NDA because you're probably going to have some sort of like contracts or at least document with them anyway saying hey I'm giving you this prototype for 30 days in exchange for that you just promise to give me feedback you're not going to pay me or maybe you are going to pay me that's obviously a big thing as well as if you can get people to pay for those prototype units that's traction but it's at that level we're really like handing off your prototype doing extended trials which is something we didn't talk about too much here but it's really important for us to see a highway one really when you're doing extended trials and handing over your entire prototype that's the point to get some NDA language in there and protect yourself that's very very helpful advice so I'm going to take it over to a much more specific direction regarding some of the choice materials or best materials best practice materials if you will this question is specific to a listener's project do you recommend acrylic for prototyping for small casing for projector and sound system so maybe we can address that question further on what are some of the typical materials and recommended materials in terms of prototyping especially looking towards high resolution yeah that's a great question so start with that specific example I mean acrylic would be appropriate there just because of the scale you're looking at I mean part of what that makes me think is acrylic is most commonly used in light pipes so light pipe is basically the little connector pieces that basically help your LED shine out to the outside of the product right so this is where you see logos lit up you see different features and things like that that's what we call light pipe so acrylic with a vapor polishing finish is normally most appropriate for that so especially I mean if you have a projector project if there's any lensing if you need anything optically clear that's where you would definitely want to be dealing with an acrylic and it's also going to be you know very very easy to machine and get that first box out there but more commonly when we see someone moving from 3D printing to CNC normally what you see is either ABS ABS is a very common material and one of the big benefits there is ABS is machinable and it is also injection moldable and that's a lot of what you want to start to learn when you get to the higher resolution 3D is getting really getting to learn about the strength of the materials my mechanism going to work is my FDA that I did in CAD going to hold up when I get to that point so ABS can be helpful for that also Delrin is a very helpful machinable plastic we'll often use that because ABS can also kind of get gummed up on CNC bits so those are a few and polycarbon it would be the other one so those are a few of the more common materials that we see in CNCing and part of what you learn there is again from the strength what are you going to need to do when you go to injection molding do you just need a different resin do you need a higher strength resin or do you need to do some fiber filling I think I saw somebody mention that in molding earlier because you can put glass or even carbon fiber fibers injected in the mold to strengthen it up so there's areas where you're going to get more strength and injection molding just by kind of doping the plastic and machining prototypes all right cool and I'm going to be coming to an end here so if anybody has any burning questions please bring them out there but I'm going to throw one out to you regarding maker spaces and if you have any thoughts on maker communities as a great or useful mechanism for refining prototypes and engaging with like-minded individuals any suggestions for international folks at all that you want to share regarding making maker space opportunities yeah that's a great question I mean I think a lot like maker spaces to me are a lot of what has created hardware startups as we now call them in the last five years like when I started working at hardware startups at a college we were calling them hardware startups who were just technology startups that had a bunch of hardware and I think that there's really been that flattening of the landscape in terms of prototyping that's enabled people to get out there that's enabled people to learn more about it get their hands dirty and go do that so I mean tech tech shop is obviously the biggest example you know but again to your point no one's going to have a local tech shop and normally what you'll see when you get farther out in the world is these crappier maker spaces and I guess my advice to them would be a lot of emphasis on tools and especially when I go to them a lot of what I see is electronics a lot of what I see is like oscilloscopes and power supplies and things like this and then maybe one 3D printer and I guess what I would encourage people to do is you know it's great if you can get that 3D printer but if you can't get that 3D printer yet for any number of reasons start in 2D to where we started this conversation with you know phone core even if phone core is accessible cardboard and exacto knives there's got to be some version of that you can find locally right so I would just encourage people to you know get scrappy and help people start making and getting in front of users as quickly as possible and also just to engage the community you know I think a lot of the maker spaces typically will come out of a community come out of a university or an area but think broader you know who are the big companies in the area that want to help because they were a small company like you were 30 years ago they have interest in having exposure to the talent in the area they want to know who's coming to the maker space they want to know who that thought leadership in the local area is so reach out to the big companies reach out to the governments reach out to the universities might take a few tries to find the right pathway but there's going to be someone there that wants to help you and you can find a lot of win-win partnerships there they're encouraging we seem to have one very specific question that was hidden a little bit but I think we can address it as our last question so this particular acknowledges that he knows nothing about materials but it's making a disposable cheap electronic part potting that device is there a material interaction with electronics that need to be considered with prototyping materials that will be or could be in contact with the circuit board and electronic components? Yeah that's a good question so for those that aren't familiar potting is basically coding or really submerging circuit board in a resin or plastic material that's water ingress in the elements you also have conformal coding that's more of a coding but that's an advanced process honestly a lot of it depends on the specific material you're using you would be surprised how often hot glue is an effective potting material I would not suggest hot gluing your million unit run but if you're trying to get 10 baby units out there absolutely hot glue is appropriate where it's like that's what can help you prototype that's what can help you move fast and eventually what you're going to want to do is go to the vendors and research more Hinkle who owns the lock type brand does a lot of this 3M as well they're both known for being very friendly you can get in touch with a person you can get more feedback and really understand what the limitations of your board materials and resin are going to be before you really go to a proper potting material because there are a lot of challenges there too in terms of potting on a manufacturing line is really a timely process so curing can take up to 24 hours if you don't have a UV curative or something more advanced so I would encourage you to go fast with something like hot glue my one asterisk there would be don't burn the board because that's going to be your issue with a lot of processes that's basically why you often don't see batteries inside products they're injection molded you normally see a battery door part of that's for service but honestly that's mostly for manufacturing because molding inside the mold would bring your battery above its operating temperature so be careful to check what the operating temperature of your ICs are of your electronic components but other than that I would just start with something simple like hot glue look into a more complicated epoxy and start working with vendors when you need to do more units. Thank you that's very helpful so that was our last question without it I'd like to thank Ryan for taking the time to join us today and answering all of our inquiries about prototyping in a budget I'd like to thank all of you for joining us from wherever you may be today for those of you who are seeking PDHs code is listed if we didn't tackle your question or you are inspired to ask additional questions please feel free to email us at webinarsatengineeringforchange.org and invite you again to become the first team members to hear about our upcoming webinars especially those focused on hardware in the next few months I wish everybody a good afternoon good evening or good morning depending where you are and thank you take care.