I was just wondering how many of you have had a job in manufacturing such as just soldering/debugging defective electronics for a very small company or with friends/common person next door? Say someone paid you to build something not available or too expensive for them to reach or needed something custom to fit their exact needs?

Where I work I get people who come in and sometimes are building very simple devices, so I usually suggest to them if they want to spice up their little project I could assist them, by building a very small circuit that makes their project have more features or flexibility.

I was wondering how many of you get offers or offer people this service/product? ... Basically whats the demand like for most of you?

 

I do that as a side job, it gives money but not enough to quit my day job. I would like to do it every day, but the market, at least where I live, is not so wide.

 

When I worked component level troubleshooting for small manufacturing companies it was called, "quality control". Doing house calls to repair TV's or appliances isn't called QC but it's the same job, "Find the bad part and replace it". Only twice in 40 years has a person come to me and asked for a design. I did them. Made a friend for life but less than $100 each, and the projects never went commercial. Liability issues forbid me from modifying retail goods for customers but I design for my own home and shop, usually to increase the reliability or efficiency of my machines.

Most people can't even imagine what could be done with custom design, then they don't want to pay for it. I can't imagine making any reasonable amount of money as a custom designer. By a ratio of tens of thousands to one, I wind up putting it back the way it was before it broke.

 

I talk to a lot of people with a lot of ideas, but for me, unless they can describe the cash flow, my time is too limited. I work for a number of manufacturers that have many needs, from equipment control to overall management systems. I can tell you that most are interested in cost effective solutions, however, my task is to make sure that they are not handcuffed with a custom solution that prevents repair, upgrade, or alteration by third parties.

For these types of clients, upgrading their equipment from older relay logic to PLC is typical. Convincing them of forward capablities is a tradeoff with cost. In my mind, if someone (me maybe) can develop a simple HMI/processor/configurable I/O at a reasonable cost, they'd do well.

Carry that over to the general public and you have a simple concept that everyone will eventually embrace, and that's the Android capable device interacting with your hardware of choice, acting as the HMI. Irregardless of the complexity or simplicity of your hardwares' function, Altering parameters via your phones wireless connection is just too simple. In my opinion, the functionality of the hardware is irrellevant, with the focus being on the interface. Control your house, start your car, configure your hobby project, monitor a process line, whatever.