ETK 1000 - Embedded Trainer Kit
ETK1000 was a hardware project that My mentor and I created. We made it out of a garage with minimal resources. We created a reflow oven from an ordinary conduction coil oven, we picked and placed each SMD component by nad with tweezers and painstakingly populated, assembled all the throughhole and SMD components manually for a batch of 150 units. The PCB was designed by my mentor, I created the plan for execution, pricing plan, features needed as per stakeholder requests and made significant profit. We sold the boards to 125 students and conducted a workshop with the boards and got overwhelming feedback from the participants on how easy the board was to use considering the alternatives.
List of Peripherals
1. Inbuilt SD Card reader.
2. 16X2 LCD display.
3. TSOP IR remote reader.
4. LDR (Light Sensor).
5. Temperature Sensor.
6. Potentiometer.
7. Inductive load output for DC motors or relays.
8. RGB LED
9. Buzzer and speaker out.
10. 2 buttons.
The BOM cost came to be about Rs450($6.10) and we were able to sell it for Rs1000($13.56) including the workshop and a user manual with easy projects to do with the board. This was the first time I was able to see and create, a product from conceptualization to Profit. We created a production line in the garage with different stations for different stages of productions. The whole operation was done in 1.5 months with parts procured from the most affordable vendors with 3rd party sellers. All the design were done using open-source tools and the engineering work were done by myself and my mentor only, driving down the cost per unit. If we had the capital to create atleast a 1000 units, we would be able to bring the cost even further to a few dollars.
