Welcome to Efabless!

We are a community of engineers, product designers, marketers, and more- anyone interested in making smart products and learning how smart products are made. This is a place to learn and discuss how products are developed, marketed and used.

What’s the Story?

Our approach is a bit different as we seek to understand not just the what of product development, but the why as well. We want to delve into not just how a product is made but what really makes it useful and desired.

Before a product or an improvement can exist, there must be a reason for it. Every product has a story - the story starts with why the product is needed: who needs it and what it will do for the lives of the people who use it. But that is really just the beginning. The story of a product grows as people add to it - what features should it have? How can it be improved?

Efabless brings together people from all parts of the story of a product. From the people who need and will use a product to the product designers and engineers who will make it, to the marketers who will help tell the world about it. Anyone who has anything to do with a product is part of the story, and thus part of the Efabless community- including the consumer.

Efabless community members are the characters in the story of a product. Like any good story, the story of a product has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Right now, we’re concerned with the beginning: bringing the characters together to learn about and from each other. On the site you’ll find specific discussions about anything from software to microchip design, from form factor to ergonomics along with general basic discussions intended to help people learn something new, like the fundamentals of how all electronics products work.

From there we’ll move on to the middle of the story: creating virtual prototypes of specific products. Starting with a few hand-selected projects intended to provide both a learning experience and a useful product concept, Efabless members can work together to build a virtual prototype of a product that includes every level of detail associated with the physical product- from the electrical engineering to the software and hardware design. The idea is to provide an opportunity for people to learn about each discipline that is part of a product’s story, within the context of an actual product.

It might be ambitious, but we hope to get all the way to the end of the story: making actual products for the market. Before that though, we’re focused on setting the stage for the characters- on the site at launch you will find general discussions about product development disciplines, issue-specific discussions, and educational project discussions.

Of course, the best stories are the ones where the characters help complete each other. We sincerely hope that we are able to help you form your own story here.

So, without further ado, let’s get this story started! Welcome to Efabless!