Why Hardware Makers Are Turning to Off-The-Shelf Parts

Some tech companies take “custom hardware” to an absurd extreme, designing and building every part of their products. Others use more readily-available parts, and embedded systems to build their proprietary devices. But there is another way that might be gaining ground—using off-the-shelf parts to build specialized devices.

One of the biggest changes in electronics hardware in recent years is that anyone can make it. A bedroom designer can spin up a hardware company using a combination of open-source software, cheap, custom circuit-boards that can be ordered as easily as ordering a printed book of your vacation photos, and 3D printing all make it possible to make and sell gadgets out of a garage or basement.

Some kinds of device are more suited to this than others. Building a camera requires a complex interplay between sensor, software, and electronics, for example, whereas off-the-shelf computer brains like the Raspberry Pi make it relatively easy to build computers with knobs, dials, and displays. Electronic musical instruments and effects are a particularly fertile ground for this approach. All the processing is done in software and doesn’t require high-end CPUs, and after that it’s just a matter of deciding where to put the buttons and knobs.

Ableton Move

Ableton’s new Move is an excellent example of this. It’s a small sampler and synthesizer that integrates with its Live software suite and its Note iOS app. From the outside it looks a lot like a cut-down version of the Berlin company’s Push controller, but inside it is a real mix of ready-made components.

For example, the brain of the unit is a Raspberry Pi. Storage is a standard 64GB microSD card, housed in an internal SD card reader. Both of these should in theory be completely replaceable. The case is held closed by four Philips screws, none of which is hidden under a rubber foot or anything like that, and the battery is a LiFiPO4 Lithium Iron Phosphate battery. These are designed for heavy charge cycling and should retain around 80% of their capacity even after 2,500 cycles. They’re also easy to replace.

The little OLED screen, and the built-in speakers, also look very much like standard parts that appear in other devices.

Device Page

Raspberry Pi Desktop

Raspberry Pi computers are credit-card-sized single-board computers (SBCs) developed in the UK by the Raspberry Pi Foundation. First released in 2012.

View Device

Supply

I chose this example because it is a brand-new instrument from a major company, one that has already sold out its first manufacturing run, not just a cool Github project that has been cobbled together from whatever was available. This shows the viability of using things like the Raspberry Pi as a basis for large-scale consumer electronics.

This approach has its downsides, though. If you design and manufacture your own parts, like Apple, then you control exactly how many are made, and when to cut that product line. If you’re using commodity parts, though, you might find yourself in a pickle.

This actually happened to Ableton last year. Its Push controller can be bought as, or upgraded to, a standalone version that runs on an Intel NUC computer. The idea is that in future, you’ll be able to swap in more powerful computers to keep the Push going for a long long time. But then Intel ditched the NUC program. In the end, Asus bought the platform from Intel, but that was a lucky break for Ableton.

Something similar happened to another musical instrument maker, Teenage Engineering. After around 10 years of making its portable OP-1 synthesizer, the OLED screens it used went out of production, and TE had to stop building them for a year until it found an alternative.

These setbacks might have actually informed the subsequent designs of both companies. TE created the EP-133 sampler, which is not only built from off-the-shelf parts in Barcelona, Spain, but was designed by first looking at standard parts that would be available long-term and building a device around them.

Similarly, the Move’s move to a Raspberry Pi seems like a pretty safe move. That platform isn’t going anywhere soon. One user has already managed clone the microSD card to replace it with a larger-capacity version using Linux’s DD disk copying utility (and has since deleted their forum post). I haven’t yet read whether another Raspberry Pi can be swapped in, but I bet it can.

Repair and Upgrade

It’s really a win-win. The company making a device doesn’t need to build their own platform. Users can source spares even if the original vendor stops selling them, or never sells them in the first place, and of course NUCs running Linux, or Raspberry Pis, are totally hackable for future upgrades and other creative shenanigans.

I mentioned Apple above as an example of the opposite approach, with almost every part and component being custom-designed and proprietary. But of course general purpose desktop and laptop computers were for a long time built from standard parts. You can still buy the various components separately, bolt them into a case, install an OS, and off you go.

Recently laptops have started to go back in this direction, largely thanks to the right-to-repair movement. The canonical example is the Framework laptop, where the commitment to off-the-shelf parts is so strong that sometimes the display panel’s corners don’t match the shape of the display bezels, but there are others that get close. Lenovo’s recent ThinkBook T14s have user-replaceable storage, RAM, keyboards, and batteries, and even some of the ports can be swapped out.

The point is, it’s totally possible to build not just viable mass-market products from easily-available commodity parts, but to build the kind of smash-hit device that sells out on launch, like Ableton’s Move. It also means easier repair, and much better longevity thanks to the wide availability of spares. Upgrades and hacks are also easier for the user, and for the manufacturer, there’s less up-front investment for production. This in turn could lead to riskier, more interesting ideas making it to users. Like we said—a total win-win.