Congrats! You've made it to page two. If you've thought about  creating your own product, let us give you a tour of our own product  development. It spans 5 years.

A little history to SparkFun Electronics... This pile of  boards was a product developed for the sport of rowing (the sport of choice by  the SFE originator - Nathan Seidle). This was the device that spawned SFE. We  started from scratch and designed a few revisions of this rowing amplifier (mind  you, we were in college and knew nothing about PCB layout or embedded  electronics). Then, because the programmer blew out, we needed to buy a new  programmer. Olimex kept coming up on  internet searches, and because the  distributors of the Olimex products had such bad websites at the time (no online  checkout, no images, etc), Nathan thought he  could do better. He created the original SparkFun Electronics website to sell  the various tools that he need for the amplifier product development. The Spark  Fun sales and site development grew to a full time job over the following two years and, as  they say, the rest is history. SparkFun Electronics became it's own beast. But  back to the product development...

Good old wire-wrap prototyping with a PIC 16F876 with a  pre-packaged backlight driver. The graphical screen and touchscreen come on an old dev board hand assembled  from CrystalFontz. Not too bad for just starting out. This  was around July of 2002.

The first PCB layout in September of 2002. This predates the  creation of SparkFun Electronics by three months.

This is the only hand etched PCB by SFE. This was enough.  Everything after that was professionally fabbed.

Here was have the 'v01' progression of this product from left  to right in time. Starting with 2-24-03 on the left and 7-12-05 on the right.  Two and a half years of work and the design was eventually scrapped and started  anew with a beefier processor and parts. It's a constant learning process.

2-24-06. All sorts of fun. No stand-off holes! Notice the  power resistor hanging off the side. The drill holes where too small. I don't  think the LCD ever worked on this layout.

Notice the original  CFAX 50-pin tab connector, hand soldered.  The tab to the LCD is plastic so it would melt while soldering it to the PCB.  Ugly, but it taught me how to hand solder!

7-3-03. Bigger processor (16F877A). Added an ADXL311  accelerometer. Serial connection, and all sorts of goodies.

7-29-03. New mixed layout with corrections. Never populated.

8-18-03. More goodies. This board uses the new audio amplifier  with heat conductive adhesive with stuck-on heat sink. Crazy. Bad voltage  regulator footprints. The backlight circuit worked though!

You thought you had it rough. That's the 50-pin tab connector  hand soldered. It worked! But only once. This was the old style CFAX connector.

The same board with  screen folded down into place.

Next rev dated 5-12-04. All sorts of problems, but reset  button, new v-regulator and external 32kHz RTC crystal.

7-2-04 revision. Never populated. Notice the bad silkscreen  outline on Y1 crystal. This was coming dangerously close to the 22pF caps.

7-12-05. Eventual alpha release unit featuring the Lassen iQ,  newer 18-pin  CFAX connector (ZIF connector was much easier to solder), charging  circuit with heat-sinked voltage regulator, power resistor, et al. Large  10,000uF cap was to help reduce interference from the EL (electroluminescent)  backlight and the audio amplifier. As much work and time went into this layout,  it was eventually scrapped after three years of work for a better, more powerful  unit. Product development is painful, slow, and very expensive.