POC Complexity Rating Tool: https://predictabledesigns.com/poc-difficulty-tool-yt3

0:51 #1 I just need to put my parts on PCB
3:01 #2 It's reliable, it ran on my desk for a week
4:42 #3 The firmware is basically done
5:54 #4 Power is handled, it runs fine
7:25 #5 The enclosure works, I 3D printed it

I once glued a sander to a piece of plywood laid on top of a box of marbles just for testing. Total cost was under $100. Finding bad mechanical & solder joints.... Priceless.

Great video. Some time ago I saw a simple product for my motorcycle. It was way too expensive. So, I thought I can do it myself, better and cheaper. Yes, I could. But if I would have mass produced it and do all the certificates, and test it and all the other things which you mention in this and other videos, then I would be hard pressed to make it cheaper and sell it with profit.
Luckily, I realized that early and stopped. I realized my hobby knowledge is good enough to get it somehow running for myself. But that's it.

i wire wrap SMD , just for the fun of the challenge and as a psychological treatment for excessive aggression origination from prototyping SMD pcbs.

I do some electronics design and PCB layout and a guy I work with is constantly coming up with what I call a "Jenga stack" prototype. Just one tall pile of different breakouts and eval boards strung together with a rats nest of wires that falls apart the second you touch it. A lot of those breakouts are also stripped down or overly complex in a way that you'd never do on an actual product. I will say if I had to choose I'd rather have a software issue cause then the hardware is still good. Nothing sucks quite like having a board just be broken in a way that a bodge just won't work.

Great video, I've got 30 years experience as a firmware engineer in the embedded systems industry working at HP in their Test and Measurement Division, Stanford University as Chief Engineer of the SID monitor for monitoring the Solar effects on our Ionosphere I laid out a PCB, had metal chassis made, I had maybe one spin on the board, and then proceeded to make over 600 monitors and were shipped world-wide, and lastly I ended up at Davis Instruments making weather and environmental monitoring systems with data telemetry over cellular modems.  So  I've been around the block many times on this and see the mistakes and the consequences of it, so I can confirm everything you've said 100% true.