It's not just IoT - it's the entire product development ecosystem. Usually a prototype for an idea involves hardware, firmware, and software. You can tinker, or you can go into production complete with FCC badges - and never really leave the adafruit.com site. Not too long ago these prototyping (evaluation) tools and circuits were prohibitively expensive. And the information hard to find.

She's awesome and true to every sense of rainbow ribbon cable'd single sided tin-can hacking.

It's also true that we entered into this period after simple ICs plus some wire and analog components (or Heathkit) let you do interesting things when you started to need a lot of expensive gear to do interesting hardware. That's still true in some cases. But gear like Arduinos and Raspberry Pis (and BLE devices etc.) once again let you do practical but interesting things at home.

Agreed. I didn't get into electronics as heavy years ago because of cost and lack of solid information, and this site has changed that for me.

I also messed with electronics since I was a kid with 100-in-1 kits from radio shack, but several years ago adafruit, sparkfun, eevblog, hackaday, and seeedstudio (Bunnie) helped provide me with the background info and fun hacker on-my-own-time-projects I eventually required to help build serious real world products - the kind surgeons use today and required approval from both the FDA and FCC.

Thanks to all of them! And happy hacking!

As someone who worked with the fda, do you think there could be some pre certified framework that greatly reduces the work and the certification burden of medical product developers?

Just ignore the enormous risk or cost. Or how the EU does it (only slightly faster) for one moment.

Given that you, the creator, define the risk (dMFEA [1]) AND the "quality system" [2] (which is actually a process and has little to do with QA from a software definition or understanding), my guess is that the entire system for approved devices, drugs, and their requisite clinical trials has evolved for the big guys to eat the medium guys and prevent the small guys from even entering the competition. The final nail in the coffin is that there is ABSOLUTELY NO 3rd party risk or security analysis at any time or level - only what you say, document, and submit (claims [3]). They are only involved once there's a lawsuit - and every piece of documentation by the creator is "burden of proof" than the accuser must disprove. Now imagine a 10,000 patient study - how do you prove the drug was bad because it, e.g. blinded one person?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Failure_mode_and_effects_analy... [2] http://www.fda.gov/medicaldevices/deviceregulationandguidanc...

Edit: add claims in parens [3] http://www.fda.gov/MedicalDevices/ResourcesforYou/Industry/u...

Edit 2: Short answer, no. But there may be hope for simple pure-software app developers: http://www.fda.gov/downloads/MedicalDevices/.../UCM263366.pd...

That's right. The site has tons of information. The info blurb about each product is actually informative and seems written by someone who actually knows a thing or two about that item.

Tutorials? Yup. Manufacturer spec sheets? Yup. Libraries for various gizmos, hosted in GitHub? Yup. Forum where you actually get answers? Yup.

"The info blurb about each product is actually informative and seems written by someone who actually knows a thing or two about that item."

...and writes in a style that is understandable by someone who knows nothing about the item.

That's the key differentiator.

I recently bought a Windows 10 IoT kit from Adafruit. I've since purchased three more packs of different electronic components from them. It's been great. I'm really pleased with them.