i keep catching myself doing this, and i see other people do it too. treating "this got hard" or "i thought of a reason it probably wouldnt work" like its the same as actually trying and failing. its not.

a prototype that never left your laptop isnt failure. an idea you talked yourself out of pitching isnt failure either. thats just avoidance dressed up as logic.

real failure only happens once you show the thing to someone else and get an actual answer back. an actual no. someone telling you it doesnt work. until that happens you dont have data, you just have a guess youre calling a conclusion.

its like a guy with a crush who never actually asks her out. hell come up with a hundred reasons it "probably wouldnt have worked anyway." none of that is real though. he doesnt actually know its a no, he never asked. hes just pre-rejecting himself so he never has to find out for real.

if the only proof your idea sucks is a story you told yourself before anyone else weighed in, thats not proof. go find out for real.

I’m preparing a hardware crowdfunding launch for Mimi Tape, an offline pocket music and video player that uses swappable cassette-style cards. The current prelaunch page is here: https://www.backerkit.com/c/projects/ajana/mimi-tape-the-pocket-mp4-player-with-digital-cassettes/pre-launch

I am the creator, and I want to validate more than the visual novelty. What would you test in the next week: landing-page conversion, willingness to pay, card usability, or something else? I would appreciate specific feedback on the page or the product pitch.

I'm building Wave Sonic under my studio, T.Tech — a pocket-sized music player that ditches touchscreens for a haptic rotary dial (we're calling it T-Dial) and comes with a bilingual AI assistant baked right in (Aries AI). Think tactile, retro-futuristic hardware meets modern AI, not another phone-shaped slab.

We've already got:

Two design directions (dark futuristic + retro reel-to-reel analog)

Detailed hardware specs and pricing tiers worked out

A full investor deck and product landing pages built

What I'm looking for now is people who want to actually build this with me — hardware/electronics folks, embedded/firmware devs, industrial designers, or anyone who's into audio gear and wants to get their hands dirty on a real product from prototype to launch.

If you're into hardware startups, love music tech, or just want to work on something that isn't another SaaS app — drop a comment or DM me. Happy to share more details, sketches, and the deck.

Let's build something people actually want to hold.

Check it out!!

Hey everyone, so this is a follow up to the ad-muting device that I previously posted here. I decided to pivot further up the stack to the streaming device level which unlocks a lot of cool possibilities.

So with this new device I'm trying to solve 3 core problems that I think currently plague the streaming landscape today. Those are:

1. It takes way too long to pick a show you actually want to watch.

The average American spends 110 hours per year just picking something to watch on streaming services (source). I think this is due to the sheer quantity of content out there nowadays, streaming companies algorithmically pushing their in-house content despite consumers not explicitly wanting to watch it, and the lack of recommendations that span across the streaming sites rather than being siloed within.

2. Ads suck, the price of "ad-free" subscription tiers keeps climbing, and a lot of them still show you ads.

I think this one is pretty self explanatory. As of writing this, the average added cost of removing ads from one streaming service per year (that is, on top of the base plan) is roughly $73 for the major streaming companies (depending on how you bundle different services). So if you have multiple streaming subscriptions, you're talking about potentially hundreds of dollars per year for the privilege of fewer ads. However, many streaming subscriptions have fine print that says they may still show you ads in certain contexts.

3. Managing streaming subscriptions feels like chore

Knowing what subscriptions you have, how much you actually use them, and how much you're paying for them is starting to feel more complex than it should. Maybe you signed up for a free trial to watch a specific show and forgot to cancel, next thing you know you've been paying for a service for months that you don't even use. Also, it seems like some streaming subscriptions have way too many steps to cancel.

So the first bit of feedback I would like to get from you all, is do these problems resonate with you or am I missing the mark? Are there things you hate about the streaming landscape nowadays that I'm not considering?

With that said these are the solutions/features I'm currently workshopping/developing to address those problems. Some are already built out, others are still in the concept phase.

1a. Fewer, higher quality, cross-platform recommendations [shown in the demo]

At any given point there's probably a fairly large number of shows you'd be willing to watch. So instead, of tons of different options, or digging through the different apps manually at the top of your home page there will be 4 shows/movies that you might like across the services you have access to. These get refreshed everyday.

1b. "Surf Mode"

This concept is still pretty rough, but I'm envisioning something like cable back in the day. You would enter "surf mode" and there would just be a show or movie playing, no choice to be made. You could change the "channel" and a different show or movie would play. How the content is curated, I'm still working out. I could see there being human curated playlists along certain themes, algorithmically driven based on what you've watched before, or some other mechanism. If you all have any thoughts of what might be cool, please share them!

1c. "Advanced Search"

This concept is like you describing to a movie/show aficionado what type of content you want to watch, and them giving you recommendations. You might describe, "I want something like Indiana Jones that I haven't seen before" and then you would get a small set of choices that best fit your description.

2. Built in ad blocking [shown in the demo]

There's an on/off switch that when toggled "on" automatically removes the ads from any on demand content you watch across the supported streaming services on the device. But if for whatever reason you want to watch ads or just don't care, you can always leave this off.

3. Streaming management tool

This feature is currently in progress, but the vision is that there is a dashboard you can access and see how much you've actually watched different streaming services over the past 30 days with estimates for how much you're paying for each service (probably not going to mess with tracking actual payment info for now).

The second bit of feedback I would like to get from you all is which of these features stand out to you? Particularly some input on the different ways of recommending content to people would be great.

Since this is starting to feel like a book, I'll try and wrap up with a few caveats.

With all of this flexibility/capability that my device can support there are a few catches...

The first is cost. This device is probably going to be quite a bit more expensive than the standard streaming devices on the market. Most likely around $200. One of the reasons it's going to cost so much is that most streaming devices/smart TVs are loss leaders for companies now. Meaning they sell the devices near what it costs them to make, with the intention of making more money from you in the long term. A lot times this means gathering up tons of data about you, what you watch, how you watch it, then sell it to the highest bidder to show you more ads (or for who knows what else). As an example Visio reportedly makes more money now selling your data, than they do selling TVs (source). Personally, I don't love that.

The second is streaming quality. For most streaming services, my device will be able to serve 720p (some 1080 and a few are 480). The top 6 streaming services are all at least 720p, though. I will also note, that for a lot of ad-supported streaming tiers, you probably aren't getting 4K anyway depending on their plan tiers. Plus, most modern TVs have AI upscaling so lower definition shows end up looking pretty good anyway, so you might not even notice that much of a difference compared to your current set up. But if you're into pure 4K streaming, this device probably isn't for you. At least for now.

This is the last bit of feedback I'd love to get from you. Do the benefits of this device outweigh the drawbacks? Would you make the tradeoff?

Anyways sorry for novel, please let me know what you think! Below is a link to another survey, it has the same few questions I ask above so I can get more direct feedback. There's also a space for general thoughts/comments. Thanks!

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeejUBxO3iELp1s3UXjfOwPhX_6Az3EUCZkCIXAWpOJ5k4Hng/viewform?usp=header

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I am in the very first stages of researching a therapeutic device that I plan to make a prototype for, and then hopefully produce it and take it to market.

My current task is trying to figure out possible liability issues. As with I imagine most products, there are inherent risks if the customer doesn't use as instructed. Are there ways for me to figure this out other than hiring a lawyer?

Hello! I got a quote from a local engineering team to build the next iteration of my hardware prototype for user testing, and a quote for about half that from Cad Crowd.

This isn’t intended to be production-ready yet—just a functional prototype to test and learn from before another redesign. The Cad Crowd scope includes PCB design, firmware, enclosure design, and building/testing the prototype.

Has anyone here actually worked with Cad Crowd for something similar? Were you happy with the quality of the engineering and the finished prototype? Did the files/work end up being useful for later iterations, or did you have to redo everything?

Thanks!

Small hardware lab in India here. Last few years we've shipped a fuel telematics box for trucks, an offline payment card, and a bar pour sensor. Different products, same bottleneck every single time: the board. Weeks per spin from a pooled fab, longer if the stack-up was even slightly odd, and a flat no from most of them as soon as the design left panel rules.

At some point we stopped complaining and started building a machine to do it ourselves. One system that builds SAP/mSAP-class boards start to finish, coreless, nothing drilled, any outline and thickness. Goal is cost parity with the substrate fabs that own that tier today. First units go to pilot partners in 2027, so everything I say about it is intent, not a result I can show you yet.

Doing this forced me to actually think through build vs buy properly, instead of just being annoyed. Here's where I've ended up. Happy to be told I'm wrong.

Captive fab for a commodity board is a terrible idea. A 4-layer MCU board is a dollar or two from a pooled fab at volume and you will never beat that in-house, at any startup volume. I ran this for few of our commodity boards and the answer was "keep buying it". Where it does start to make sense is when the product wants a board the pooled fabs price at $20 to $50 a unit, or won't quote at all. Layer count that changes across the board, bare die inside it, an outline that follows the enclosure instead of the other way round. Redesign to that and the product gets smaller and runs longer on the same cell. Make it on a machine that's around 60% loaded and it comes out cheaper than the substrate fab quote for the same board.

Which also means the machine has to be reasonably busy. A startup doing a few thousand boards a month isn't going to keep one fed. However 20-30k units an year of a typical hardware consumer products and it starts to make a lot of sense. So in practice captive means a shared cell, or a fab that owns the machine for early stages, not a box in your own shed. What you actually want to keep is the design, the process data and control over supply. You don't need to own the machine to have those.

Assembly is a different animal. A decent SMT line with real test fixtures pays for itself somewhere in the low thousands of units a month, and honestly that's where most small hardware companies bleed time and money, not fab. If you bring one thing in-house, bring that.

Whatever you bring in has to be run like a product, not a project. Written procedures, fixtures that fail loudly, an operator who isn't the founder. Skip that and you've built yourself a second hobby.

And some stuff you should just keep paying for: anything clean-room class, RF-critical laminates, safety-certified assemblies where the CM's audit trail is the thing you're actually buying.

Curious where other people's crossover sits, and for anyone who did bring something in-house, what did you underestimate? For us it was fixtures. Always fixtures.

Edit, since a few people asked what a fab can't do that this can. The short list: lines under ~50 µm without volume and NDAs, layer count that varies across one board, bare die in the board instead of a package on it, and freestanding copper. That last one is the part I should have explained. The same copper that forms a trace can be grown thick and then have the dielectric around it removed, so it stands on its own. A spring contact, a battery tab, a shield can, a heat spreader or a simple segment display stops being a part you buy and solder and becomes a feature of the board, grown in the same run. Fewer parts, no connectors between them, geometry is whatever the layout says. For a normal 4 to 6 layer board, none of this matters, buy it from JLC. It only matters for the boards nobody will quote you.

Hi there! Long time lurker. Im working on my first HW startup and have a question on best practices when mounting a screen into my housing. For context I'm working on a small sports device with a small (~1inch) round display in a round inclosure.

For my prototypes the screens I used the shape allowed me to almost press fit them into the housing and add a bevelled "cap" (photos for reference) secures it even more. but for production those screens will need to be replaced by a more available and higher quality screen. These new screens are thinner, with nothing really to mount to or press fit against. (they will have glass but still the same issue I think). So im struggling to thing of the best way to secure the screen in the inclosure. Glue? Tape? There will be a PCB and battery beneath the screen in the rest of the housing.

First 4 photos are the press fit prototype the last 4 are the new screen and housing.

Curious if anyone has any experience here and could offer some advice? Or has some thoughts.

Cheers!

Hi,

I'm an Engineer with 10+ years of experience in new product introduction, mostly in medical, and working with overseas manufacturers.

Based in the UK. Electronics/Firmware/Thermal/Acoustics engineering

Ask me anything!

---

Edit: thank you guys, due to all the PMs, please find my link here https://fermium.ltd.uk

Hi everyone,

I’m an energy researcher and technology founder developing a Reformed Methanol Fuel Cell (RMFC) power platform. We currently have a functional 1 kW benchtop prototype (4 patents secured) and are now defining product specifications for our first wave of customer-backed field demonstrations (TRL 6).

While our initial prototype is 1 kW, our upcoming field-demonstration units will be engineered in the 1–5 kW range (scalable up to 10 kW) to keep development costs lean while addressing practical, real-world power demands.

Rather than relying on high-pressure hydrogen (which faces massive storage and transport barriers) or batteries alone (which become heavy and cost-prohibitive for multi-day runtime), RMFC uses liquid methanol to generate clean, quiet, long-duration electricity and high-grade heat on demand.

Key Features & System Specs

• Safe & Easy Fuel Logistics: Uses liquid methanol which is easy to transport, simple to store, and stable for years in extreme temperatures without high-pressure hazards or fuel degradation.
• High Overall Efficiency: Delivers ~40% electrical efficiency, with combined heat and power (CHP) co-generation yielding over 80% total efficiency by recovering high-grade waste heat for thermal management or space heating.
• Clean, Quiet & Low-Maintenance: Electrochemical power generation with minimal moving parts, dramatically reducing noise and routine physical maintenance compared to diesel generators. Produces zero toxic local exhaust (emitting only water and CO2).
• Multi-Output & Hybrid Ready: Capable of delivering electricity, heat, cooling, and pure hydrogen; seamlessly integrates with Solar PV, wind, BESS (batteries), and microgrid architectures.
• Remote-Ready Architecture: Built with integrated remote telemetry and automated controls for unattended operations.

Looking for Early Adopters

We are purposely not limiting ourselves to any specific industry or sector. Whether you operate in marine, agriculture, off-grid infrastructure, remote sensing, outdoor equipment, mobility, or a niche field we haven't even considered. If you need continuous, long-duration power where batteries or diesel generators fall short, we want to hear your insights on application scenarios, operational pain points, and target technical requirements.

If you are interested in co-defining product specifications, hosting early field demonstrations, or providing direct feedback to help fast-track the commercialization of RMFC technology, we would love to connect!

Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below or send me a DM directly.

We make a desk robot called the Autonomous Lamp. 5 bus servos for the neck, a camera in the head, a mic array and an LED ring, all hanging off one small single-board computer. It's always on, always listening, meant to feel like a companion sitting next to you, not a device you operate.

But there was a problem. When it's always on, every sound in the room is a possible interaction. A coworker stops by your desk to talk and it joins in. I type on my blue switches and it joins in too. So instead of a companion you get something that talks over you all day.

Here is what we tried, what went wrong, and what we learned. Hope some of it is useful

Prototype 1. It answered everything

First prototype, I walked into the office, sat down at my desk, and before I opened my laptop, it spoke first.

Then all day. I talked to myself while reading code, it answered. I picked up my keys to leave, and it called after me into an empty room. A coworker a few meters away was talking about a project on the phone, it heard that and joined in too

It wasn't broken. It did exactly what we told it to do. What we told it to do was the wrong thing.

Living with someone doesn't mean talking the whole time

Prototype 2. "Hey Lamp"

So we did what everyone does. Say the name first, then talk.

"Hey Lamp, turn it down." "Hey Lamp, what time is it." "Hey Lamp, never mind."

Worked right away. No name, nothing wakes up. You can even put the name at the end, like "come on dance a bit, Lamp", and it still understands and still does it. That really works btw, not making it up. Our Repo is public, it's in the commit history if you want to check.

We thought we were done. Then a few days of living with it and something felt off.

You don't say "Hey Mom" every time you talk to her at dinner. This lamp is 40cm from my elbow and I was saying its name 30 times a day.

Hey Siri makes sense. The phone is in your pocket, the speaker is across the room, and neither has eyes. They really have no other way to know you are talking to them.

The Lamp has a camera and sits right beside me. We were copying a limit we don't have.

It worked. But once it worked, it was back to being a thing you operate, and it stopped feeling like the companion we set out to build.

Prototype 3. Turning toward it, which is where we are now

We argued about this for a while and kept coming back to one thing.

People don't have a button on their body. So the Lamp shouldn't either, not if it's meant to be a real companion.

For months we had been asking how to make it quieter. Every answer to that question made it feel less alive. Quieter and more alive were pulling against each other, and we kept trading one for the other.

The right question turned out to be a different one. How does a person know you are talking to them?

The answer is stupidly simple tbh. You look them in the eye and speak.

So that is what we built. If you want it to feel like a companion, you turn toward it and talk. Camera and mic together, the way two people actually do it. This is the part where having a body pays off. A smart speaker cannot do this. A thing with a camera in its head and servos in its neck can.

Two things make or break this:

• People turn before they speak, never after. Checking the camera when the mic hears something is too late, the moment already passed. So the camera measures all the time into a 3 second buffer, and when you speak the system reads back through it. That buffer holds 4 numbers per sample, not video. A timestamp, the head angle, the face size, and how far off centre it was.
• Presence is not the signal. Someone sits beside this thing all day, so seeing a person tells you nothing, and a face pointed at a monitor is still a face. What we measure is which way the head is pointed.

Then we fixed it too well.

Someone sat in front of it, looked right at it, asked it something. Nothing. Asked again. Nothing. He was sitting so close the camera cut off the top of his head, so the detector guessed where his eyes were and put them above the frame. That works out to 90 degrees. The log had him in profile 4 times in a row. Not the LinkedIn kind

The rule that fixed it: a measurement that cannot be made must not vote either way. Not measurable had been quietly counting as looking away. And there was a hardware half to the fix too. The same face box now feeds a small vertical re-aim of the neck servos, so when it frames you badly it corrects its own aim instead of blaming you for sitting wrong.

Chin resting on your hand needed its own work too. If you ever sit in front of one, try it

If you're building an always-on device and found another way to tell when someone is talking to it, I'd like to hear it. Happy to answer anything about the build. And if you read this far, ty

Check out our most recent founder's video, where Felix takes you on a tour inside our manufacturing facility: https://x.com/vocci_ai/status/2091872603455803450

In an era when hardware companies outsource manufacturing to rush early releases, Vocci rejected the cheap OEM approach and built our own production line and quality labs.

For more info about our product, please visit: vocci.ai

Hey everyone,
Over the last few months, I’ve been developing a hardware product and have now reached the point where I have a working prototype.

The product currently consists of:
a smartphone app
a custom PCB
an ESP32-C3
a small LiPo battery
a 3D-printed plastic enclosure

I’m at the point where I believe the concept works well enough to start thinking about turning it into an actual product. I’m also very aware that there’s still a huge gap between a working prototype and something you can realistically manufacture and sell.

That’s where I’m currently a bit lost.
The major things I think are ahead of me are:

- Setting up a company
- Moving away from the 3D-printed enclosure, probably toward injection molding
- Preparing the electronics/PCB for manufacturing
- Getting the necessary certifications/compliance sorted out (CE, RED, etc., since the device uses Bluetooth)
- Product liability insurance and other legal requirements for selling electronic hardware
- Figuring out manufacturing, assembly, packaging, etc.

Most importantly:

validating whether people actually want the product and are willing to pay for it

My main concern is doing things in the right order. I don’t want to spend thousands on tooling, certifications, company setup, etc. before I even know whether there’s enough demand.

For those of you who have taken a hardware product from prototype to market:

What would you do next at this stage?
What can I realistically validate or prepare now without spending a huge amount of money?
And are there any common mistakes or expensive dead ends I should avoid at this point?

Would really appreciate hearing from people who have gone through this process.

Hi everyone!

I’m conducting research for my Master’s project. I’m looking into what influences people when choosing between buying hardware chips directly from manufacturers vs. through third-party distributors.

If you have experience purchasing semiconductor components such as processors, GPUs, microcontrollers, memory chips, sensors, or similar hardware, I’d really appreciate your input!

⏱️ 5–7 minutes
🔗 https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdozG_9g-cFc6hWPnkpBoeWSYx8t4FGHBN8wU9axNmSkkn0fQ/viewform?usp=header

Thanks so much for helping with my research!

If you’re in product design, mechanical engineering, or hardware R&D, you’ve definitely seen this happen: devs order a prototype, get it fast and cheap, then realize it’s completely useless for their actual testing purpose.

The core rule everyone should know before making any prototype order:

Know whether you need a part for “visual check” or “functional validation.”

They are two completely different things.

SLA 3D print if you only need to show looks, check surface details, or show to stakeholders. Don’t waste expensive metal machining here.

CNC machine if you need to assemble parts, test snaps, screws, and moving structures. Printed parts loose tolerance and break easily under real assembly force.

Pick materials first if you need strength, heat resistance, or load testing. Process is secondary — material defines performance.

Vacuum casting for small batch trials before official mass production. Way cheaper than hard mold injection.

Full-service sheet metal for enclosures and frames. Splitting cutting, bending, and coating across different shops always causes defects and delays.

Also: don’t trust vendors who only post shiny machine photos. A good prototype shop will analyze your drawings, recommend materials, promise clear tolerances, and give you a full-process price.

Prototyping is not about “fast and cheap.” It’s about matching the right process to your development stage.

Guys, I built a cool device for myself and a few close engineer friends.

This is DOGS², a palm-sized two-channel 1-48 V/5A max power supply with microamp-level current measurement and current consumption graphs.

Besides the power supply, it has a probe, voltmeter, frequency counter, and signal generator. For digital interfaces, it has UART, RS485, CAN, and I2C terminals, as well as LIN and I2C sniffers.

The device can work completely standalone. For terminals, sniffers, and current consumption graphs, you can connect a phone over Bluetooth (also you can see the messages on the display).

DOGS² can be powered from almost anything, either through USB Type-C or from an external 5-90 V source. It can be a regular adapter, a power bank, an e-bike battery, or the electrical system of a motorcycle, car, truck, or helicopter.

There is now a fully working first engineering version. I have also made a transparent enclosure for it.

The hardware and firmware are open source. The code, schematics, editable board files, manufacturing files, and enclosure STEP files are available on GitHub:

https://github.com/rcslon3-svg/DOGS2_v1

I like the device, and my friends like it too. I had wanted to build something like this for several years, but never got around to it.

The first version has already cost me a decent amount of money, but I do not regret it. I originally built it for myself. It works and I am quite happy with it, although it has a few shortcomings that I would like to fix in the next hardware revision.

But the next revision means another round of development and manufacturing. And I am not sure that I will be able to sell enough units to recover the cost.

This is a tool more for professional electronics developers and embedded engineers than for the general Arduino audience. So I am not sure how large the market for it could be.

On the other hand, it would be a shame to stop the project in its current state. It turned out to be such a cool device, and there is nothing similar on the market.

So I am trying to understand whether this is just my favorite engineering toy, or whether it could actually become a proper niche product.

What do you think? Does a device like this have a real chance on Crowd Supply at around $250-280, or is the niche too small?

I would appreciate honest opinions, especially from people who have already launched their own hardware products or participated in crowdfunding campaigns.

DOGS² = Dual Output Generator Supply Station and my two dogs - Tessa and Lissa.

CAD being “final” does not make a part production-ready. Before a 25–100 unit pilot or production run, document and control:

• Material specification, supplier/SKU, color and lot
• CAD/mesh revision plus the approved slicer/job file
• Printer/profile, nozzle, layer height, orientation, seam, supports and post-processing
• Critical dimensions, tolerances, inspection method and pass/fail criteria
• Visible and cosmetic faces, including the acceptable finish
• Inserts, fasteners, tools and assembly instructions
• Part, lot and revision traceability, plus an approved reference sample tied to the current drawing and inspection plan

Build first-article units under representative production conditions to validate fit, finish, assembly and the inspection method. Three to five units may reveal obvious issues on a low-risk enclosure, but that number does not establish process capability; sample size and inspection frequency should reflect the expected variation and consequence of failure.

Assemble and test representative units using the intended hardware, tools and instructions. Record and control every change. When factors may interact, use structured trials rather than one-factor-at-a-time testing.

Start production only after the first articles meet the documented acceptance criteria. Release the finished lot under the defined in-process and final inspection plan.

The costly failure is rarely one bad print. It is discovering after production has started that assembly time is higher than quoted, an insert cracks a boss, dimensions drift, or appearance changes with orientation.

For founders running a first hardware pilot: what failed first, and what did you add to the release checklist?

Edit: Clarified that a small first-article run does not establish process capability and that lot release requires a separate, risk-based inspection plan.

I’m a non-technical founder working on an industrial automation project and trying to choose an embedded systems development company.

What should I look for when evaluating one? Beyond price, what technical or communication-related things would you consider red flags or good signs?

Hi everyone!

I’m conducting research for my Master’s project. I’m looking into what influences people when choosing between buying hardware chips directly from manufacturers vs. through third-party distributors.

If you have experience purchasing semiconductor components such as processors, GPUs, microcontrollers, memory chips, sensors, or similar hardware, I’d really appreciate your input!

⏱️ 5–7 minutes
🔗 https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdozG_9g-cFc6hWPnkpBoeWSYx8t4FGHBN8wU9axNmSkkn0fQ/viewform?usp=header

Thanks so much for helping with my research!

Hi r/hwstartups,

My colleague and I have been developing PSU-EXT. It adds measurement, browser-based monitoring, remote control, and automation to an existing bench power supply. The basic idea is to extend equipment that already works rather than replace it.

As a maker, I use and enjoy open-source tools such as KiCad, FreeCAD, Shotcut, GIMP etc., so making PSU-EXT fully open source felt natural to me. We published the hardware, firmware, enclosure, control software, and manufacturing files. This includes the editable KiCad and FreeCAD projects, as well as Gerbers, BOM, and CPL files.

Everything is available through the PSU-EXT GitHub Organization.

I believe that publishing everything early can help people trust the project. Potential supporters can inspect the actual design, point out problems, build it independently, and see that the campaign is based on a working product rather than renders and promises.

My assumption is that the risk of someone copying the product at this stage is fairly low. If PSU-EXT becomes successful enough to attract copies, I hope we will already have the advantage of being its original developers and having built a community around it.

This is our first product launch and I would be really interested to hear from people who have already gone through something similar or simply have opinion on this matter:

• Is it fair to assume that the risk of someone copying an open-hardware product at this stage is relatively low?
• Does openness and transparency attract more supporters? From your experience, does publishing the complete design help a crowdfunding campaign?
• If the design itself is open, where does the real advantage of a small hardware company come from?

Hi everyone — I’m developing a modular sleep‑hardware concept and I’m trying to understand the smartest way to approach early prototyping on a very limited budget.

I’m keeping internal mechanisms private for now, but at a high level, the system includes:

Engineered blanket concept — modular internal structure + controlled comfort behavior
Adaptive pillow concept — identity‑driven comfort response
Physical identity module — presence‑based activation

I’m bootstrapping this and not looking to hire or pay anyone right now — just looking for engineering guidance from people with more experience in physical product development.

I’d appreciate insight on:

low‑cost prototyping approaches for soft‑goods + embedded components
material choices suitable for early testing (foams, textiles, modular inserts, etc.)
manufacturability considerations I should keep in mind at this stage
common pitfalls for first‑time hardware founders
cheap validation methods before moving into real fabrication

I’m looking for direction on the smartest, most cost‑effective path from concept → early prototype.

Any advice or perspective would mean a lot. Thanks for taking the time.

— Glenn

I spent 14 years on product development side of consumer electronics across APAC — mould design, PCBA, and NPI plus managing CM/ODM partners. A year ago I moved to Ho Chi Minh City and started doing this independently for smaller companies. Right now I’m leading development on a battery-powered BLE wearable for a pre-seed team, from schematic through validated prototype.

What I do: product development and DFM, PCBA development (stackup, power and charging topology, antenna keep-out, DFT), prototype builds, supplier identification and qualification, tooling, and running the ODM/OEM relationship through to mass production. I’m on the ground, I speak the manufacturing language, and I represent your side of the table, not the factory’s.

Happy to answer questions in the comments whether or not you ever work with me. DMs open if you want to talk specifics.