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You’ve worked for months to get your prototype functioning. It’s time to take that ugly (but functional!) works-like prototype and create a real consumer product. Right now, you may be focused on the general shape, smoothing out the curves and accommodating the awkward PCB shape (darn those electrical engineers!), but soon you’ll feel the need […]

Before the 2016 Bay Area Maker Faire, my inner-child set out on a goal to re-live the freedom I felt when I got my first car—a 25lb plastic, electric blue, Power Wheels Jeep. Those of you who have attended the Bay Area Maker Faire may have seen the awesome PPPRS races. PPPRS stands for Pow-Pow […]

Your source for hardware insights. May 13th, 2016 Products Hyundai’s Iron Man Suit Hyundai has created a wearable robot suit that increases users’ strength, which could make it ideal for use in factories, hospitals, or by the military. The company joins Panasonic, which manufactures similar suits for factory workers, developing leg-only robotic exoskeletons to help […]

上周我们举办另一个事件在我们每月event series at Fictiv, this time focusing on the trials and tribulations of bringing a product to market. To Sell or Not to Sell: How to Get Your Hardware Product to Market featured an amazing panel of speakers who have executed a variety of crowdfunding, […]

Your source for hardware insights. May 6th, 2016 Products Your Skin as a Touchscreen Researchers at Carnegie Mellon are testing a project called SkinTrack, which lets people use their skin as a touchscreen to play games on a smartwatch. It works the way cell towers triangulate signals to locate your phone: In this case, a […]

Some of the products in our world are brand new—they’re the things we “didn’t know we needed,” the innovations that ramp up our experience of life a few notches. You know, like the Internet, the iPhone, and now all those Internet of Things things. Plenty of other products are age-old, traditional, ubiquitous. We also can’t […]

Your source for hardware insights. April 29th, 2016 Products The Hair Dryer That Costs as Much as Your Smartphone Dyson’s first-ever hairdryer, the Supersonic, is expensive, attractive, and packed with technology, like an air multiplier feature, a digital motor, and heat sensors. Plus, it’s apparently beyond the audible range for humans, so you can blow-dry […]

When designing components that will be made of plastic, it’s often necessary to add ribs and gussets to improve the stiffness and strength of load bearing features. This reduces material volume and print time for 3D printed parts, compared to the time it would take to make these features out of solid structures. That’s because print […]

While the power of a hardware product comes from its internal components, a product is typically recognized by its enclosure, the outer shell that encloses electronic products, making them appealing and user-friendly. In this post, I’m going to walk you through the steps for designing a basic enclosure, using the design of a IoT plant […]

In Fictiv’s 2016 State of Hardware Report, a whopping 70% of participants reported using Solidworks. Solidworks might be expensive and is certainly not perfect, but it sure is popular! Considering how many people out there are using Solidworks, I thought it would be great to impart a few tips & tricks for upping your Solidworks […]