Disclaimer: I'm one of the people behind Airgeek, a soon-to-be-open-source air quality monitor. We are currently launching it on Kickstarter. I'm posting here because I thought the display-development story might be interesting to the community here. Ask me anything :)

Introduction

Hi Reddit,

In 2023 we started work on what would become a serious open-source air quality monitor (currently on Kickstarter). I am responsible for the hardware design, including the display panel.

We started with an E Ink panel but eventually moved to a "legacy" segmented LCD. I think it might be interesting for the community to hear why we switched (it's the question we get the most often) and where the advantages and disadvantages of E Ink are, compared to a custom segmented LCD. I also wanted to document the path in case anybody else wants to follow (and avoid the many, many potholes).

First prototype (E Ink, 2023)

So this was the very first prototype of what would later become Airgeek. We used a 1.54" E Ink panel made by Waveshare. We got a pretty decent volume price on that panel. We were driving it (in the hardware sense) with our own custom driver based on the reference schematics from the manufacturer of the on-board IC. For code, we were using a clean rewrite of the Waveshare driver (in the software sense).

We also experimented with the red-black-white version of this panel, but the refresh cycles were way too slow.

I really liked the look and feel of the panel, but it had a few problems. Some of those were obvious from the beginning, some surprised us:

• First of all, the panel was tiny (duh). It's not a problem when you place the device up close. But for our project specifically, we realized you don't want to place the device up close, because that affects the readings. Or to put it another way: the size of the display shouldn't severely limit your placement options, which the E Ink did. But I could probably live with that; there are many commercial devices which suffer from this exact issue.
• The second problem was, perhaps surprisingly, power consumption. Refreshing the E Ink is not actually that cheap: at 3.3V, we're talking milliamps over seconds (IIRC, it's been a while). Normally the cost of redraw amortizes pretty well since the content stays on for a long time, but we're making updates every 5 minutes (and we might want to go as low as 30 seconds in some cases). And that's just the panel: you still need to optimize the driver circuit (which uses a charge pump to increase the voltage), and unfortunately my analog skills back in the day weren't up to the challenge. (And I would probably still struggle a bit today.)
• But the real deal-breaker was the full refresh cycles. Every now and then, we would need to do a full refresh cycle (a transition to all black, followed by a transition to all white) to keep the display healthy. Each time that happened, if I had it in the line of sight, the device would interrupt my train of thought - basically it was an unintentional pomodoro timer :). I know there are big differences between the manufacturers and some panels would probably tolerate less frequent full refresh cycles and they would be faster. That would only partly solve the problem though.

And a complicating issue was the integration of BMV080. This is a laser-based particulate matter (PM) sensor that measures particulates in the freely flowing air, i.e. it doesn't have a fan. You need a clean optical interface between the sensor and the environment, and normally that is very thin glass. The datasheet constrains the thickness of the glass and its various optical properties, severely limiting your choice. Gorilla Glass was a readily-available product that ticked all the boxes, so we wanted to go with that.

Ynvisible side quest (2024/2025)

It was around this time that I found Ynvisible. If you don't know them, they make extremely cool thin film displays. We still weren't sure what the enclosure was going to look like, and so we liked the (literal) flexibility. We entered into talks with them, and realized this isn't going to fly.

Ynvisible requires a fair gap between segments. That's perfectly viable for loads of applications, but it wasn't compatible with what we needed. We did one design iteration with them and abandoned it.

But I still think what they do is massively cool.

The E Ink had a massive advantage: it's a matrix display, and you can craft beautiful, crisp fonts and pictures with it. If we were to give that up and go with a segmented display, I wanted it to at least be sleek. I saw a watch LCD made by em microelectronic at embedded world, and I wanted that level of ridiculous segment spacing. You can barely tell this is an LCD because the telltale gaps between segments aren't there.

The first generation LCD (2024)

After that didn't work, I started hunting for a manufacturer willing to build a display panel with such an unusually low segment spacing.

I approached em microelectronic (who make the watch display) several times, but their sales representative ghosted us. They would promise to get back and they never would, and when I reminded them they wouldn't bother to reply at all. That was seriously uncool.

Unfortunately, Europe and the USA basically gave up on (segmented) LCD manufacturing. We invented the technology, perfected it and then decided it was too low-tech to bother, and outsourced all manufacturing to Asia. As a result, the vast majority of manufacturers are based in China, and we couldn't find a European partner. Don't be fooled, there are many American companies which "pose" as LCD manufacturers, but only provide consulting on top of overseas manufacturing.

Eventually we found a company that would meet the challenge, Royal Display of Shenzhen. It was my first-ever experience dealing with a Chinese ODM. The experience was basically the opposite of em microelectronic. They work fast and they actually care.

That being said, we were in the early days and things were still just taking shape. So we designed this very conventional LCD with them (the graphic design is mine, the engineering is theirs):

The contrast on that panel is pretty epic. You can confidently read this in any light, from virtually any angle, and at distance. Technically, the panel is backlit, but we ditched the backlight eventually. The power consumption of the LEDs is too high, even if you just turn it on briefly. Perhaps we can fix this in Airgeek A2 :)

Here are some pictures of the panels taken at a larger distance, and at angles:

Side quest: Gorilla Glass (early 2025)

So this was a fun one... Remember the BMV080 and its optical interface? Gorilla Glass was a natural choice, and so we wanted to use that and cover the entire front of the device (the panel, and the sensor) with a single piece of glass to get a nice, clean look. But we made the mistake of sourcing the glass and the display separately, leading to lots and lots of pain down the line.

We had an electronics fair coming up soon (embedded world 25) and so we were in a hurry to finish the next-gen enclosure. But Gorilla Glass processing is done in China, too, and we couldn't find a company, local or not, that would guarantee delivery of the glass in time. So we decided to cut it ourselves - what a brilliant idea that was. We bought some Gorilla Glass iPad display protectors and asked a local water jet cutting company to carry out the actual cutting. I bought four types of protectors, brought them over, and collected the shattered glass the next day...

Turns out they had never worked with glass this thin and "had no idea what was wrong." I bought some more and asked them to allow me to witness the machine in operation. After a few more destructive passes, it was obvious that the jet would vibrate the thin glass sheets so violently they would shatter against the steel bed of the machine. So I bought _even more_ protectors and glued them to some scrap glass with a heavy-duty double-sided tape, and voila, that worked! - somewhat, anyway:

The abrasive they were using clearly was too large, resulting in fuzzy edges and extremely shatter-prone cut-outs, since there were about a bazillion sites where cracks could form around the perimeter.

We then tried applying lacquer to the glass anyway, in a last-ditch effort to salvage what we could. Unfortunately, the glass is treated with hydrophobic coating which we were unable to remove. Certainly not mechanically, since the panel would just crack; I tried applying all the solvents I could (legally) use, but to no avail.

All in all, this was a desperate attempt at having a backup plan in place and I'm not particularly proud of this!

In the end, a Chinese supplier did ship the panels two hours before we left for the fair, and we were incredibly relieved:

A misunderstanding, and the second generation LCD (mid 2025)

The feedback from embedded world was encouraging and people did like the overall design. But it was clear the device didn't have the "premium" look and feel we were after. Somebody told me (jokingly) that the device looked like a miniature television from the 1980s, and I just couldn't unsee it. It was clear we needed to do better.

It was around this time that I started thinking about inverting the LCD: making the front side normally black, with the active segments white - that would give us a clean, uniform look. But it turns out that's not as easy as "flipping the colors."

To see what the device would look like, I peeled off the front polarizer from the original LCD and turned it 90 degrees:

Our ODM offered to build an inverted panel at no additional cost. They shipped it in a few weeks and it was absolutely stunning:

There's one minor issue, mind you: this isn't a reflective panel. This is a VA panel, and it _must_ be backlit from behind. And sure enough, the contrast is just epic, but it's not exactly compatible with our incredibly constrained power budget.

Now I have to admit, I didn't know immediately what the problem was. You can actually see the segments without backlight, but they are incredibly faint - so I thought I must be driving the display wrong, because it was using a different waveform. It took a while to clear up the confusion - the engineers kept telling me I should enable the backlight; I tried to explain I want to run the panel without backlight. Eventually we realized a mistake was made, and this panel could never have worked to begin with. Too bad, because it looked amazing. We took some great pictures of the device with the VA panel (with backlight on) and built the first website around them, but otherwise it was a complete flop. And we made it our goal to approach the looks of the VA panel, but in a reflective configuration.

We decided to build an inverted STN panel instead, and - crucially - to have it optically bonded to the Gorilla Glass by our ODM. This is one of the game-changers: they use a glue which has similar optical properties to the cover glass and the display components, so you get very few internal reflections which reduce the (perceived) contrast - the result is a "brighter" display.

Third generation LCD (early 2026)

But I still wasn't happy with the result. Compared to the E Ink or the first LCD, the contrast of this panel and the viewing angles were quite poor - after all, it was an STN panel.

This was when I realized that the various Western companies offering to do the R&D for you do actually add value: they know the technology and the manufacturers and their capabilities, so they can help you get there quickly - but at several times the cost, and we couldn't afford that. I sort of felt I owed them an apology for writing them off as useless middlemen though.

I decided to get to the bottom of the problem. I felt that my goodwill with the ODM was running out - after all, I've been constantly changing what we were trying to build - and we only had one more shot at doing this right. I came up with a load of proposals - stuff we could try to make it better - and I just sent that over.

A hard-earned lesson: a picture is worth a thousand words. Before, I tried to explain what I was trying to do in English; around this time, I started sending pictures. The language barrier is real; the salespeople speak English really well, but the engineers designing the panels often don't. I guess a lot is lost in translation to Chinese, but the pictures often make it to the engineers unmodified.

In the end, our ODM designed an LCD with optically-bonded Gorilla Glass, with an anti-glare foil on top. And if I understand correctly, this foil also plays the role of the external polarizer for the display, increasing the amount of light that makes it through the display stack. So you remove the vast majority of reflections, and you make the display brighter - and that is enough to kick this into high gear! (I will certainly try peeling the foil off, but I don't have enough panels to spare at the moment.)

Closing thoughts

Switching to LCD fixed all of the original problems:

• The panel is really quite large: the digits are 45 mm tall. You can read this from across a small room just fine.
• The power consumption, including the extremely low power driver in our microcontroller, is on the order of microamps (at 3.3 V drive).
• The display doesn't suffer from periodic attention-grabbing full-refresh cycles.

LCDs come with some advantages:

• The power consumption is constant and doesn't depend on how often you change the displayed values (but you need the MCU to run to drive the change, so there is some indirect power consumption).
• Refreshes are much faster and feel smoother.

And obviously, they have some disadvantages:

• The layout of a segmented LCD is fixed, whereas an E Ink display is completely software-defined. But in our particular case, LCD was the right choice, and I'm glad we went that route.

If you're curious what the finished device looks like after all of this, check out our Kickstarter page.

And if you're designing a custom LCD, feel free to ask me anything here. I've probably made the mistake already. :)

Hey everyone!

We’re the team behind PIIX. We’ve been building an AI workspace for creative work, and we’re at the point where we’d really like to get it in front of people outside our own team.

The idea behind PIIX is pretty simple: instead of jumping between different tools when you’re researching, collecting references, developing an idea, generating images, or exploring different directions, we wanted to bring that process together in one place.

That’s what our Flowboard is for. You can organize references, prompts, generated images, and different ideas in one workspace. You can also bring in things you’ve already made with tools like Midjourney or ChatGPT and keep developing them in PIIX.

We’re still early, though. So rather than telling you that PIIX is the future of creative work or something 😅, we’d honestly just like to know:

Does this actually make your process easier? What feels useful? What feels unnecessary? What would you change?

We’re looking for some early users who are interested in creative work and experimenting with AI. No particular type of work or background required.

As an early user, you can get one month of PIIX Pro completely free ($36 value) in exchange for trying it out and sharing your honest thoughts with us.

If you’re interested, check out PIIX here: https://piix.studio/ and send us a comment or DM. We’ll get in touch and set up your free Pro access.

And honestly, even if your feedback is “yeah, I don’t really see the point,” that’s useful for us too. We’re still figuring things out, and we’d rather hear what people actually think.

Thanks for reading!

Curious what other people's version of this is, something that seemed completely reasonable at the design stage and only became obvious once it hit an actual manufacturing process, whether that showed up as a weird quote or parts that just didn't work the way you pictured.

Doesn't have to be a big one, just want to hear what people actually ran into.

What are smaller hardware businesses using to manage materials and avoid running out of parts before a production run?

I've been looking at MRPeasy, Katana, and Odoo, but it's difficult to tell how well they work once you're managing multiple BOMs and supplier lead times.

Has anyone used one of these, or found any other option that works well? I'd be interested to hear what you like about it and whether it actually helped you catch shortages earlier.

Long story short, several years ago my father invented a system to sanitize water and basically increase the capacity of water treatment plants with only a small modification. Currently, we are moving to commercialization. We have 2 units successfully in the field running for more than a year and have interest globally. For the first time in years we have tangible momentum

To get to this point we have exhausted all our own resources and that of the 100k equity investments we have had. To successfully get to the market we need roughly 300k over the next 3 years (Exchange rates are in our favor). We need capital now to keep moving and actually penetrate the market.

Unfortunately, in our country grants are not an option for us. We have participated in several incubator/ accelerator programs that are extremely time consuming, disappointing and offer prizes of free access to software or monetary rewards of just 2k. We have yet to present directly to an investor.

My question is then, what is the best way for a hardware manufacturer to reach audiences/ investors outside of their home country?
Is it worth putting our limited resources and effort into Social Media? If so, what sort of presence gains the best traction (especially with such a technical target market).

I’ve been building a small ESP32-S3 voice device for kids. The MVP is working now — actual hardware, custom firmware, WiFi, SIP/RTP and clear two way calls.

I’m also already working with a manufacturer in Shenzhen, so its beyond the dev board stage.

For hardware founders here, when would you start raising?

After a working MVP? After EVT/DVT? Or would you try crowdfunding/preorders first?

Trying to understand where bootstrapping normally stops making sense once tooling, certification and production costs start coming in.

So i have been running my hardware startup for little over 10 years and now that it is more stable, I would like to explore a different avenue.

I was looking into becoming a Fractional CTO or technical advisor (haven't made up my mind yet).

But before I begin, i want to know if hardware startups do hire fractional CTOs or is Full time CTO a better option for them.

I want to know from founders and co-founders if they would hire someone like that, whether pro Bono or for a small equity or even better for a monthly retainer.

I have seen many software startups hiring fractional CTOs, so wanted to scope the hardware, core engineering market for the demand for this title.

I’m sharing this early because I need a reality check before I spend more time building it.

I’m working on a small side project and would love feedback on the problem it should solve first. What makes you personally decide a new tool is worth trying instead of sticking with your current workaround?

I’m especially interested in the point where an annoying task becomes annoying enough to look for a solution.

I’m 27. I recently joined a product company as a PM after spending ~5 years in a small bootstrapped hardware startup, where I was one of the earliest employees and eventually grew into a director-level role.
My previous role was very hands-on across product development, hardware, bit of firmware, manufacturing, vendors, customers and execution. It was very startup/ad-hoc style, and I had a lot of ownership and freedom.
I joined this new company specifically to learn proper product/project management and understand the structured side of hardware + firmware + software products and also financial perspectives.
It has been just over a week and honestly, I feel completely out of my depth.
JIRA, documentation, certifications, firmware/software releases, structured processes, international clients, formal tracking, etc. are all new to me. I’ve been assigned a project already and I’m slowly figuring things out, but it has definitely shaken my confidence.

At the same time, I’ve received another offer from a company working on hardware manufacturing/prototyping solving pain-points for startups.
That role is much closer to my existing strengths, I'd have much more ownership: handling projects, customers, vendors, bringing in business and potentially helping scale the business but no firmware or software exposure.
So essentially:
Option A: Stay where I am, tolerate the uncomfortable learning curve and build the skills I’m missing.
Option B: Take the other role, leverage what I’m already good at, get much more autonomy/business exposure and potentially move faster towards entrepreneurship.

Long term, I don't see myself as a traditional PM. I want to build/run businesses and products around technology, but I don't have the exact path figured out yet.

Would you guys stay and push through the learning curve, or take the opportunity where you already have leverage and ownership?
Especially interested in perspectives from people who have made a similar transition.

Hi Everyone!

I'm new here, my name is Matt and I am the CEO of a company called "Circuit Center". I had heard from some of my colleagues that there were a litany of issues within the PCB industry, not the least of which being gatekeeping educational and useful tools behind a paywall, causing a difficult barrier to entry

I made my app because of this.. and because of spite towards some former business partners. Every tool & future-tool on the site is free (we have data science tools, API integrations, user-metrics, a free BOM tool, and a PCB creator // editor // 3D-viewer & more on the ay this week) so that people can learn & price their boards.

The only way the company makes money is through people advertising their products on the site, and I will eventually only ever feature products & links to sponsors on the site as the sponsors come in, but for now I have integrated every API I can to fill the website's data set :)

I would love any and all feedback (a few potential partners told me they would love a "mom-and-pop-shop locator tool" for me to integrated into the interactive map I made & I cannot help but love it!), so please do not hesitate to reach-out or comment with criticism and/or questions. I just want to help people that make things which are wonderful, and I am proud of my creation so far. Please check it out at circuitcenter.ai for more & view our signup page at our signup page for more!

I managed to make a prototype that gets my idea across, basically just a solid frame, and a lever attached to a tube. It's measured in inches not feet or centimeters, what's the best way I can get this thing streamlined so it's not so janky?

Hi,

I'm not building another AI CAD tool, but I'm building the missing layer: the workflow between "I have an idea" and "I have a product in hand."

Nirmana AI — an AI-powered platform that carries a physical product across the whole journey in one marketplace:

- Generate: describe what you want → iterate 2D/3D → export STL/OBJ/STEP

- Validate: publish to a gallery and see if anyone actually wants it before you spend on tooling

- Manufacture: route validated designs to real shops for quotes and commercialize.

My background is architecture, prototyping, design controls, and verification/validation. So this is built around making sure a design is manufacturable.

Would love your feedback:

1. If you're an indie designer, hardware founder, brand, or maker, where does idea → CAD → manufacturing hurt you most today?

2. For those who've made it to production: which step ate the most weeks?

3. What would make you trust an AI-generated design enough to manufacture it?

Opening 100 founding spots — 50 creators + 50 manufacturers to shape this (no card required): https://nirmanaai.com/

If you think the idea is wrong, please tell me why?

We're a small electronics manufacturer based in Germany (industrial communication, IO-Link hardware, smart industrial gateways). With the new EU Packaging Regulation (PPWR) in force, cross-border selling within the EU needs local registration and a representative in each country we ship to, which is impractical at small volume. However, we are registered for the German market with all necessary obligations (LUCID, system provider).

I am looking to connect with similarly-sized electronics manufacturers or vendors in other EU countries for a reciprocal distribution setup instead. The idea is: we sell your products here, you sell ours in your country. Each side stays locally registered and compliant in their own market, avoiding costs per country.

Ideally I'd be looking for companies with a comparable product portfolio and an existing customer base in industrial automation, embedded systems, or electronics in general.

If that sounds interesting, drop a comment or DM.

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 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 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.

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

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.