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The Engineer’s Guide to Small Scale AC vs. DC Motors

While electric motors drive vastly different applications, their core function remains the same—to convert electrical energy into mechanical energy. Numerous articles highlight the characteristics of each unique motor on the market, but they can be simplified into two overarching categories: AC (alternating current) motors and DC (direct current) motors. Each type has its own pros […]

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Holy FBD, Batman! Using Engineering Analysis to Improve Your Designs

A new engineer, I was getting used to the “excitement” of cubicle life when something (finally) happened. We’d stiffened part of our flow meters a month prior, and one of our customers started complaining about breakage. The graybeards upstairs were defending the change, while my engineering partner was struggling to explain why the minor tweak […]

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Celebrating the Women at Fictiv for International Women’s Day

In celebration of International Women’s Day today, we want to honor the amazing and inspiring women across the Fictiv team, each helping to make hardware more efficient everyday. International Women’s Day is a global celebration of the achievements of women, and a call to action for gender parity. Learn a bit about the women powering […]

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Hardware Sessions: Waterproofing & Reliability Testing with Hind Hobeika of Instabeat

To gain actionable insights on how real hardware products are developed and manufactured, we interviewed top engineers and designers in the San Francisco Bay Area in our Hardware Sessions series. In this edition of Hardware Sessions, we sit down with Hind Hobeika, a mechanical engineer and founder of Instabeat, a connected accessory for swimming goggles […]

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Design for (Lean) Manufacturing

What is lean manufacturing? How do you design for lean manufacturing? And how does it apply to your product development cycle? The idea and practices of lean manufacturing grew from auto manufacturing—Henry Ford and then Taiichi Ohno (of Toyota) were the pioneers of lean manufacturing. Its roots go back decades, but lean methodologies and lean […]

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8 Tips to Maximize the Impact of Your Prototypes

You just finished the initial design of your product, and it looks great! Well, it looks great on your computer screen. So, you decide to make a prototype and see if your design looks and works as intended in real life. Odds are that the first prototype won’t meet all of your expectations. In fact, […]

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CNC Periodic Table of Elements

Fictiv’s CNC machining service provides parts in just 3 days, via our simple online interface. In addition to powering hardware teams with the best fabrication services, we think it’s really important to support development with prototyping and manufacturing knowledge. Our awesome design and manufacturing teams teamed up to create a visual representation of the foundational […]

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Intro to Haptic Technology: Vibration Motors

Remember the days of flip phones and physical alpha-numeric keys, where you pressed physical buttons to enter phone numbers and send text messages? We’ve come a long way since then, with modern smartphones and replacing buttons with capacitive touchscreens. Despite the technological advances, there’s something I miss about those physical keys. Maybe it was the […]

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Fictiv Hardware Sessions with Sam Hickmann of Joy

One of the best parts about working at Fictiv is being surrounded by a community of amazing engineers and designers, building the next generation of hardware products. To shine some light on who those creators are and their best kept product development secrets, we’re launching a new video series called Hardware Sessions. Hardware Sessions is […]

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Join us at HardwareCon

We’re excited to announce our participation at this year’s HardwareCon from March 24th-25th in San Leandro, CA, where Fictiv CEO and co-founder Dave Evans will be discussing how to go from digital to physical more effectively. Dave will explain how the hardware development lifecycle can be shortened by asking and answering the right questions during […]