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Tips for Prototyping Food-Safe Products

So you’re thinking of making a food-related product that needs to be food-safe — great! This article will help guide you toward the right materials, necessary regulations and approvals, best production processes, and design considerations. Which Products and Components Need to be Food-Safe? It’s easy to remember that packaging and tableware need to be food-safe, but […]

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CAD Design Terms

When learning CAD, some words may seem foreign–extrusion, chamfer, radius, and fillets aren’t exactly intutive. No worries, read up on the terms below as a refresher or an introduction to the most common CAD terms and operations. Main CAD Operations Extrude / Extrusion: An extruded face of an object expands or contracts (or cuts through/against) empty […]

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Industrial Design vs Mechanical Engineering — How Endless Manages the Give and Take

Beauty and function encompass two critical elements of a hardware product: one tangible and the other intangible. For Endless Mobile, these two elements encapsulate the overarching vision for the product they sought to create: an affordable, yet delightful and luxurious computer for the developing world. For hardware companies, mechanical engineering and industrial design can sometimes appear […]

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How to Reduce 3D Printing Costs by Cutting Your 3D Model

We receive a lot of questions about how to reduce the cost of 3D printing. One of the best ways to do this is to ensure your model fits on a smaller build bed to ensure the fastest build time on the cheapest machine available to produce your part. In this article we’ll show you […]

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Financing Hardware Products: Kickstarter vs Indiegogo vs Pre-Orders

You’ve ran your tests and iterated until you can iterate no more (well, you could but you won’t). Now finally, (finally!) you’re ready to bring your product to the masses. But what’s the best way to get it out there? Kickstarter and Indiegogo have brought some real success stories to market over the past few years and […]

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Why Process Trumps Relationships in China

When it comes to manufacturing in China, there’s one idea that seems to dominate the conversation: relationships are everything. Success seems to revolve around your ability to build strong relationships with the right people who will introduce you to the right factories. Moreover, continued success depends on maintaining a strong relationship with that factory so […]

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An Overview of RTV Molds

Injection molding has long been the best method of bulk production, while 3D printing has recently become the best choice for early stage prototyping. But when and how should you make the switch from single volume production with 3D prints to high volume production? With small run production it can be hard to find the […]

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Building Dreams: Insights on Becoming a Hardware CEO

Each startup begins with a dream, an idea. But to discover the courage, strategy, and means to actually move toward realizing that idea is a exceptional task and for most Founders that period of transition is both challenging and transformative. Clifton Roozeboom is in the midst of such a transition as he moves from completing […]

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3D File Types

There are three different types of digital files, broadly speaking: ones for printing, ones for modeling, and ones for 2D drawings. In order to produce a physical part, a 3D printer requires a specific file type. Known as a ‘mesh model’, the most common file type for 3D printing is called STereoLithography, or STL. To […]

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Petcube’s CTO on How to Work with Vendors in China

For this week’s Hardware Spotlight, we’re chatting with Alex Neskin, the CTO at Petcube, an innovative product that connects owners with their pets using remote wireless camera streaming, 2-way audio, and a built-in laser pointer. Often the greatest lessons are born out of challenges encountered and Alex Neskin, CTO at Petcube, relates to this sentiment all too […]