Archive - Hardware FYI

Old Tricks for New Robots

The chasm between demos and useful robots, a new entrant for silent speech, the basics of quantum computing, and more.

16 hrs ago • Benji Chia and Cooper Shea

Let’s Talk Navier–Stokes

CFD in the Boeing 787’s design, the foldable smartphone market, an open-weight model for investment casting, and more.

Sep 12 • Benji Chia and Hardware FYI

$399 Robot, $412 Worth of Servos

Teaching robots to walk through simulation, Formula 1’s forbidden materials, the gap between a promising battery and a viable business, and more.

Sep 8 • Benji Chia and Cooper Shea

Chip Design Meets AI

AI in the chip design flow, FreeCAD and KiCad demos using GPT-6 Astra, a tour of automated fish processing, and more.

Sep 5 • Benji Chia and Hardware FYI

Inside the Idea Factory

Moonshot factories, Hugging Face’s robot duck, reverse-engineering rocket engines, and a primer on cable testing.

Sep 1 • Benji Chia and Cooper Shea

August 2026

Claude Learns the Factory

Standardizing factory test infrastructure, the slow collapse of optical disk drives, graduating from a garage machine shop, and more.

Aug 29 • Benji Chia and Hardware FYI

Open-Sourcing the Inkjet Moat

The most hated machine, a field guide to adhesives, additive manufacturing for eyeglass lenses, the basics of cost engineering, and more.

Aug 25 • Benji Chia and Cooper Shea

Can America Still Make Things?

A grill scrubber’s view on reindustrialization, an intuitive guide to energy, retrospective on the smart home, and more.

Aug 22 • Benji Chia and Hardware FYI

Physical AI and the Factory Automation Trap

Apple’s failed experiments in robotic automation, reconfigurable assembly lines, chemically etched sheet metal, China’s jet engine bottleneck, and more.

Aug 18 • Benji Chia and Cooper Shea

AI Chips Need Liquid Cooling

Google’s liquid-cooling buildout, a map to control theory, and the history of Delta Electronics.

Aug 15 • Benji Chia and Hardware FYI

Can Anger Fuel a Nobel-Winning Idea?

Blue LEDs, the rise of LFP batteries, sixteen years of electronics lore, and more.

Aug 11 • Benji Chia and Cooper Shea

DARPA & The Impossible Frontier

DARPA’s heavy-lift drone competition, explosive vegetable peeling, multi-modal sensing, and more.

Aug 8 • Benji Chia and Hardware FYI

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