P.S. We’re back in SF for another happy hour on 8/11! We’re setting aside a few tables for teams with demos or other work they’d like to bring into the room. If that’s you, send us an email.

Interesting Presentation: Why is Manufacturing Difficult?

More and more kinds of work can now be remade at almost no cost. Not to say that the work is good or particularly useful, only that it has become cheap to produce. The contemporary word for this is ‘slop’, describing the kind of cheap excess that appears when the barrier to entry is near zero. It’s particularly top of mind as more artificial content has overwhelmed social feeds, to the point that LinkedIn now has a ‘Seems Like AI Slop’ button.

Perhaps what’s still beautiful about working with real systems (especially those that extend beyond demos or prototypes) is that the process of building is still just as difficult. And by virtue of the work itself, there’s a natural barrier to ‘slop’.

Dr. Anna Thornton’s 2016 MIT presentation on Why is Manufacturing Difficult? is a great synthesis on the complexities of manufacturing that boils down to this: manufacturing is complex because it is an exactingly detailed process fraught with decisions that cast a long shadow once set.

The story of product development is usually told from the engineer’s POV, but manufacturing has its own lifecycle that the author groups into three phases: pre-manufacturing, manufacturing ramp, and ongoing production. Multiple parallel loops and qualification steps that run concurrently to the regular development lifecycle, where the object of the work is to translate a design into a repeatable process.

There’s lots more nuggets of knowledge buried in the presentation; see pages 20–21 for standard critical path/production timelines, and pages 24–27 for cost and supply-chain planning.

Though most of the framing is on consumer hardware, many robotics startups would benefit from the methodology it lays out for factory qualification, sourcing, and production planning. The supply chain, after all, doesn’t care whether the finished product walks or makes toast.

More From Around The Web

• CADBench is a benchmark for evaluating models and agents on AI-generated parametric CAD.

• Math for the Electronics Student by RadioShack.

• A hand-designed, cam-operated torsion spring machine - more machining ASMR.

• Overseas machine shops have found short-form social. Perhaps it does work as a discovery channel if we’re writing about it.

• Recipes presented as diagrams by cookingforengineers.com. See here for a tiramisu recipe.

• Sponsored: Zoo is hosting a virtual API Makeathon open through 8/5 - prizes include a Bambu Lab 3D printer and API credits. Register here!

Presented by Jiga: Manufacturing ≠ Transactions

Source custom parts with direct access to the manufacturers making them. No middleman, no black box. Jiga gives you a vetted network and one accountable partner standing behind every order. You know who's building your parts and communicate with them directly. AI-assisted operations handle supplier matching, quoting, quality verification, and production tracking, so the relationships stay human while the operations run at speed.

Interesting Video: Progressive Die Stamping

A visual walkthrough of sheet metal stamping, including progressive die stamping and all the fixturing/workstations that keep the line moving.

Manufacturing & Startup News

• DoorDash Labs received FAA Part 135 air-carrier certification, making it the eighth U.S. operator cleared to run commercial drone deliveries. The company had previously (and still is) partnered with Wing and Flytrex, ahead of a fall 2026 launch for DoorDash Air.

• SoftBank is reportedly in talks to acquire Gravis Robotics, an ETH Zurich spinout that builds autonomy kits for excavators.

• REEF Technologies acquired KAIKAKU, a food robotics startup developing back-of-house food assembly automation.

• Terminal raised a $20M Series A to normalize telemetry data through a single API for fleet operators and insurance companies.

Tools From Our Partners

• Aris Machina Protos – Design & validate anything, with the AI-native workspace for industrial science and hardware R&D.

• Jiga – Custom parts at digital speed, with trusted shop access.

• SolidWorks for Startups – Full access to SolidWorks’ product development tools, free for early-stage startups.

• Zoo – AI-native CAD with a modern geometry engine, readable code, and editable feature trees for precise, editable models.

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Interesting Links

• An insider’s account of the buildout strategy behind Tesla’s residential energy business from two early Powerwall engineers. For all the talk around vertical integration, many enduring platforms began as OTS components patched together into a working system. In 2012, Tesla’s residential energy effort began with a California Energy Commission grant and a simple thought exercise: could EV battery modules supply backup power through a home’s electrical system? What follows is a product journey that’s not about vertical integration as an opening strategy, and more about using each development iteration as fast strategic steps. The first iteration, ‘Resi,’ combined modified Model S battery modules, a basic BMS, and a Schneider XW 4048 inverter/charger designed for 48 V lead-acid banks rather than EV cells. Instead of building an inverter (and pushing time to launch), Tesla added a small controller between the two that read the battery’s limits and adjusted the Schneider accordingly. Each later version then pulled in another layer exposed in the field — solar compatibility, metering, controls, installation — and by the sixth generation, nearly the whole system had moved in-house. Small important steps, each compounding over time.

• For related reading on the role of the inverter in residential battery storage systems, Steinmetz’s primer on motor controllers and inverters explains the same class of power electronics from the EV side. Batteries are DC devices, but few of the things we want batteries to power can use that DC directly; a house expects stable 120/240 V AC, and a brushless motor needs three-phase AC current that changes with the rotor. The job of the inverter is to handle the DC-to-AC conversion, and a motor controller is the broader term for a device that controls motor actuation (current sensing, phase current control loops, etc.), though the terms are often used interchangeably. Useful reading for anyone working around battery systems.

• Learning CAD, or any new skill, first feels like a set of memorized commands. Over time, those commands then converge into a recognized intuition. And for the best intuitive control of a model in space, CAD power users use an input device known as the SpaceMouse. This open-source build is a useful look at what sits inside and the operating philosophy behind how to use it. The small puck gives the user six degrees of freedom to move the camera (three translations, three rotations) and acts as a physical analogue for the model - push it forward/backward to zoom in and out, tug it up/down to translate vertically, or twist left/right to rotate around it. Commercial models use an optical sensing system built on the same principle; two PCBs mounted between three springs, one fixed at the base and the other free to move. A slotted plastic piece moves between six LEDs and light meters, and the resulting pattern of interrupted light tells the controller how the puck has moved.

• Product testing contains an enormous catalog of very specific worries. Some become UL requirements; others become standardized test equipment. Articulated finger probes like the ULP20, for example, are used to check whether a “human finger” could touch a live electrical part. There's even more anatomically correct equipment, like the B&K 5128 acoustic test head used for audio testing. Engineers can mount headsets (earbuds or headphones) to it and measure the frequency response, distortion, channel matching, and isolation at the simulated ears. By no means is it meant to capture how a headset will sound to every listener. Instead, it reproduces the acoustic load consistently enough that two tests, or two designs, can be meaningfully compared.

• Canal locks are water-filled chambers that raise or lower boats between sections of canal at different elevations. While boat lifting locks have largely converged to the Pound Lock, the Falkirk wheel is a one of a kind rotary boat lift. It replaced 11 sequential locks, and only uses 1.5 kWh (about 1/9 of a gallon of gas) to complete a rotation. Because of its symmetry, the prior lift is used as a counterweight to displace all load except the boat. The early designs were completed by using a Lego helicopter model kit and modifying it. See here for a more detailed overview of many other styles of Locks.

• And a couple fun links to round out the week:

  • StartUp Podcast is probably our favorite podcast of all time. The first season follows Alex Blumberg building Gimlet Media, a podcast production company, eventually acquired by Spotify.

  • Using a forklift as external fixturing during CNC ops.

Presented by Duro: AI-native PLM for hardware teams

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From out-of-the-box CAD integrations to seamless connections with ERP and MES, make sure your data is accurate at every stage make sure your data is accurate at every stage of the product development lifecycle.

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Startup News

• Atoms, Travis Kalanick’s robotics company, has raised a $1.7B funding round led by a16z to build a robotics platform targeting heavy industry and mining. Atoms is a rebranded holding company built on Kalanick’s CloudKitchens business; in March, it acquired Pronto, the heavy-industry automation company run by former Uber executive Anthony Levandowski. Few details have been shared on the company’s plans, but has described an ambition to build a “wheelbase for robots” and expand into industries including mining.

• Gritt raised a $26M Series A to automate solar-panel installation, bringing total funding to $32M. The company uses AI software with off-the-shelf skidders and robotic arms to move and position panels, helping an eight-person crew install 3,000–4,000 panels per day compared to ~800 manually.

• Humanoid raised a $152M Series A for its wheeled humanoid robots, becoming Europe’s first humanoid robotics unicorn. Unlike bipedal humanoid startups, Humanoid is building a wheeled platform for factory and logistics work; Bosch will manufacture the robots, while Schaeffler has agreed to deploy thousands across its manufacturing facilities.

• Sila secured $300M in private funding to expand U.S. production of its silicon-carbon battery anodes at its Moses Lake, WA facility. Sila’s silicon anodes offer 20–40% higher energy density than conventional graphite, and the facility is designed to scale from 2 GWh of annual capacity to as much as 250 GWh over the next five years.

• Antares Nuclear raised a $470M Series C to build microreactors for U.S. military bases. The company is one of three finalists in the Pentagon’s Advanced Nuclear Power for Installations program. The round was led by Paradigm and Caffeinated Capital.

Open Jobs

More jobs added weekly on our job board. If you’re hiring, promote your open role here.

Early Career:

• NVIDIA is looking for a Research Scientist, Electronic Design Automation in Santa Clara, CA.

Mid-Level:

• Mill is looking for a Product Manager, Commercial Hardware in San Bruno, CA.

• Meter is looking for a Product Design Mechanical Engineer in San Francisco, CA.

Senior to Staff:

• Long Wall is looking for a Sr. Electronics Design Engineer in Long Beach, CA.

• Cowboy Space Corporation is looking for a Head of Materials & Process in Seattle, WA.

Internships:

• ASML is looking for an Optical Engineer Co-Op in Wilton, CT.

Tools From Our Sponsors

Design & Simulation

• Duro — AI-native PLM that centralizes part data, manages change orders, and connects the whole stack so your team can focus on execution, not administration.

• nTop – Computational design to accelerate product development.

• Onshape for Startups – Free access to Onshape Professional or Onshape Government (compliant with ITAR/EAR) for hardware startups and entrepreneurs.

Manufacturing

• Loombotic – Instant-quote custom wire harnesses. Upload drawings or design online, fast turnaround.

• Xometry — Instant quoting on custom parts, from R&D prototypes to high-volume production runs.

• Blitzpanel – Custom control panels made fast and easy. Design online for instant pricing or let us design for you.

• Express Manufacturing, Inc. – Southern California’s largest EMS provider with 40+ years of end-to-end electronics manufacturing expertise.

• Fictiv – On-demand custom manufacturing from prototype to production.

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Interesting Presentation: Real-World Hardware Espionage

For many of us who build physical systems for a living, the object of our work comes to us with its identity already fixed. The same is often true of the philosophy by which we build it. It is a system to be architected, a methodology to follow, an assembly to be built and tested.

There is, however, an alternative school of thought — one not usually taught in academic circles, and in industry, is more concerned about defense and evaluation. This is the world of hardware hacking. Hardware hacking does not treat a system as an object with a fixed identity, but as a physical layer that can be opened, probed, and even manipulated for points of exploitation.

For those curious, Joe Grand’s presentation on reverse engineering an implant found inside a cryptocurrency wallet is a real-world case study in hardware espionage. Specifically, a supply-chain attack where a legitimate cryptocurrency wallet was modified after leaving the factory to capture a user’s recovery seed during setup, then transmit the data over a cellular network.

Here’s the simplified breakdown:

1. A customer bought a cheap Nano X online as a donor for a failing wallet battery. Upon opening the device, he found a smaller battery, extra circuit board, wiring, and an antenna.

2. While the wallet itself was genuine, someone had replaced its original battery to make room for the implant, then resealed and resold it.

3. The added board tapped the SPI bus driving the display, while cellular hardware (modem, eSIM, antenna) gave it a path off-device.

4. Rather than attacking the wallet’s secure element, the implant monitored display traffic during initial setup, when the display renders the recovery seed for backup.

5. The implant firmware then reconstructed the seed from character glyphs, and transmitted it over cellular to the attacker.

The original product was still there, performing as designed. So was a second product, nested inside it.

If a deal just so happens to be too good to be true, it may be because someone else expects to make the margin (and much more) back later.

Grand’s full slides and write-up are linked here.

Presented by Aris Machina: Meet Protos

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Use Protos to explore concepts, reason from first principles, compare tradeoffs, simulate “what-if” threads, and visualize results before committing time and resources to the next build. Protos helps teams move from question to model to decision with more confidence.

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More From Around The Web

• A technical writeup on how to coordinate underground robot trains in a single pipe network. Pipedream builds autonomous underground delivery systems; this covers the scheduling and control architecture they use to prevent collisions.

• One way to waterproof a circuit board is to ‘pot’ it in a case of epoxy. See walkthrough here.

• Reverse engineering a payment card terminal. Same vein of what we’ve written about above, now probing for exploits.

• A bedframe built from 80/20 - pretty much adult Legos.

• Sponsored: Modeling Mersenne’s Clavichord was the winning project from Zoo’s Makeathon back in June. It’s a neat use of applying AI CAD to reconstruct a 17th-century instrument from historical measurements and a healthy amount of math around string tension. Zoo is running it back with a virtual API Makeathon - prizes include a Bambu Lab 3D printer and API credits. Register here.

Interesting Video: IMAX’s 70MM Projectors

Adam Savage’s tour of IMAX’s projection and film-printing equipment. The Odyssey came out last week and the 70mm projectors the film was optimized for are near impossible to build at scale.

There are only 41 theaters worldwide that can project in IMAX 70mm.

Manufacturing & Startup News

• Walden Robotics launched from stealth with $300M in funding to build and deploy general-purpose robots that use ‘Large Behavior Models’ to learn new tasks for applications in manufacturing and logistics.

• BRINC raised $125M in new financing to expand domestic manufacturing of its public-safety response drone.

• 1872 raised $15M in seed funding to build a steel fabrication factory in Cincinnati that uses AI software and robotic welding.

• Splash Industries raised $4.2M in funding to build uncrewed surface vessels for naval resupply.

Tools From Our Partners

• Aris Machina Protos – Design & validate anything, with the AI-native workspace for industrial science and hardware R&D.

• Jiga – Custom parts at digital speed, with trusted shop access.

• SolidWorks for Startups – Full access to SolidWorks’ product development tools, free for early-stage startups.

• Zoo – AI-native CAD with a modern geometry engine, readable code, and editable feature trees for precise, editable models.

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Interesting Presentation: Crowdfunding Was Never the Business

For a few years in the 2010s, “connected” devices were treated as the next obvious product requirement. Kickstarter campaigns existed for nearly every household object that could plausibly carry a BLE/Wi-Fi chip, and perhaps the best embodiment of the era was Quirky, a crowd-funded startup best known for a connected egg tray that raised $185M in subsequent financing rounds.

The premise behind most startups at the time was that an ordinary product could become a software business if you connected it, just as smartphones were becoming common enough to make the interface possible. “IoT everything” was as much a rallying cry as it was the central investment thesis for a new generation of companies.

8 Things About Hardware Crowdfunding from HAX is a useful field report from inside that moment, and while its lessons are nominally about crowdfunding, most apply broadly to any company trying to turn early attention into a real business. Some nuggets of knowledge:

• Crowdfunding validates an audience, not a company. It can prove people want the product, but does not prove the scale, defensibility, or market size required for a venture-backed company.

• Funded != profitable. Work backward from cost and target a 3–4x multiple, including fixed costs like tooling, certification, fulfillment, and the production surprises that show up after launch.

• A successful campaign can be the whole story! Campaigns can be commercially meaningful without becoming a venture-scale business, nor does it need to be.

Many of the original campaigns and connected-device companies are now gone, but a few did use crowdfunding well; not as the business, but as the first financing mechanism for something larger. Click below for the original campaigns.

1. Formlabs: one of the few enduring 3D-printer companies from the era. Professional machines, recurring resin, now expanding to consumer SLS printers.

2. Oculus: crowdfunded first, then acquired by Facebook two years later.

3. Ring: started as Doorbot, created the video-doorbell category and sold to Amazon for ~$1B.

4. Tile: crowdfunded before AirTag existed, acquired by Life360 for $205M.

Presented by Duro: AI-native PLM for hardware teams

Your hardware tech stack starts here. Duro Design PLM is AI-native, API-first, and fully programmable—built to meet the present and leap into the future. Duro centralizes part data, manages change orders, and connects your stack so your team can focus on innovation, not administration.

From out-of-the-box CAD integrations to seamless connections with ERP and MES, make sure your data is accurate at every stage of the product development lifecycle. Whether it’s Altium 365 or Solidworks, Duro’s integrations make integrating PLM into your workflow easy.

Take a tour of Duro for free and see if our PLM solution is right for you. 👇

Interesting Chart: Surface Finish vs. Relative Production Time

Finer surface finish specifications tend to increase manufacturing time exponentially - use the coarsest spec (or no specification at all) when possible.

Interesting Video: The Math Behind the Smith Chart

A great walkthrough of where the Smith chart comes from, the impedance matching chart many EEs first encounter in academia. Candidly, the only useful summary is to watch the full video!

Manufacturing & Startup News

• Neros landed a five-year Army contract worth up to $500M for its Archer FPV drones, with the company aiming for a 100,000 annual production rate by year end.

• ProvenMetal is a new YC S26 startup assembling quick-turn circuit boards out of a garage in San Francisco, hinging on the simple pitch that domestic board assembly should take days not years.

• Machina Labs received a Lockheed Martin qualification contract for a JASSM missile assembly produced with its robotic metal-forming process.

• Agility Robotics is opening a 60k sq. ft robot training facility in Fremont, CA, as it prepares to go public and scale Digit beyond pilot deployments.

Tools From Our Partners

• Aris Machina Proto – Design & validate anything, with the AI-native workspace for industrial science and hardware R&D.

• Jiga – Custom parts at digital speed, with trusted shop access.

• SolidWorks for Startups – Full access to SolidWorks’ product development tools, free for early-stage startups.

• Zoo – AI-native CAD for generating fully editable B-rep models from natural language or direct manipulation.

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Interesting Links

• More often than not, the design lineage in early hardware “markets” fans out across strange solution spaces before converging on a standard form. One particularly good example is World War I tank design. The UK eventually landed on the reasonably effective rhombohedral Mark V, Germany the armadillo-like A7V, and France pioneered the nimble Renault FT-17 (and the less effective Saint Chamond). Before good field data exists, several quite different designs can look right. That makes getting into the real world quickly and cheaply far more important than trying to be perfect out of the gate, when the Pareto-optimal tradeoffs between competing constraints are still unclear. Countering new military technology often requires building competing designs, and rarely allows a nation to export either its design or the manufacturing capacity behind it. Weapons of war often create this environment.

  • The Ukraine-Russia war is producing a similar early-market divergence in drone designs with fiber-optic FPVs, fixed-wing motherships, quadcopters, and more - which oddly enough appears poised to make 100 years of tank evolution moot due to the law of economic warfare. A $1000 drone destroying a $10 million platform is still a $1000 drone destroying a $10 million platform regardless of what cage you weld onto the turret.

• A very practical use of the accelerometers and gyroscopes already inside a smartphone is Apple’s Vehicle Motion Cues used for motion sickness. When you read in a moving car, your inner ear registers acceleration while the screen gives your eyes no corresponding reference; smartphones like the iPhone use their IMU to drive small dots at the edges of the display, giving peripheral vision a cue that moves with the vehicle. This patent (US 12,561,864) describes the same basic mechanism more broadly: a semi-transparent geometric overlay that shifts and contracts with the device’s three-dimensional acceleration, including motion toward or away from the screen. While this capability has been technically possible since the earliest smartphones, it took nearly two decades for a product team to turn the sensor data into a useful human cue.

• If you are ever feeling down about your math skills, remember that Sainte-Chapelle (and almost all ancient architecture) was built by people who never studied formal mathematics or geometry. Using heuristics developed over hundreds of years, the masons of the Sainte-Chapelle Cathedral were able to construct a much more compact arch system without having the ability to do proper calculations or having a standard length unit. By simply using rope, they were able to pin the width of adjoining wall sections to the proper structural characteristics needed to prevent buckling - all by laying rope and folding over the arch and marking specific fractions. While counterintuitive, engineering doesn’t always require science, and it’s a common misconception to think engineering emerged from the scientific method. People built cathedrals before there were architects, or engines before thermodynamics. Theory and formal expertise often arrive later to explain and refine centuries of discovery and practical knowledge.

• The FCC has approved (or declined to deny) Reflect Orbital’s Eärendil-1 test hardware - a giant flying mirror to direct sunlight to solar farms, industrial sites, farms, and other places that wish it were always sunny. The company began with a simple observation: the largest available energy gradient is between the Sun and Earth, yet most of the Sun’s output passes into space. With deployable 59-by-59-foot Mylar mirrors, Reflect Orbital hopes to bend a small portion of that reality back toward the ground. Russia tested a similar concept in the 1990s with its Znamya experiments. The first launch briefly produced a moving patch of light across Europe, while a second mission failed after the reflector became tangled during deployment. While Znamya shuttered after the second deployment, its basic premise has become easier for private companies to revisit (roughly $12k–$32k/kg to LEO in the 1990s, versus $2.7k/kg on Falcon 9). Many more companies like Reflect Orbital represent the start of a new space race predicated on commercial interests.

• Blake Courter’s Moat Map is an attempt to sort through the 200+ companies now claiming some version of generative, AI-native, or radically faster engineering software. The map spans everything from CAD, CAM, EDA, MES, and more of the software alphabet soup. The open question is whether the new wave of tools expands the market, or instead hollows out the incumbents that once controlled it.

• And a couple fun links to round out the week:

  • instro is a new open-source Python library for scripting lab instrumentation (think power supplies, multimeters, electronic loads, DAQs, oscilloscopes, PLCs) through a single API.

  • Our job board now has a company directory showing hiring momentum, seniority, locations, and last posted date, plus salary data based on posted pay ranges.

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Startup News

• Hippo Harvest raised $30M in Series C funding to scale its robotics-enabled indoor growing system for vegetable produce. The company uses autonomous mobile robots inside greenhouses to monitor, tend, harvest, and automatically respace growing modules throughout the crop cycle. The capital will fund a 30-acre expansion at a new Hollister, California facility, and support commercialization of indoor-grown spinach after launching butter lettuce to retail buyers earlier this year. Cox Farms, North America’s largest greenhouse operator, led the round.

  

• Venus Aerospace raised $91M in Series B funding to scale its rotating detonation rocket engine for hypersonic flight and space transportation. Unlike conventional rocket engines, a RDRE generates thrust from a continuously rotating detonation wave, with the promise of higher efficiency and performance. The Houston-based company recently flight-tested a 2,000 pound thrust version at Spaceport America. Mercury Fund led the round, with participation from Lockheed Martin Ventures

• Quaise Energy raised $134 million in a first close of its Series B to build Project Obsidian, a commercial superhot geothermal power plant in central Oregon. The company uses millimeter waves to ablate rock rather than mechanically crush it, aiming to reach 300–500°C rock at depths beyond 5 km, where geothermal systems can produce far more power from a smaller footprint. Quaise recently drilled more than 100 meters through granite at full scale in Texas last year and is now approaching one kilometer, with first grid power targeted at Obsidian for 2030. Prelude Ventures led the round

• Proxima Fusion raised €411 million to build Alpha, a stellarator fusion demonstrator designed to prove that its magnet system can confine superheated plasma long enough to produce net energy. The funding will support a full-scale model coil, high-temperature-superconducting cable and magnet production, and the manufacturing systems required to build Alpha near Munich. XTX Ventures and East X Ventures led the round, with RWE and Google participating.

• Hive raised $15 million in seed funding to retrofit existing heavy equipment with a machine-agnostic autonomous driving system. The company installs sensors and its AI compute module on existing fleets like forklifts, excavators and haulers, then remotely supervises multiple machines through a common control layer rather than requiring customers to buy new autonomous equipment. SuperSeed led the round.

Open Jobs

More jobs added weekly on our job board. If you’re hiring, promote your open role here.

Early Career:

• Northwood is looking for a RF Hardware Engineer (Early Career) in Torrance, CA

Mid-Level:

• Etched is looking for a PCB Layout Engineer in San Jose, CA

• Fluidstack is looking for a Reliability Engineer in Austin, TX

Senior to Staff:

• OpenAI is looking for a Secure Manufacturing Stealth Investigator in San Francisco, CA ($288-425K)

• Formlabs is looking for a Startup Founder in Somerville, MA

Internships:

• HaloBraid is looking for a Mechanical Engineering Co-op (Fall) in Cambridge, MA

Tools From Our Sponsors

Design & Simulation

• Duro — AI-native PLM that centralizes part data, manages change orders, and connects the whole stack so your team can focus on execution, not administration.

• nTop – Computational design to accelerate product development.

• Onshape for Startups – Free access to Onshape Professional or Onshape Government (compliant with ITAR/EAR) for hardware startups and entrepreneurs.

Manufacturing

• Express Manufacturing, Inc. – Southern California’s largest EMS provider with 40+ years of end-to-end electronics manufacturing expertise.

• Fictiv – On-demand custom manufacturing from prototype to production.

• Loombotic – Instant-quote custom wire harnesses. Upload drawings or design online, fast turnaround.

• Blitzpanel – Custom control panels made fast and easy. Design online for instant pricing or let us design for you.

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Interesting Design Challenge: The Local Design Space of High-Speed RC Planes

There are not many ways to get practical experience with aerodynamic systems without working for an aerospace company. Even in industry, the work is often divided into subdisciplines and practitioners see only a portion of the development cycle. RC airplanes are one of the few ways to encounter the whole system at once. They turn aerodynamic theory into something that can be understood through the construction of a real flying machine.

At the far edge of the hobby, there is a simple pleasure in making a small machine move faster than seems reasonable. (See, for example, this turbine-powered RC jet traveling at 451 mph).

That’s the context for a new extremely fast blended-delta aircraft design from a Georgia Tech student, which recently went viral and prompted a discussion about resemblance and influence in high-performance designs.

Tomas’s aircraft is a 5 kg carbon-fiber jet built around a 250 N turbine (yes, you can buy miniature jet engines from suppliers like JetCat and Sierra Turbines), with a stated goal of surpassing 500 mph. The immediate comparison was to Niels Herbrich’s Inferno, which set the official record for a jet-powered RC plane at 465.5 mph in 2017.

At a glance, the resemblance is obvious: both are small, highly swept, delta-like aircraft built around a single turbine and optimized for speed. But Herbrich’s designs are not available to copy; beyond observing their functionality, the details are not public. The aircraft happens to occupy the same local design space while remaining a distinct design, where small changes to the airfoil, inlet geometry, control tuning, or surface finish can materially change behavior.

Perhaps the better takeaway from this is that heavily constrained design problems often converge to very similar results. Thus, it is unsurprising that in design problems such as maximum drone speed, the best performing configurations often look identical to one another.

For more resources, check out this primer on RC model jet engines, adaptations of the same principles used for jetpack designs, and a great presentation on dynamic soaring - the unpowered side of RC flight.

As we’re writing this, Boom announced an $800,000 prize for the first amateur-built RC aircraft to break Mach 1. More on the contest here.

More From Around The Web

• A method for silent speech by holding an ultrasound probe under the chin. Before becoming a popular voice dictation app, Wispr Flow spent three years building an earpiece for the same problem, then decided the hardware was premature for consumer use.

• Taking an inside look at Valar Atomics.

• A simulation of strain-wave gears - making a gearbox flexible for zero backlash.

• Beni by Mondo Robotics is a new camera robot built by a former Tesla Optimus engineer. The Kickstarter campaign has already raised ~$1.5M against a $50K goal.

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Interesting Photo: The B-2 Bomber and Peregrine Falcon

On the topic of convergent designs — similarities between a peregrine falcon and the B-2 bomber. Borges’s On Exactitude in Science and Farnam Street’s The Map Is Not the Territory offer a different angle on what it means to “copy” information.

Manufacturing & Startup News

• Tesla decommissioned the original Model S and Model X assembly line at Fremont a few weeks after ending production, clearing one of its oldest vehicle lines for Optimus.

• 1X unveiled a new 25-DOF tendon-driven hand for NEO; the images and demos are a good look at the mechanical complexity behind tendon-driven hand architectures.

• SambaNova raised $1B in Series F funding at an $11B valuation to scale its AI inference hardware business, betting that large enterprises will want private infrastructure for running large models.

• Amity Robotics raised $7M in seed funding to scale its AI concierge kiosks for malls and hotels.

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Onto the issue: liquidation auctions as a stealth procurement channel for hardware teams, early sketches behind Weave's home robot, a deployment-first definition of "Physical AI," and a taxonomy on the art of debugging circuits.

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Interesting Links

• A loosely guarded secret of hardware teams and engineering lab managers is to scour liquidation auctions for equipment on pennies on the dollar. When companies fold, whole labs go up for sale and you can rebuild yours from the graveyard of past startups. In the Bay Area, liquidators like Silicon Valley Disposition run frequent auctions, and national aggregators like HiBid aggregate listings if you don’t mind arranging freight. Find equipment like lab stools, a Keysight U1253B multimeter, or, if you’re feeling particularly ambitious, the remnants of a $240M+ agriculture autonomy bet: autonomous EV tractors.

• Engineering is often less about what you know and more about knowing how to investigate the unknown. Especially as AI commoditizes access to information and calculation, a cultivated intuition remains uniquely yours. The Art of Debugging Circuits (Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Analog) opens with the question that really matters: is the schematic wrong, or did the circuit on the bench become something else? Practical habits include an emphasis on neat construction to save yourself the debugging pain of tracing wires, using a multimeter’s continuity mode to check for shorts, really understanding how to use an oscilloscope (triggering, coupling modes, 10x vs 1x probes, keeping ground clips on ground), and most importantly, treating debugging as thorough investigation, not random measurement. As Williams puts it - circuits aren’t magical, physics is never wrong, and the apparent conflict between them is a failure of the user’s logic.

IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO EFFECTIVELY DEBUG A CIRCUIT IF YOU DO NOT UNDERSTAND ITS SCHEMATIC AND DO NOT KNOW HOW IT IS SUPPOSED TO WORK.
— Socrates

— D. Elliott Williams

• Weave Robotics launched Isaac 1 last week, and for all the attention around shipping a home robot to customers later this year, the real charm is in the public trail showing how polished hardware once began as a set of approximations. Half-resolved sketches, CAD blocks floating in space, and a loose idea slowly collapsing into constraints. The end result looks inevitable in retrospect, but it almost never feels that way at the beginning.

• For anyone who has felt confused or simply unconvinced by the phrase “Physical AI,” A Boring Definition of Physical AI strips away the marketing theater and provides an actionable definition. The section to pay attention to after the definition is the deployment implication. Once non-deterministic software enters the control loop of a machine, someone has to absorb the variance. In software, a bad output can often be retried, but real machines are not always afforded the same luxury. That pushes value away from “AI” in the abstract and toward whoever owns deployment. The author collapses it into three archetypes: 1) operators who wrap robotics inside a service business, 2) integrators who make these systems work inside someone else’s operation, and 3) robot builders who pick specific verticals where the machine earns its keep.

“Physical AI is non-deterministic software running in the control loop of a machine. A learned policy that perceives through sensors, acts through hardware, and then perceives again as its own actions keep changing the world it is sensing.” — Gabriele Tinelli

• Engineers practice making parts strong. Making one usefully weak is a separate skill - compliant enough to bend, tough enough to survive it. A 2021 review of bending setups provides the basic context for working with and testing flexible electronics: surface strain (and stress) scales as thickness over radius (ε ≈ t/2R), while resistance to bending scales as thickness cubed. Cut a 50 µm film to 25 µm and the strain at a given radius halves while bending stiffness drops eightfold: “weaker” yet more survivable are the same move. Textiles reach the same end from the other side: a load-bearing fiber can’t be thinned without giving up the tension it carries, so you preserve the cross-section and split it into filaments that slide past one another. There is no perfectly strong or compliant material, only the right one for its constraints; soft goods go on soft bodies, and “strong enough” beats as-strong-as-possible at delicate interfaces.

• Sponsored: A useful technical history comes from Quilter on one of EDA’s oldest unresolved promises: the autorouter. Similar to LLMs reviving decades-old neural network ideas with more data and compute, PCB autorouting traces back to early grid-based pathfinding work at Bell Labs in the 1960s, then runs through decades of maze routers, shape-based routers, and tools like Specctra. The premise was always sound: let software do the tedious work of connecting nets. The problem, and the source of so much skepticism from PCB designers, is that traditional autorouters optimized for the narrowest version of the job. Tools measured success exclusively by completion rate (how many nets can be connected without violating design rules). PCB layout is not just routing though; it’s also placement, power distribution, impedance, manufacturability, and the quiet physics that turn connected copper into a board a designer can ship.

• And a couple of fun links to round out the week:

  • Leo from Humba Ventures is hosting a six-week, paid fellowship for operators who want to peek behind the curtain of early-stage deep tech investing. Applications close 7/09.

  • A literal hand screw, complete with a matching bit.

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Startup News

• Queue emerged from stealth with $12.6M in seed funding to build a fully autonomous robotic pharmacy for prescription fulfillment. The startup’s system takes sealed wholesale pill bottles from one end and produces filled prescription vials out the other. The company is targeting pharmacy labor shortages, store closures, and declining unit economics by automating the physical dispensing and verification layer itself, with a working prototype already deployed with a major national pharmacy chain. AlleyCorp led the round following a $6M pre-seed led by Riot Ventures.

• Even Realities raised $150M in pre-Series B funding at a $1B valuation to scale its display first smart glasses. Unlike camera-focused glasses, the Shenzhen-based startup skips the camera and uses a heads-up display built into the frames, controlled by a companion ring. The company says it has sold more than 10,000 pairs with the U.S. now its fastest growing market. Meituan and Tencent led the round.

  • Fun fact: Palmer Luckey was spotted wearing a pair of Even smart glasses during a TED talk last year, using them as a heads-up teleprompter.

• CarbonSix raised $40M in Series A funding to develop robotic intelligence software and robotic hands/manipulators for manufacturing lines. The company is positioning itself around deployment-ready automation tools with systems that can be integrated into factories and improve from task-specific operational data collected during use. The round was co-led by DSC Investment and LB Investment, with participation from Korean and U.S. investors.

• Luxonis raised $14M in Series A funding to scale its machine vision cameras and software for robotics and intelligent automation. The company builds cameras that combine multiple vision sensors with on-device compute, and its open-source software stack for building edge perception systems. The latest devices support local AI models, high-accuracy depth sensing, and low-latency processing for applications like factory floors, warehouses, heavy machinery, and more. Denali Growth Partners led the round.

Open Jobs

More jobs added weekly on our job board. If you’re hiring, promote your open role here.

Early Career:

• Scout AI is looking for a Junior Firmware Engineer in Sunnyvale, CA

Mid-Level:

• OpenAI is looking for a 3D Printing Lab Technician, Robotics in San Francisco, CA ($250-295K)

• Pronto is looking for a Robotics Test Engineer in San Francisco, CA ($298-$376K)

Senior to Staff:

• CoreWeave is looking for a Senior Product Manager (Supply Chain) in Livingston, NJ

• Valar Atomics is looking for a Senior Mechanical Engineer in Hawthorne, CA

Internships:

• The Boring Company is looking for a Mechanical Engineering Intern (Year Long) in Bastrop, TX

Tools From Our Sponsors

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Manufacturing

• Express Manufacturing, Inc. – Southern California’s largest EMS provider with 40+ years of end-to-end electronics manufacturing expertise.

• Fictiv – On-demand custom manufacturing from prototype to production.

• Loombotic – Instant-quote custom wire harnesses. Upload drawings or design online, fast turnaround.

• Blitzpanel – Custom control panels made fast and easy. Design online for instant pricing or let us design for you.

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Interesting Links

• At the start of last year, Meta’s CTO circulated an internal memo titled 2025: The Year of Greatness, framing the company’s metaverse and hardware push as a defining year that likely determines whether this entire effort will go down as the work of visionaries or a legendary misadventure. The evidence is still early, but Meta appears to have found real consumer demand in the simplest version of the category, specifically smart glasses built around cameras/audio without a dedicated in-lens display. EssilorLuxottica (Ray-Ban’s parent company) sold more than 7 million Meta Ray-Bans in 2025, up from roughly 2 million across 2023 and 2024 combined, while revenue tripled in the first half of this year. According to a well-known supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, that demand signal now puts Apple’s original headset-first roadmap in a different light. The company is reportedly focusing on just two smart glasses variants, a display-less AI pair aimed at Meta’s Ray-Bans in 2027 and a more complex waveguide-based AR/XR version pushed to 2029.

• Camera smart glasses are starting to look like a real consumer category. Add a display though, and the product quickly turns back into a precision optics problem. Why the Waveguide Is Blocking Mass-Market AR Glasses is a useful breakdown of the technical bottleneck around the waveguide, the optical element that routes an image from a tiny projector into the eye. Simply stated, today’s waveguides are made from specialty high-index glass wafers, processed in cleanrooms at nanometer-level precision (~30% of BOM cost). That creates a structural dichotomy: the product wants to be sold like consumer eyewear, but the gating component exists today in a manufacturing paradigm not compatible with high-volume, low-cost production. There are several companies claiming polymer waveguides (one monolithic part molded with reflective arrays), but the important caveat is that this is still early and unproven at the volumes the category ultimately needs.

• As cooling demand climbs globally, heat pumps should be scaling fast, and yet residential adoption in the U.S. is still grinding against a friction that’s under-discussed: heat pumps are not yet commodity products. A former rocket propulsion engineer turned HVAC contractor lays out the operating reality well through a comparison to the gas furnace. A gas furnace is boring in the best way; contractors measure the old unit, match the cabinet size, voltage, efficiency tier, and BTU rating (measure of heating output), then install a comparable unit. This is a commodity in practice: a product category reduced to known variables and a repeatable installation workflow. Despite all of their stated advantages, heat pumps do not yet fit that pattern. Instead of swapping a known box into a known opening, contractors are often reconciling ducts, voltage ratings, controls, refrigerant lines, equipment pairings, and load assumptions on a house-by-house basis. Heat pumps are sold like equipment and installed like custom projects, and that gap, more than any technical limitation, is what keeps adoption slower than the opportunity suggests.

• Isotropic means a material behaves the same in every direction. Anisotropic means the axis you load, cut, or measure against changes the answer. Most engineers learn this early in school, then relearn it when a part quietly inherits a preferred direction from the process. It’s common to hear 3D printing flagged for anisotropy as though other processes exclusively produce isotropic parts. Injection molding orients glass fibers along the flow front in materials like glass-filled nylon; the same resin will test differently depending on where you cut the coupon relative to the gate. Rolled sheet develops a crystallographic texture. Forgings follow part geometry with grain flow. Castings have dendritic solidification fronts. FDM just makes the directionality visible because the layers are printed in plain sight. Composite engineers are the ones who design for it explicitly, choosing ply angles to put the strong axis where the load goes. Everyone else inherits and accepts it - the trick is knowing how processing leaves an imprint on final performance.

• Not all cooling requires energy to move heat. A few years ago, researchers at Purdue created a library of metal-oxide suspensions for cheap paint that reflects and radiates heat — capable of reflecting up to 98.1% of incoming solar radiation. While an AC uses compressors to heat up a working fluid and then rejects that heat to a cooler environment, this paint radiates its heat to the cold sink of space to achieve subambient temperatures. The paints are now being commercialized to cool homes where energy is scarce and costly, and to cut AC loads at large facilities like grocery stores. The main drawback is that it only works on surfaces oriented upward, and requires a clear sky to radiate effectively. Fortunately, the radiative particles used to make these paints don’t require exotic or expensive precursors, and can be made at home, as shown here. Not a bad outcome for a project that basically boils down to, “What if we made the whitest color possible?”

• And a couple of fun links to round out the week:

  • Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s founding father, on air conditioning as a theory of development. It changed the nature of civilization by making development possible in the tropics.

  • Related to AR hardware, these are the new Snap Spectacles.

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Startup News

• The return of the SPAC, sprinkled in with humanoid robotics. Agility Robotics plans to go public through a SPAC merger in a deal valuing the company at roughly $2.5B. The Oregon State spinout is best known for Digit, its bipedal warehouse robot, which is already operating across nine customer sites like Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada and Schaeffler. The transaction is expected to bring in more than $620M, which Agility plans to use to scale production of its next-generation Digit v5, fulfill existing orders, and expand deployments with new and existing customers.

• Omen AI raised $31M in Series A funding to monitor coolant health in liquid-cooled AI data centers. The company’s sensors track more than 21 elemental signatures across metal content, biocontamination, and wear patterns, replacing the old model of taking fluid samples and waiting days for lab results. As GPU racks get denser, coolant chemistry becomes a control problem with more heat absorption traded against bacterial growth and expensive downtime. Nava Ventures led the round.

• Rocket Lab agreed to acquire Iridium in an $8B deal that would combine its launch and satellite manufacturing business with Iridium’s satellite communications services. The deal gives Rocket Lab a shortcut to the parts of a constellation business that are slowest to build from scratch, especially the spectrum, distribution, and existing customer base. The deal is expected to close in mid-2027.

• General Intuition raised $320M at a $2.3B valuation to train AI agents using video games as the bridge from simulation to real-world robotics. The company spun out of Medal, a gaming clip platform, giving it access to hundreds of millions of hours of gameplay paired with the underlying player inputs. General Intuition is using that data to build a foundation model for agents across gaming, simulation, robotics, drones, and other controllable systems, though whether gameplay can transfer reliably into the physical world is still the open question. Khosla Ventures led the round.

Open Jobs

More jobs added weekly on our job board. If you’re hiring, promote your open role here.

Sponsored:

• BREAKFAST, an art studio building kinetic sculptures with motors, electronics, and software, is hiring for a Senior Technical Program Manager in Brooklyn, NY.

• Vale Matcha, a startup building automated self-serve matcha bars, is hiring for a Fluid Systems Engineer in Seattle, WA

Early Career:

• Firefly Aerospace is looking for a Firmware Engineer in Cedar Park, TX

Mid-Level:

• Chariot Defense is looking for a Power Electronics Engineer in San Francisco, CA

• OpenAI is looking for a Mechanical Engineer, Soft Goods Design in San Francisco, CA

Senior to Staff:

• Google is looking for a Mechanical Engineer, Advanced Analytics in New York, NY

Tools From Our Sponsors

Design & Simulation

• Duro — AI-native PLM that centralizes part data, manages change orders, and connects the whole stack so your team can focus on execution, not administration.

• nTop – Computational design to accelerate product development.

• Onshape for Startups – Free access to Onshape Professional or Onshape Government (compliant with ITAR/EAR) for hardware startups and entrepreneurs.

Manufacturing

• Express Manufacturing, Inc. – Southern California’s largest EMS provider with 40+ years of end-to-end electronics manufacturing expertise.

• Fictiv – On-demand custom manufacturing from prototype to production.

• Loombotic – Instant-quote custom wire harnesses. Upload drawings or design online, fast turnaround.

• Blitzpanel – Custom control panels made fast and easy. Design online for instant pricing or let us design for you.

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Interesting Video: Battery Claims Meet Test Data

One of the recurring challenges in the battery space is that many investors and even industry observers struggle to distinguish between a promising laboratory result, a prototype, and a scalable commercial product. The gap between those three stages is enormous. Independent technical diligence and validation are critical, especially when extraordinary performance claims are involved.

Donut Lab is facing more criticism after an investigation by science YouTuber Ziroth uncovered several new examples of miscommunication and misleading technical results. For those unaware, Donut Lab set off a frenzy at CES 2026 by claiming a battery that was beyond state of the art across every single battery metric: cost, longevity, energy density, and charging speed. However, subsequent testing was not able to reproduce any of the features, and indicates the battery cell doesn’t use a solid-state sodium chemistry as claimed, but a lithium-ion one.

The battery test data points to a different cell chemistry not through a teardown of the cell itself, but through two battery characterization curves: voltage versus state of charge and cell expansion during charging.

The first breadcrumb is the voltage curve which closely resembles a high nickel lithium-ion cell, sitting in the same 3.7–3.8 V range where NCM type cells operate. The stronger clue is the expansion curve: during charge, it showed the characteristic graphite-anode kink around 50–70% state of charge, a behavior sodium-ion cells should not show because sodium ions are too large to naturally nest inside graphite the way lithium ions do.

If Donut Lab simply claimed a highly performant lithium-ion battery (which they appear to have) for use with partner companies like Verge Motorcycles, the reaction would have been far more measured. Instead, it appears to have fallen into a familiar trap: early technical claims stretch into a company-defining narrative before the underlying evidence can support it.

Extraordinary claims still require ordinary validation.

Interesting Chart: More Objects in Orbit

A record number of objects were launched into space in 2025, mostly small satellites being stacked into commercial constellations.

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Interesting Whitepaper: Edge Processing in mmWave Scanners

A fun artifact from Analog Devices: a vendor whitepaper that walks through the architecture of a modern airport mmWave scanner. Phased-array transmitters and receivers, high channel count ADC capture, and an edge-processing chipset that keeps the main processor from having to manage every part of the scan.

Manufacturing & Startup News

• Copper and Impulse Labs are now in court over battery-integrated induction stoves, turning a nascent appliance category into an IP and safety certification fight.

• Bear Robotics is acquiring Kinisi Robotics, a Bristol startup developing a wheeled humanoid, to move beyond robots that navigate buildings and into robots that can pick, place, and sort objects.

• Sophia Space raised a $7M SAFE, bringing total funding to $22M, to build orbital compute hardware for satellites.

• Upscale AI raised a $190M Series A extension to build networking chips for AI data centers, focused on getting GPUs from different vendors to communicate fast enough for large AI workloads.

Tools From Our Partners

• Jiga – Custom parts at digital speed, with trusted shop access.

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Interesting Links

• Surface Truths: A Practitioner’s Guide to CMF Specification is a useful guide to the messy handoff between a designer’s aesthetic intent and a factory’s actual instructions for color, material, and finish. Digital tools are useful for concepting, but for anything cosmetic, physical samples are the single source of truth. The guide’s framing is to treat CMF less like art and more as a manufacturing instruction set that a supplier can reproduce: CAD callouts, annotated drawings, golden samples, limit samples, texture plaques, SPI/VDI equivalents, durability tests, and inspection criteria. It gets into the unglamorous details too, like why RGB values aren’t useful for production color matching (screens render color differently), why a color spec needs L*a*b* targets and ΔE tolerances (so color can be measured, not argued), and why parts should be checked under multiple lighting conditions for metamerism (two parts can match under one light and drift under another). Every missing CMF callout becomes someone else’s decision, likely at the supplier, and usually not the way intended.

• A good example of CMF hides in plain sight on the PS5 controller, where 40,000 tiny PlayStation symbols function as the grip texture. Tiny squares, circles, triangles, and crosses are formed into the shell of the controller as molten ABS fills microscopic features cut directly into the tool steel. Sony reportedly tested multiple hand-sketched patterns, digitized them, and tuned the texture until it matched the right ergonomic balance. The final pattern uses two height layers, ~15 and 30 microns tall, with larger symbols about half a millimeter wide. Cutting fine details across a curved grip requires the use of a multi-axis laser engraving machine like ones from GF Machining Solutions that specialize in 3D laser texturing. Map a digitized pattern onto the 3D tool surface, then ablate the steel layer by layer.

• In 1943, Kelly Johnson was given 180 days to build America’s first jet fighter. He had it flying in 143, working out of a rented circus tent. That improvised setup became Skunk Works, the Lockheed shop behind the U-2, F-117, and SR-71, which held the air speed record for half a century. Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed is the source text to read unabridged, but if you’re short on time, this article distills Johnson’s 14 rules as a playbook for replicating the model: restrict headcount “in an almost vicious manner,” fund the program on time so nobody’s “running to the bank,” and push authority down toward ICs as possible. It also recommends paying the best ICs far more to remove the inexorable pull toward managing growing teams. Vannevar Bush pioneered related practices in the 1940s, keeping civilian scientists out of the military’s chain of command and on separate funding so radar and the proximity fuse could get out the door. For more on Bush’s philosophy, we recommend reading Pieces of the Action and As We May Think, his 1945 essay that anticipated the personal computer and the web.

• A couple new product announcements made headlines last week:

  • Midjourney, of all companies, announced a medical division developing a full-body ultrasound scanner. The proposed experience is closer to a spa visit than traditional radiology: step onto a platform, get lowered into a shallow pool of warm water, and pass through a ring of ultrasound transducers that reconstruct a 3D map of the body. The hardware licenses Butterfly Network’s ultrasound-on-chip technology, and the current version uses 40 chips, roughly 8,960 active transducer channels, and ~2 petaflops of compute to process 17 GB/s of raw acoustic data per scan. The skepticism is obvious: medical hardware is a regulated, validation-heavy category with slow development cycles; but the more interesting part is that a profitable, venture-free AI company is treating hardware as the next frontier. Midjourney’s founder has been open about the company strategy as less an AI platform play, and more of a well-funded lab for pursuing specific interests. He frames it as build one less data center and spend the money on “crazy science projects.”

  

  • Opal Camera is rebranding to Opal Electronics and moving into AI hardware, starting with an audio device reportedly launching in the next few months. Opal had previously sold more than 50,000 webcams and manufactured in Taiwan. As it shifts focus, the company is taking a notably un-Silicon Valley approach to sunsetting its webcams by pledging to open-source the design files, PCB schematics, and software so owners can keep them running.

• A couple fun links to round out the week — two libraries that double as architectural feats and an interesting opportunity:

  • Biblioteca Vasconcelos in Mexico City, with floating stacks of books suspended above.

• Qatar National Library in Doha, where the shelves are built into the slope of the building itself.

• EEVblog, the long-running corner of the electronics engineering internet, is hiring an engineering content creator in Sydney, Australia. Of the now 2,000+ video catalog, a personal favorite is his first principles debunking of long-range wireless charging.

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Startup News

• XDOF emerged from stealth with $70M in funding to build the data layer for robot foundation models. In practice, that means teleoperation rigs, collection workflows, cleaning tools, and annotation systems for labs that do not want to run giant robot data farms themselves. The company grew out of Berkeley research on GELLO (a low-cost robot arm teleoperation system), and says it already has 20 customers including frontier AI labs.

• Limitless Labs raised a $20M Series A round to build AI tools for CNC programming. The company’s software sits inside existing CAD/CAM workflows, reads a design file, checks it against the target machine’s constraints, then helps select tools, plan operations, and generate toolpaths. The company says it is now in production with customers including Blue Origin, Cadillac Formula 1, and ISCAR, among others. The round was led by Dell Technologies Capital and Square Peg.

• Odyssey raised a $310M Series B round at a $1.45B valuation to build general world models, or AI systems that can simulate physical environments and act inside them. The company has released several research systems focused on physics accuracy and multi-modal interaction. The round was led by Natural Capital, with participation from Amazon, AMD Ventures, Google Ventures, EQT, and In-Q-Tel.

• Superlight raised a $21M Series A round to build electric box trucks for middle-mile logistics. The company’s first design is a clean-sheet EV truck designed around cargo volume and energy use, with the company claiming 50% more cargo capacity and 50% lower energy expense than comparable trucks. Superlight has logged 500,000+ kilometers of powertrain mileage, including commercial pilots in the UK, and plans to use the funding to finish its UK manufacturing facility and prepare vehicles for US customer testing. The round was co-led by Engine Ventures and 2150.

Open Jobs

More jobs added weekly on our job board. If you’re hiring, promote your open role here.

Sponsored:

• GITAI, a space startup building robots for satellite servicing and lunar infrastructure, is hiring for a Mechanical Engineer in Los Angeles, CA

Early Career:

• Base Power Company is looking for a Hardware Test Engineer in Austin, TX

• Qualcomm is looking for a Systems Engineer (Sensors) in Santa Clara, CA

Mid-Level:

• Xometry is looking for a Mechanical Engineer, AI Integration in Waltham, MA

• Last Energy is looking for a Thermofluids Engineer in Austin, TX

Senior to Staff:

• Astranis is looking for a Senior Director of Vehicle Engineering in San Francisco, CA

• Form Energy is looking for a Staff Global Supply Manager (Stamped Metals) in Berkeley, CA

Tools From Our Sponsors

Manufacturing

• Express Manufacturing, Inc. – Southern California’s largest EMS provider with 40+ years of end-to-end electronics manufacturing expertise.

• Fictiv – On-demand custom manufacturing from prototype to production.

• Loombotic – Instant-quote custom wire harnesses. Upload drawings or design online, fast turnaround.

• Blitzpanel – Custom control panels made fast and easy. Design online for instant pricing or let us design for you.

Design & Simulation

• nTop – Computational design to accelerate product development.

• Onshape for Startups – Free access to Onshape Professional or Onshape Government (compliant with ITAR/EAR) for hardware startups and entrepreneurs.

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Interesting Links

• Tesla’s Cybertruck body repair manual is a useful counterpoint to the open repairability question around gigacasting. If you replace several dozen stamped and welded parts with a few giant aluminum castings, does local damage become a total-loss event? The answer appears to be, treat the casting less like a sacred monolith and more like any other structural part: cut out the damaged section, bond and rivet in a replacement piece, and use a crash-durable adhesive like Fusor 2098 to restore the joint. Using glue may sound odd, but adhesives in automotives are not new; they’ve become standard fixtures in the assembly/repair playbook especially as more OEMs mix aluminum, steel, and composites in the same structure. The more interesting move is treating a gigacasting as a sectionable part. Depending on the damage location, a technician can cut areas like the rear end, underbody, or larger casting sections, then bond and rivet in a donor piece. Interestingly enough, the castings already come with sectioning reference lines molded directly into the part.

  • A bit more about crash-durable adhesives: Fusor 2098 is rated at 22 MPa (3,200 psi) tensile strength, and belongs to a broader category of two-part automotive repair epoxies. JerryRigEverything has a great demo showing why the word “glue” undersells what these materials are capable of, by literally lifting his Cybertruck with a single 2.5-inch glued joint.

• In 2014, Google and IEEE hosted a competition called The Little Box Challenge, offering $1M to anyone who could pack a 2 kW power inverter into under 40 cubic inches, about one tenth the state-of-the-art at the time. The Little Box Challenge, 10 Years Later asks what that prize money actually produced, and the answer is: no breakthrough in the traditional sense, but a revitalization of power electronics that led to surprising innovations in other areas. One group pulled the flying-capacitor topology long stuck in academia back into the running, betting that gallium-nitride (GaN) switches had matured, magnetics would be the limit on density, and computation and sensing could now handle the topology’s complexity. That design didn’t win, but a separate entry’s work on the ceramic-capacitor losses behind the 120 Hz ripple buffer later carried over to full-sine motor drives. Not all progress is direct in academia (or life), but curious exploration out in the open can become a public good.

• If you’ve ever managed a shared CAD folder out of Google Drive, you already understand the basic premise behind PDM/PLM even if you’ve never heard the acronyms before. At some point, the problem stops being file storage and becomes product control. How PLM works: a primer for engineers to top managers (or anyone, really) is a good plain English explainer of how those acronyms map to the real work around keeping files, part numbers, revisions, BOMs, approvals, and supplier handoffs tied to the same version of reality. PDM, or product data management, is the engineering layer: the vault, metadata, revision history, and parent-child relationships behind a CAD assembly. PLM, or product lifecycle management, extends that discipline past engineering into manufacturing, supply chain, quality, and the outside organizations that eventually have to build the product.

• Architecture of Consoles is an architecture and board-level archive of nearly every video game console ever made, starting from 1983 to 2012. In retrospect, some of these designs probably never should have seen the light of day, but the early race to commercialize gaming produced a few truly novel attempts to win the market. In the “fifth generation” of consoles in the mid-1990s, 3D was the new frontier, so every company made a different bet. Nintendo’s was the Virtual Boy, which faked stereoscopic depth by sweeping a single column of red LEDs across each eye with a mirror oscillating fifty times per second. It sold 770,000 units and halted production after a year.

• A 2026 version of the old Southern California aerospace corridor, shifting from primes into new-age startups and neoprimes. Click here for the interactive version, along with more regional maps like the Bay Area and Seattle.

Presented by Onshape: Professional Access, 6 Months Free

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Startup News

• Standard Bots raised a $200M Series C round at a $1B valuation to scale U.S. built industrial robots. The company manufactures industrial robot arms that can be taught by demonstration, targeting factory tasks like machining, welding, palletizing, assembly, and inspection. They’re expanding its Glen Cove, New York facility to 70,000 sq ft and says it is on pace to deliver 10% of new U.S. industrial robot deployments by next year. The round was led by RoboStrategy, with participation from General Catalyst.

• Podium Automation raised a $18M Series A round to scale quick-turn manufacturing for industrial control panels, the electrical cabinets that control factory equipment and other automated systems. The Brooklyn startup uses software to connect customer requirements, eCAD design, component selection, and UL 508A validation, cutting panel lead times from 12+ weeks to under 4. Construct Capital led the round, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Transition Ventures, Sunflower Capital, and Banter Capital.

• Fabri raised $13.5M in total funding to build a more automated approach to investment casting, the old foundry process used for complex metal parts. The MIT spinout uses 3D-printed wax patterns and production software to cut down on the labor-heavy parts of casting, especially mold prep and post-cast rework (read Issue #110 for a primer on the general methodology). Fabri is already shipping castings to customers including Lockheed Martin and RTX, and is setting up a second foundry targeted for full production in 2027.

• NOX METALS raised an $11.5M seed round to expand domestic metal supply for U.S. manufacturers. The company says it has shipped metal to hundreds of American factories since launching production seven months ago. The round was led by Hyperion, with participation from Palmer Luckey, Y Combinator, RoboStrategy, Operator Collective, and others.

• Neura Robotics raised a Series C round of up to $1.4B for humanoid robots, with the full amount reportedly tied to performance milestones. The Germany-based company is now one of Europe’s biggest robotics bets, with backing from a mix of U.S. tech giants and European industrial players like Nvidia, Amazon, Bosch, and Schaeffler.

Open Jobs

More jobs added weekly on our job board. If you’re hiring, promote your open role here.

Early Career:

• Whoop is looking for an Embedded Engineer in Boston, MA

Mid-Level:

• Rivian is looking for a Product Design Engineer (Charging Products) in Torrance, CA

• Hadrian is looking for a Process Engineer (Sheet Metal Manufacturing, Special Projects) in Los Angeles, CA

Senior to Staff:

• Vast is looking for a Director of Satellite Engineering in Long Beach, CA

• OpenAI is looking for an Electrical Engineer, Robotics in San Francisco, CA

Internships:

• Tesla is looking for a Climate Controls Calibration Intern (Fall 2026) in Palo Alto, CA

Tools From Our Sponsors

Manufacturing

• Express Manufacturing, Inc. – Southern California’s largest EMS provider with 40+ years of end-to-end electronics manufacturing expertise.

• Fictiv – On-demand custom manufacturing from prototype to production.

• Loombotic – Instant-quote custom wire harnesses. Upload drawings or design online, fast turnaround.

• Blitzpanel – Custom control panels made fast and easy. Design online for instant pricing or let us design for you.

Design & Simulation

• nTop – Computational design to accelerate product development.

• Onshape for Startups – Free access to Onshape Professional or Onshape Government (compliant with ITAR/EAR) for hardware startups and entrepreneurs.

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Interesting Overview: Starlink's Phased Array Antenna

Internet access is near ubiquitous, yet it’s still surprisingly young infrastructure. It feels like a utility, something so embedded in daily life that you only notice it when it disappears. But unlike water, power, or gas, its quality still varies wildly depending on where you live, and the infrastructure is still early enough to be actively rewritten in real-time.

Short of deorbiting a satellite, the most interesting piece of Starlink that users can get their hands on is the user terminal, and this is one of the best technical breakdowns of how ‘Dishy McFlatface’ steers a beam at a satellite crossing the sky at 27,000 km/h.

Before Starlink, phased array antennas mostly lived in applications where cost wasn’t the binding constraint. Think applications like military radar, maritime terminals, or niche commercial satcom products running tens of thousands of dollars per unit. The reason is visible once Dishy is opened (and also why SpaceX subsidizes the terminal): it’s a 55 cm PCB covered with 1,280 small patch antennas, arranged in a hexagonal grid and coordinated by front-end modules and beamforming chips. A normal satellite dish points by moving the whole reflector, whereas a phased array antenna like Dishy points by coordinating many small antennas so they behave like one larger antenna.

There are finer points to the physics worth reading slowly, and Curtis does them full justice: flat patch antennas on the PCB, phase shifting to electronically steer a beam, and how tiny antennas constructively interfere into a signal 3,500 times stronger than any one of them alone.

A related note, in the same vein of how impossible businesses can become ordinary technology, is this perspective from Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s president and COO:

“I think engineers think better when they’re pushed hardest to do great things in a very short period of time, with very few resources. Not when you have twenty years,” Shotwell said. “I don’t think there’s a motivation or a drive there.”

More From Around The Web

• Andrew McCalip, Varda’s head of R&D, went viral this week for building an ad network on Claude Code’s progress bar.

• A collection of founder horror stories from VC pitch meetings.

• Lego continues to be the most useful medium for explaining mechanical principles.

• A DIY elevator for a shop loft. The full build instructions, and companion video.

• More related to Starlink: a black-box security evaluation of the user terminal.

• Mapping WHOOP data to calendar meetings to rank the most stressful coworkers.

Presented by Jiga: Manufacturing ≠ Transactions

Source custom parts with direct access to the manufacturers making them. No middleman, no black box. Jiga gives you a vetted network and one accountable partner standing behind every order. You know who's building your parts and communicate with them directly. AI-assisted operations handle supplier matching, quoting, quality verification, and production tracking, so the relationships stay human while the operations run at speed.

Interesting Diagram: Black Magic Design

A chaotic web of circles known as the Smith chart, that’s really a map to see how impedance changes along a transmission line and how much signal will reflect back.

Manufacturing & Startup News

• Endurance Energy raised $54M in Series A funding to build offshore geothermal power plants that turn seafloor heat into baseload electricity.

• One of the first public examples of an unmanned surface vessel doing operational work for the Navy was a Saronic Corsair recovering two Apache crew members near the Strait of Hormuz.

• Reaxiomatic raised $7.25M in pre-seed funding for a stealth aerospace/defense hardware startup led by former Hermeus co-founder Skyler Shuford.

• Orbital raised $5M in pre-seed funding to build AI data centers in low Earth orbit, starting with a 2027 Pathfinder mission.

Tools From Our Partners

• Jiga – Custom parts at digital speed, with trusted shop access.

• SolidWorks for Startups – Full access to SolidWorks’ product development tools, free for early-stage startups.

• Zoo – AI-native CAD for generating fully editable B-rep models from natural language or direct manipulation.

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Interesting Links

• Application notes occupy a strange and useful corner of engineering writing. Simply defined, these are technical guides from component makers showing engineers how to design real circuits around their parts: equal parts practical, specific, occasionally funny, and one of the few places where the author is still allowed to sound like a person. At their best, they read like a senior engineer passing craft to an apprentice they will never meet, with some of the most memorable application notes now cultural artifacts of the early analog era. Jim Williams’ Switching Regulators for Poets: A Gentle Guide for the Trepidatious is one of the great examples that is a guide to the LT1070 switching regulator family, but really about making a feared circuit topology approachable to engineers. Williams walks through five working circuits of increasing difficulty: a 5V-to-12V boost, two –48V telecom supplies (one isolated through a transformer, one not), a 100W off-line switcher that rectifies the AC wall outlet directly, and a pair of loops driving a small motor and a Peltier cooler.

  • A switching regulator converts one DC voltage to another (up, down, or across an isolation barrier) by rapidly switching a transistor and using an inductor to transfer energy between input and output. More efficient than the linear regulators they replaced and common in nearly every modern electronic device; has a reputation for being difficult to design.

• SPICE, or ‘Simulation Program with Integrated Circuit Emphasis’, began in the early 1970s at Berkeley as a circuit simulation program for analog electronics, and over time became part of the default workflow for circuit design. Describe a circuit in software, and it will tell you what the circuit should do before you build the thing on a bench. What’s All This Spicey Stuff, Anyhow? is Bob Pease’s four-part monologue about what was lost in that transition, and a warning against the seemingly innocuous habit of letting tools do your thinking for you. The broader point isn’t that SPICE was useless, but with newer and better tools it becomes easier to mistake output for understanding (think CAD, FEA, autorouters, now AI copilots). Every generation gets its own version of this trap that boil down to the same truth: tools should confirm your understanding, not generate it.

Once, a customer called me up and asked me how to get my LM108s to stop oscillating in his circuit. He explained it was a simulated LM108 with some simulated feedback resistors, and simulated switches and filters. Hmmmm. I asked if he has made up a breadboard, and if it oscillated. He said he had made it and it didn’t oscillate. Hmmmm. I asked him, “If you build up a breadboard and a computer model, and the real breadboard oscillated, but the computer did not, you wouldn’t be calling up to complain, would you?” He stopped and thought about it. He cogitated for a while. He said, “I’ll call you back.” And he hung up. He never did call back. I mean, what would you do?

• Bill Hammack, better known as The Engineer Guy, has another instant classic on the engineering behind bicycle helmets. A helmet has three jobs: prevent penetration, reduce peak impact force, and, in newer designs, limit rotational acceleration of the skull. The outer shell protects against sharp objects and keeps the foam intact while the expanded polystyrene liner (same material family as packing peanuts, much denser in helmet designs) does the real work by crushing on impact and spreading the impulse over a longer period of time. Most of the wave/honeycomb inner shells that protect from rotational injury make use of auxetic structures that crumple and fold in selective directions — a property that, unlike regular hexagonal meshes, also allows them to conform to the curved surface of a human head.

• The Toyota Production System (TPS) Basic Handbook is a 33-page primer on the ideas that became modern lean manufacturing, before half of them were converted into conference room names and corporate manufacturing theater. Just-in-Time (JIT) was coined by Kiichiro Toyoda in 1937 because Toyota was too poor to carry excess inventory or equipment; the discipline means producing only what’s needed, when it’s needed, in the quantity needed. Jidoka, the system’s second pillar, is centered around the idea that automation makes intelligent decisions. Machines are designed to stop themselves at the first sign of trouble rather than keep running and compounding the defect. That automatic stop frees operators from monitoring duty and puts them to higher-leverage work. The core idea is to design the system so problems surface immediately, then fix the cause instead of padding the process with inventory, labor, or hidden workarounds.

• We highly recommend reading Casey Handmer’s Career Development Guide for Job Seekers in full. It’s written from the perspective of a former NASA/JPL engineer turned startup founder at Terraform, and is full of truthful career nuggets you rarely hear stated plainly.

Working at NASA (or any other company that’s big or old enough to have recursive process control meta-documents) has institutionalized you. If you insist on only working at companies with processes compatible to the very peculiar way things were done at JPL, you are cutting yourself off from 99.999% of the opportunity described in the previous paragraph. Therefore, to have the best chance of turning your career around in a productive way, you need to recognize this fact and take active measures to de-institutionalize yourself with maximum urgency and maximum effort.

• And one fun link to round out the week:

  • Testing the most popular 3D prints on MakerWorld - the standout is this standby dock for iPhones.

• A quick question for you: would you watch video podcasts/interviews from our team, or should we stick to writing and go even deeper? I’ve been increasingly tempted by expanding formats, but keep coming back to a line Dwarkesh wrote in his podcast strategy doc — if he, as a host, can’t extract real insight from hours of conversation, the audience won’t either.

Presented by Onshape: Professional Access, 6 Months Free

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Learn more below. 👇

Startup News

• PhysicsX raised $300M in Series C funding at a ~$2.4B valuation to expand its AI engineering simulation platform. The London-based startup builds models that predict how physical systems behave, letting aerospace, automotive, and semiconductor teams test design changes faster than conventional simulation workflows. The company expects revenue close to $50M this year and counts Applied Materials, Siemens, and Stellantis as customers. Temasek led the round, with Nvidia and Applied Materials returning as investors.

• Westmag emerged from stealth with $11M in seed funding to manufacture drone motors and robot actuators in the U.S. The company is ramping production in South SF, where it designs, winds, assembles, and tests motors and actuators on a shared production platform. Westmag says it already has committed customer orders for hundreds of thousands of units and is investing upstream in stator steel stamping and rare earth magnet finishing. Andreessen Horowitz led the round, with Founders Fund, Lux Capital, NFDG, and Menlo Ventures participating.

• Red Metals raised $10M in seed funding to recover copper from scrap and turn it directly into copper rod. The Charleston-based startup is building a $70M facility in South Carolina that will sort copper from discarded products like electric motors and wiring, then skip several intermediate refining steps normally used in mined copper production. Red Metals says the U.S. collects roughly 1.6M metric tons of copper scrap annually, compared with about 2M metric tons of new copper demand, and plans to build its own supply chain from consumers, data centers, and other large scrap sources. Gigascale Capital led the round.

• Mach Industries raised $300M in Series C funding to scale production of autonomous defense systems. The company has five systems in development, including a jet-powered VTOL aircraft, high-altitude weapons glider, airborne surveillance platform, low-cost counter-drone interceptor, and long-range munitions launcher. Infinite Capital and Ribbit Capital led the round.

• Helion raised $465M in Series G funding to build Orion, its first fusion power plant, with a target to deliver electricity to Microsoft as early as 2028. The Washington-based company has now raised $1.5B total and is using the capital to scale manufacturing and move from prototype machines toward commercial deployment. Helion’s reactor uses pulsed magnetic compression, then attempts to convert the expanding plasma’s magnetic-field energy directly into electricity instead of using heat to boil water and spin a turbine. Thrive Capital led the round.

Open Jobs

More jobs added weekly on our job board. If you’re hiring, promote your open role here.

Early Career:

• Shinkei is looking for a Build Mechanical Engineer in El Segundo, CA

• Hermeus is looking for a Propulsion Development Engineer in Los Angeles, CA

Mid-Level:

• Snap is looking for an Electrical Signal Integrity Engineer in Boulder, CO

• Doordash is looking for an Electrical Engineer (Dot) in Oakland, CA

Senior to Staff:

• unspun is looking for a Head of Textile Engineering in Emeryville, CA

• Prolific Machines is looking for a Senior Software Platform Engineer in Emeryville, CA

Tools From Our Sponsors

Manufacturing

• Express Manufacturing, Inc. – Southern California’s largest EMS provider with 40+ years of end-to-end electronics manufacturing expertise.

• Fictiv – On-demand custom manufacturing from prototype to production.

• Loombotic – Instant-quote custom wire harnesses. Upload drawings or design online, fast turnaround.

• Blitzpanel – Custom control panels made fast and easy. Design online for instant pricing or let us design for you.

Design & Simulation

• nTop – Computational design to accelerate product development.

• Onshape for Startups – Free access to Onshape Professional or Onshape Government (compliant with ITAR/EAR) for hardware startups and entrepreneurs.

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Interesting Presentation: Building a 100 Robot Data Factory

An emergent trend in modern robotics is the premise of a data factory. We usually think of factories as places that turn raw materials into finished goods — think stamped steel into cars, resin into molded parts, silicon into chips. In robotics, a new version of this idea is taking shape, one where the input is robot operation itself and the finished product is training data.

Tutor Intelligence’s Data Factory 1 is a 100 robot farm of bimanual manipulators that the company says collects up to 1,000 hours of demonstration data per day. Each robot has two 6-DoF arms, stereo RGBD cameras on each wrist, and a fleet of remote operators to supervise in real time (one operator per robot, or 1:N) and intervene when a robot gets stuck.

The core bet echoes a familiar lesson from hardware development: you learn best by building and testing things in the real world, not by perfecting them in simulation or on static datasets. The founders framed it as sending robots to kindergarten where operators demonstrate tasks, the robots attempt them autonomously, and when they fail, a human steps in with a correction that gets folded back into the model. The more robots deployed, the faster edge cases surface, and the faster the policies improve.

A related but distinct idea is emerging in life sciences with Medra also operating a fleet of one hundred robots in a dedicated facility. While Tutor’s factory uses robotic arms to produce training data as its finished product, Medra’s approach is to give models a body to work with for wet lab experiments. Similar approaches: one factory outputs data, the other outputs experiments.

Interesting Video: Meditative Machining

Machining ASMR, and a man using a lathe with the confidence of someone who knows exactly which rules are optional.

Interesting Chart: USB-C Power Delivery Basics

USB-C power delivery is a deterministic sequence: two configuration channel pins (CC1 and CC2) detect cable orientation, establish source and sink roles, and bring the connection up safely at 5V. From there, USB PD negotiates higher voltages over the active CC line, and in higher-current cases, also checks the cable’s own rating before allowing more power through.

This is also in part how you end up with a “universal” serial port - the port itself is universal, but what it agrees to do is very much not.

DRCY: AllSpice’s AI Design Review Agent

Meet DRCY, AllSpice’s AI-powered agent built specifically for hardware design reviews. DRCY runs first-pass checks on schematics and datasheets to surface critical errors early, such as config errors, voltage mismatches, and much more. Hardware teams can spend less time on rechecks, more time innovating, and ship with confidence.

Give DRCY a try here.

Manufacturing & Startup News

• Layup Parts raised $42M in Series A funding to build a faster quoting and manufacturing workflow for custom carbon fiber and fiberglass parts.

• Terra AI raised $20M in Series A funding to build subsurface modeling software for mining, geothermal, and carbon storage.

• Volition was acquired by Siemens Digital Industries Software, expanding Supplyframe beyond electronics search and sourcing into mechanical and industrial parts.

• Volund Manufacturing raised $12M in seed funding to build small gas turbine engines for drones and low-cost missiles.

Tools From Our Partners

• Jiga – Custom parts at digital speed, with trusted shop access.

• SolidWorks for Startups – Full access to SolidWorks’ product development tools, free for early-stage startups.

• Zoo – AI-native CAD for generating fully editable B-rep models from natural language or direct manipulation.

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Interesting Links

• In honor of the Fitbit Air launch: the wearable accuracy landscape plotted by heart-rate accuracy vs. sleep staging across the major devices. Measured against a chest strap for HR and a Dreem 2 EEG headband for sleep stages.

• Building the American Actuator Company is Parth Ingle’s account of why the hard part of brushless motor production turns out to be the factory, not the motor. Actuator and motor design can feel abstract (especially when dealing with electromagnetics), but the build sequence is less exotic than it sounds. Simply follow the order of operations: 1) machine the housings and rotors, 2) wind the stators, 3) insert the magnets, 4) press-fit the subassemblies and close the motor, 5) run QC. The more interesting engineering lesson is the tooling decision. Saturn’s thesis is that in the medium-complexity production regime, building custom line machinery can outcompete specialized toolmakers, especially when factoring in lead times. An OTS magnet-insertion machine cost $12k+ and took 45 days to ship; their in-house version cost $900 and can dispense glue and push arc magnets into a rotor in about 60 seconds. Their next CNC mill design is expected to cost ~$7k and replace an ~$80k commercial machine. Instead of waiting months or debugging machines they didn’t design, Saturn’s bet is that by owning tooling, they can stand up lines faster and encode the process internally. Equally important, Parth notes that QC and metrology are not areas they want to spend cycles on. Good to know what you don’t know.

• A good argument for synchronous modeling comes from Matt Lombard, a SolidWorks expert best known for the SolidWorks Bible, who spent most of his career writing best-practice guides for the opposite paradigm. Before the recent AI CAD wave, this was the dominant CAD debate: should models preserve the history of how they were built, or should the final geometry be all that matters? History-based CAD treats the feature tree as the source of truth; synchronous modeling treats the geometry as the source of truth. Lombard’s point is that a lot of CAD “best practice” exists to manage the fragility of history-based models. The catch is that the best direct-modeling workflows, especially NX, are usually locked behind enterprise licensing. Plasticity is a tool we’ve heard of in recent conversations that offers the same basic promise: direct modeling for complex CAD, at a fraction of the cost.

“I found models that had all of the history of how a person got to where they were: add some geometry, cut some away, add more, cut more. Every change was a new feature. From a history-based point of view, people who modeled like this looked like idiots. But from an independent point of view, why not? They were just doing what was intuitive. Why should it matter how you got where you are?

When the only method you have is history-based design, you spend a significant amount of effort just making that run properly. But it turns out most of that is unnecessary. Stop worrying about ‘how,’ and put more energy into design. Or just go home earlier every day.”

• A grab bag of useful supplier lists, new prototyping tools, and other things worth checking out:

  • itera.co is a new prototyping tool for building reconfigurable, single-layer circuit boards with liquid metal traces. The technical lineage looks like it follows recent work from the MIT Media Lab and Michael Dickey’s research group at NC State on programmable continuous electrowetting. The basic idea is to move gallium-based liquid-metal droplets across a flat surface using small voltages. Laser-patterned graphene regions on the surface can then make the metal move forward, stop, or reverse direction. In effect, the liquid metal becomes a rewritable trace instead of fixed copper traces. (AJ, the founder, has been a longtime Hardware FYI reader, and we’re especially curious to try it ourselves).

    

  • On supplier lists, see Cove Design’s preferred vendor list (4/26) and partsmadefast.com, a WIP directory for quick-turn manufacturers. Anecdotally, almost every company keeps its own preferred vendor spreadsheet by process. You work with the shops you trust!

  • Matternet’s SPAC filing offers a rare look at the economics of one drone delivery company. 15 years after founding, Matternet did $393k in revenue last year, lost $31M, and is now pursuing a reverse merger to raise another $33M.

• Frontier LLM labs are attempting to prove that cheap symbolic reasoning can transform vast amounts of white collar work. World models are the same bet placed on 3D space, that a model trained to predict how physical scenes evolve can generalize to manipulation the way transformers generalized to language. Chris Paxton’s overview maps three competing families doing this with different architectures and contested names, which is probably the most accurate signal of where the frontier actually sits. The field roughly splits into three camps: action-conditioned world models, which predict future states from robot actions; video world models, which generate the desired future scene and recover actions afterward through inverse dynamics; and joint world-action models, which try to predict the scene and the action together. Many of the approaches use the word “dream”, which is particularly apt for the desired functionality.

Presented by Protolabs: Design for Moldability Toolkit

​​Designing plastic parts for injection molding means balancing cost, quality, and manufacturability, and small geometry decisions can drive big changes in lead time and tooling complexity. Protolabs’ Design for Moldability Toolkit is a practical resource for engineers working through common molding challenges like draft, wall thickness, undercuts, gating, and shut-offs. Protolabs also provides automated design analysis on CAD models to highlight features that can be adjusted before cutting a tool. Use it to reduce quoting advisories and accelerate production readiness. Accelerate your design today.

Startup News

• Itera emerged from stealth with $12M in seed funding to build reconfigurable “fluid circuit boards” that use electrowetting to move liquid metal traces across a glass substrate. The idea is to let engineers test real components on a physically rewired circuit without waiting for another PCB spin. The claim is still early, but the bottleneck is very real: electronics iteration is traditionally gated by board fab, assembly, and bring-up cycles. The round was led by Upfront Ventures, Costanoa Ventures, and Colle Capital.

• Alfred, a stealth physical AI startup backed by Sam Altman’s Hydrazine Capital, is raising at a $40M valuation. The product is still under development, but the publicly reported pitch appears to be an ‘AI-assisted engineering toolchain’ for shortening R&D cycles across automotive, defense, and robotics. Khosla Ventures, SV Angel, and Chapter One are also backing the round.

• Picogrid raised $45M in Series A funding to build middleware for modern defense systems. The El Segundo startup connects sensors, drones, software, edge compute, and other military systems so operators can field new hardware without rebuilding the network each time. Picogrid says its platform is already deployed with U.S. and allied forces and supports 100+ defense systems from vendors like Skydio, Northrop Grumman, Neros, and others. Bessemer Venture Partners led the round.

• Thea Energy raised $100M in Series B funding to expand manufacturing for its stellarator fusion magnets and begin construction of Eos, its demonstration reactor. The company’s bet is that stellarators (twisted magnetic fusion reactors) can be made more manufacturable by using smaller, software-tuned planar magnets to shape the plasma field inside a simpler reactor geometry. The demonstration reactor is targeted for 2030, with a commercial Helios reactor planned for 2034. U.S. Innovative Technology Fund led the round.

• The U.S. government is reportedly in talks to fund domestic drone companies, including companies like Neros, Unusual Machines, and Performance Drone Works. The proposals under discussion include debt and equity financing, which could give the government ownership stakes in strategic drone suppliers.

Open Jobs

More jobs added weekly on our job board. If you’re hiring, promote your open role here.

Early Career:

• Neros is looking for an Electrical Engineer in Torrance, CA

Mid-Level:

• Overland AI is looking for a Mission Success Program Manager in Seattle, WA

• Hadrian is looking for a Manufacturing Engineer, DFM in Los Angeles, CA

Senior to Staff:

• The Exploratorium is looking for an Exhibit Engineer in San Francisco, CA

• OpenAI is looking for an Actuator Design Engineer in San Francisco, CA

Internships:

• Astranis is looking for a Reliability Test Intern (Fall 2026) in San Francisco, CA

Tools From Our Sponsors

Manufacturing

• Express Manufacturing, Inc. – Southern California’s largest EMS provider with 40+ years of end-to-end electronics manufacturing expertise.

• Fictiv – On-demand custom manufacturing from prototype to production.

• Loombotic – Instant-quote custom wire harnesses. Upload drawings or design online, fast turnaround.

• Blitzpanel – Custom control panels made fast and easy. Design online for instant pricing or let us design for you.

Design & Simulation

• nTop – Computational design to accelerate product development.

• Onshape for Startups – Free access to Onshape Professional or Onshape Government (compliant with ITAR/EAR) for hardware startups and entrepreneurs.

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Interesting Manufacturing Process: Thermoforming and the Art of the Niche

Last week, a post crossed my feed about a homemade thermoformer used at OAM USA.

The machine caught our attention, and the business behind it was an equally interesting proposition that raised a few questions. What is thermoforming? Who buys these parts? And how seriously should we take the claim that most new U.S. manufacturing businesses can be started for under $25K?

Thermoforming itself is a relatively simple process compared to its more advanced plastic manufacturing counterparts. Instead of injecting molten plastic into a mold, the process starts with an extruded flat sheet of thermoplastic. The sheet is heated until it softens, pulled over into a mold using vacuum, pressure, or a mechanical plug, then cooled until it holds the shape.

The appeal is the relatively low cost of tooling: molds can be made faster and cheaper compared to most plastic tooling, especially for large, thin-walled parts like trays, covers, liners, and enclosures. The tradeoff is limited part geometry, difficulties in maintaining uniform part thickness, and a process that works best when the part is fundamentally a formed shell.

In the context of this discussion, OAM USA maps cleanly to an example with standard use cases. The company makes plastic slip-on panel covers for trucks as a more affordable alternative to conventional rust repair. They started as a custom service at an auto body shop, prototyped with a nearby university, and built their own factory once they couldn’t find a local manufacturer.

Shops that find this kind of niche tend to keep it: older products with strong followings keep generating parts demand long after OEMs lose interest, and the capital floor can be as low as whatever you can invent to solve the problem - in this case, a homemade thermoformer built from a welded steel frame and a vacuum pump.

Useful references: James Throne’s Understanding Thermoforming, plus this shorter Overview of Polymer Processing primer. One textbook even gives the same example in the abstract: aftermarket plastic parts for older vehicles.

More From Around the Web

• On a related note: using thermoforming again, this time for instant-quote plastic packaging.

• A personal essay on getting a circuit tattoo. Part low-pass filter, oscillator, and meditation on why “schematic capture” is a beautiful phrase.

• Blue Origin’s New Glenn static fire explosion. Check out Scott Manley’s reaction to the initial failure and implications on pad damage, future New Glenn launches, and NASA lunar missions.

• Founder reflections on one year of building an engineering software startup for physics modeling. Related: a good argument for slow coding with LLMs.

• Dyson has a farming division now selling strawberries in the UK.

Presented by Jiga: Build Real Supplier Relationships

Most hardware teams are stuck choosing between two bad options: instant-quote platforms that hide suppliers behind a black box, or local shops that hit capacity walls right when you need them most. One trades away relationships for speed. The other offers trust but can’t scale.

Jiga gives you direct access to vetted manufacturers with reliable capacity from prototype through production. You speak directly to the people making your parts. And when you come back, they already know your specs and technical needs. Same shop, same knowledge, consistently reliable quality without starting over every time.

Learn more here. 👇

Interesting Chart: Top CNC Machine Tool Builders

Mapping CNC machine tool builders by revenue.

Manufacturing & Startup News

• Shift, an AI data collection startup, launched with a simple proposition: free home cleanings in exchange for egocentric video data of cleaners doing household tasks, captured through a camera-equipped hat and used to train future home robots.

• One of the first indications of what The Bot Co. is building comes from an Airbnb damage lawsuit: a low, wheeled robot with an arm and dual grippers.

• Autodesk agreed to acquire MaintainX for $3.6B, expanding its software suite further into maintenance and operations workflows.

• Stark, a German defense startup, is reportedly seeking €300M at a €2.5B valuation to scale autonomous strike drones and loitering munitions

• Texas released a new automated vehicle registry showing Waymo leading with 577 registered vehicles. Fleet registrations are an imperfect proxy for deployment, but still a useful snapshot of AV activity in the state.

Tools From Our Partners

• Jiga – Custom parts at digital speed, with trusted shop access.

• SolidWorks for Startups – Full access to SolidWorks’ product development tools, free for early-stage startups.

• Zoo – AI-native CAD for generating fully editable B-rep models from natural language or direct manipulation.

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Interesting Links

• Bambu Lab built one of the best consumer 3D printers on the market, partly by standing on top of the open-source slicer ecosystem. A firmware update last year added an Authorization Control System that gated third-party slicers behind Bambu Connect, turning a workflow change into an open-source licensing fight. The backlash now has two useful artifacts: a GitHub fork of OrcaSlicer/Bambu Studio that restores the blocked third-party workflows, and Louis Rossmann daring Bambu to do something about it. The old workflow was mostly local where users model and slice, send the file over LAN or SD card, and print. The new workflow pushes more of that process through Bambu’s software and cloud infrastructure, giving the company visibility into print activity and leverage over which third-party tools are allowed to work. The legal hook is AGPLv3 Section 10: Bambu Studio derives from PrusaSlicer, itself a Slic3r fork, and the license forbids adding further restrictions on the rights it grants. The Software Freedom Conservancy has also opened a formal investigation and launched Baltobu, a reverse-engineering project targeting Bambu’s proprietary networking layer. Great hardware can create captive audiences, but post-purchase restrictions are exactly how companies turn the most loyal customers into the people maintaining forks around it.

• A year and a half ago, we shared Jim Belosic’s A Bootstrapper’s Guide to ReIndustrializing America, one of the best operator-written pieces on building a manufacturing business from the shop floor up. The advice was less about industrial policy and more about access; make modern equipment easier to buy and finance, easier to operate, and people can build real businesses around it. The WSJ follow-up lands as a clean Part II: SendCutSend just raised $110M after demand started outrunning the bootstrap playbook. The company has been running 35,000+ overtime hours, maxing out credit lines to add equipment, and looking at new facilities where real capacity is no longer a $500K machine purchase but a mid-eight-figure buildout. A good reminder on raising capital from leverage, not urgency - I’ve said no to VC inquiries for years now. We’re profitable, I didn’t need the money, and we were just barely keeping up with demand. I was never desperate. When you’re desperate, that’s when you get into bed with the wrong people and end up giving half your company away.

• A code-trained AI model can inspect a Git repo, read the commit history, modify a function, and run the tests; given a STEP file, the same model gets something much dumber: a sealed B-Rep solid with no parameters, no history, and no obvious way to recover design intent. Benjamin Hall’s argument is that the future of CAD is open because models need source, history, and feedback loops, not sealed solids. Zoo’s KittyCAD Language is the cleanest version of the upstream half: a text-based, parametric DSL that compiles to B-Rep geometry, while the kernel layer remains mostly proprietary. Blake Courter’s Omega work at Gradient Control Laboratories points in the same direction from the code//3D interface side, with early signs in our testing of versioned, iterative improvement. The broader point is that engineering is a search problem, not a generation problem; text-to-CAD is only the opening move. As models like Claude connect to Fusion and the major AI labs start eating CAD the way they ate coding, iterative improvement is the next domino.

  • Fun fact: Cursor originally explored CAD copilots before it became the AI coding IDE everyone knows today. Same diagnosis, four years earlier: “They wanted to know why their models weren’t converging. Why weren’t there enough patterns in the CAD models’ construction to learn to autocomplete?“

• Corrosion is less a single failure mode than a slow negotiation between a metal, its environment, and time. Sometimes the result is broad and obvious, like uniform corrosion spreading across an exposed surface. Other times it is local and dangerous, like pitting corrosion, where small holes form with very little total material loss before a part fails. “Never paint rust,” writes Stewart Brand. Corrosion costs the world roughly $2.5T a year, about 3.4% of global gross domestic product (GDP), per a 2016 National Association of Corrosion Engineers (NACE) figure cited in his corrosion section in Maintenance of Everything. The report calculates that available best practices could shave 15–35% off the total, $375–$875B in annual savings.

  • The Golden Gate Bridge is a great example: painting runs continuously, with locations prioritized by inspection of corrosion progress. Surface prep involves stripping rust with chipping hammers, using flame dehydration torches to drive moisture out from between plates and rivet heads, and getting primer on while the steel is still hot (and dry).

• The ABCs of Gearing is a great introductory gear reference from KHK Gears. Shigley’s is still the canonical textbook answer, but if you’re new to designing with gears, learning the calculations, or just trying to understand terminology, spend an hour walking through KHK’s catalog and technical notes.

  • The Introductory Course (1/3)

  • Basic Guide (2/3)

  • Guide for Practical Use (3/3)

• And a couple fun links to round out the week:

  • Someone took Cybertruck’s “wade mode” quite literally.

  • A torus gear.

Presented by Protolabs: Quality Manufacturing at Speed

Protolabs is the world’s fastest digital manufacturer, supporting product development from early prototypes through production. Upload a CAD file to get instant DFM feedback and real-time pricing within hours, then move into manufacturing with lead times as fast as one day. With in-house capabilities across injection molding, CNC machining, 3D printing, and sheet metal fabrication, Protolabs helps teams iterate quickly without sacrificing quality. Learn more at Protolabs.com.

Startup News

• CircuitHub raised $28M in Series A funding ($48M total to date) to expand its automated PCB assembly platform. The company operates a highly automated PCBA factory built around a robotic architecture platform designed for high-mix production. The company reports 2M+ boards shipped, 133M+ parts placed, and routine 2–3 day turnaround on 1-off prototypes without premium pricing. The capital will fund a 10× capacity expansion through 2027 in Massachusetts and support expansion into Europe. The round was led by Plural and Sten Tamkivi.

• Amca raised $300M in Series B funding at a $1B+ valuation to expand its vertically integrated aerospace and defense manufacturing platform. The company develops and produces critical components tied to programs like the F-35 and major commercial airliners, and now operates six factories across California, Iowa, and New York. Amca says its internal platform, RAPID, cuts time from development to production-grade hardware by 67% versus typical industry lead times, by integrating engineering, qualification, and certified production. The round was led by Caffeinated Capital with participation from Lightspeed, Andreessen Horowitz, Lux Capital, Construct Capital, and others.

• From YC’s latest batch (P26):

  • Synphony is deploying robots that pick strawberries in commercial fields, targeting one of agriculture’s most labor-intensive tasks.

  • Nine Fives launched to automate hardware test infrastructure, specifically modern RF test equipment for manufacturers of radio devices in cellphones, drones, and satellites.

• Texture raised $12.5M in Series A funding to expand its grid operations software, bringing utilities and grid operators onto a unified data and workflow layer. The platform consolidates data from legacy systems into a single operating model for asset visibility and load management. Texture is already working with dozens of utilities and OEMs, supporting use cases like transformer health monitoring, distributed energy coordination, and virtual power plant operations. The round was led by VoLo Earth and Equal Ventures.

Open Jobs

More jobs added weekly on our job board. If you’re hiring, promote your open role here.

Sponsored:

• Tuurny is looking for a Senior Mechatronics Engineer (Full-Stack Robotics) in Sunnyvale, CA

• Highland Technology is looking for a Senior Electronics Design Engineer in San Francisco, CA

Early Career:

• Apptronik is looking for a Firmware Engineer in Austin, TX

Mid-Level:

• Crusoe is looking for an Electrical Engineer in Arvada, CO

Senior to Staff:

• Gravitics is looking for a Chief Engineer (Spacecraft) in Seattle, WA

Internships:

• Formlabs is looking for a Build Team Intern (Fall 2026) in Somerville, MA

Tools From Our Sponsors

Manufacturing

• Express Manufacturing, Inc. – Southern California’s largest EMS provider with 40+ years of end-to-end electronics manufacturing expertise.

• Fictiv – On-demand custom manufacturing from prototype to production.

• Loombotic – Instant-quote custom wire harnesses. Upload drawings or design online, fast turnaround.

• Blitzpanel – Custom control panels made fast and easy. Design online for instant pricing or let us design for you.

Design & Simulation

• nTop – Computational design to accelerate product development.

• Onshape for Startups – Free access to Onshape Professional or Onshape Government (compliant with ITAR/EAR) for hardware startups and entrepreneurs.

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Quick note: I hope everyone gets some real time off this long weekend. Last week was the first break I’ve taken in a while, after an insane five-month sprint across writing, growth, a conference, and a few new initiatives all at once. Sometimes hard things are worth doing because they stretch what you think you can take on. Hope you get rest this weekend — call it preventative maintenance, then back with more room to take on the next thing!

Interesting Presentation: The Torture Device Between PCBs and Production

Deeply useful, deeply unglamorous problems is a good way to describe the ethos of the hardware test world. Test fixtures are boring infrastructure, but every scaled hardware sector depends on them: automotive, consumer electronics, robotics, basically any industry with circuit boards that needs to ship at volume.

From Joe & Duncan over at FixturFab, How to Design Custom PCB Bed-of-Nails Test Fixtures is an hour-long workshop that walks through the basics of functional test fixtures for PCBs, better known as the bed-of-nails contraptions that sit between every assembled circuit board and the question of whether it works.

Simply defined, a bed-of-nails fixture is a mechanical test jig that presses spring-loaded pogo pins into predefined test points on a PCB, turning dozens or hundreds of electrical contacts into one repeatable manufacturing test station. Anything built and shipped at scale needs some version of a test station (whether it’s mechanical, electrical, software, firmware), and for circuit boards, a functional test fixture answers behavioral checks like: are the voltage rails in spec, can the board talk over USB/UART, do the sensors respond, or do components like the motor driver behave as expected?

A useful framing is that functional test != prototype bring-up. On the bench, “does this board work?” is a debugging question, but in manufacturing, it has to become a repeatable go/no-go process: contact the board, exercise the major functions, log the result, and set explicit failure handling.

Despite bed-of-nails fixtures being around for decades, the workflow is still surprisingly fragmented for something this old. INGUN sells the fixture and probe hardware, instrument vendors sell the measurement stack (NI Test Stand, Acroname), CMs can build fixtures as part of manufacturing programs, and low-volume teams hack together hand-wired test rigs. Joe & Duncan are trying to turn fixture procurement into a configurable product.

Also see this cool video of a cobot automating board loading at a test station.

More From Around the Web

• For the long weekend, Vehicles of the Imagination is a fun and charming book of 1,500+ imagined vehicles; part cartoon archive, part reminder of what it feels like to dream with no limits.

• McMaster-Carr now has an active YouTube channel. Recent videos explain DIN rail components and breakaway tamper-resistant nuts.

• A console-based audio visualizer for the terminal or desktop. See below for a fun and quirky demo.

• The more you know: tolerance expectations in industrial 3D printing. Or when you should print on expensive, industrial machines.

• A side-by-side look at Starship’s heat shield across Flights 10–12. The tiles are what let Starship survive atmospheric reentry; full coverage on Flight 12 here.

DRCY: AllSpice’s AI Design Review Agent

Meet DRCY, AllSpice’s AI-powered agent built specifically for hardware design reviews. DRCY runs first-pass checks on schematics and datasheets to surface critical errors early, such as config errors, voltage mismatches, and much more. Hardware teams can spend less time on rechecks, more time innovating, and ship with confidence.

Give DRCY a try here. 👇

Interesting Video: Exploring Wing’s Delivery Drone Workshop

A tour through Wing’s drone workshop, tracing the aircraft from hand-laid composite prototypes to foam airframes, custom propellers, and an in-house wind tunnel for propulsion testing. Over the last few years, drone delivery is starting to emerge as real logistics infrastructure: Zipline has done 2M+ commercial deliveries, Wing is the most credible U.S. consumer challenger at 750k+, and Meituan/Keeta is the Chinese equivalent wildcard.

Manufacturing & Startup News

• Faraday Future raised $25M through convertible notes, bringing recent financing to $70M as the struggling EV company is repositioning around robotics with plans to ship 1,500 units by year-end.

• GE Vernova is expanding its grid equipment footprint through the $5.3B acquisition of Prolec GE, a North American transformer manufacturer.

• Quartermaster raised $43M in Series A funding to scale a ship-mounted sensor system that turns commercial vessels into a distributed maritime sensing network for intelligence and ocean monitoring.

• Star Catcher raised $65M in Series A funding to build an orbital power grid that beams solar power to satellites through their existing solar arrays.

Tools From Our Partners

• Jiga – Custom parts at digital speed, with trusted shop access.

• SolidWorks for Startups – Full access to SolidWorks’ product development tools, free for early-stage startups.

• Zoo – AI-native CAD for generating fully editable B-rep models from natural language or direct manipulation.

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Interesting Links

• In a wide-ranging interview spanning education, automation, and the long game of platform building, Eben Upton gives an inside look on how Raspberry Pi grew from an education charity into a $1.3B+ publicly traded industrial giant. The interesting inversion is that while the education brand is still what most people recognize, the business is now mostly industrial: $800M in annual revenue with 80% coming from industrial applications like display infrastructure at Heathrow, elevator systems, ISS deployments, and now OpenClaw agents. The Colossus team continues to do some of the best founder interviews we’ve come across — here are a few ideas worth surfacing:

  • Reshoring and the practical advantages of factory proximity. Raspberry Pi has assembled their computers in Wales with Sony Electronics as their CM for over a decade. Upton attributes a lot of Raspberry Pi’s price and performance advantages to 14 years of engineers walking the factory floor and asking “what do you hate about building this?”

  • The best automation win is often a fixable design constraint. After years of capital investment in dextrous cobot arms to handle USB connector assembly (5 robots to 1 human operator), the connectors were redesigned themselves so standard pick-and-place machines could handle it. The current process barely uses the same automation from before, opting for simpler Cartesian pick-and-place machines.

  • On platform serendipity and the long game. Build something general-purpose, cheap, and capable enough, and it gets pulled into whatever the current thing happens to be. The deeper flywheel is user-facing: people learn on Raspberry Pi, carry it into industry, and eventually the ubiquitous education product creeps into real infrastructure.

• Killed by Google is a running graveyard of every product Google has shut down. Toggle the filter to hardware and you get the lineage: Google Glass, Cardboard, Dropcam, Clips, and more, most defunct within a few years of launch. When a company that size ships something, people assume a level of seriousness behind it with real capital, multi-year support, and an ecosystem worth buying into. While true, Alphabet has always operated under the philosophy with products almost as experimental launchpads: ship broadly, let usage reveal the truth, and prune aggressively when something doesn’t become strategically essential. How Google Works is the canonical inside account of the philosophy around empowering ‘smart creatives’ that produced both Maps, Android, Waymo, along with the long list of shuttered products above.

  • On product philosophy, Apple sits at the other end of the spectrum: often late to a category, sometimes painfully so, but much more reluctant to ship until the engineering, product, supply chain, and support model are ready to hold up for years. Apple is reportedly lining up its first foldable iPhone for the beginning of the John Ternus era.

• OpenLab is another initiative from the same person behind OpenME, this time aimed at documenting the tools and equipment that belong in any serious engineering lab. The level of detail gets granular down to exact part SKUs and purchase links (no surprise coming from David Malawey), while also providing the organization logic for turning a pile of lab equipment into a working prototyping environment. IGAN-330 wire cutters are recommended over the cheap stamped-steel versions.

• If at first you don’t succeed, wait forty years and try again. In 1985, Polaroid engineer William Freeman sketched and patented a three-sided zipper for a Scientific American design contest — a fastener that could flip between flexible and rigid, turning soft objects into structured ones on demand. Despite not winning, he stored the prototype in his garage waiting to be discovered again. Forty years later, now an MIT professor, he revived the concept with CSAIL collaborators using tools that simply didn't exist when he first drew it up (geometry generation with Rhino and 3D printing), and the result is the Y-zipper system: a system that generates custom three-sided zippers from four motion primitives: straight, bent, coiled, and twisted. Material choice changes the use case with PLA for heavier loads or TPU for easier flex. In testing, PLA Y-zippers survived 18,000 open/close cycles before failure. Design files are linked for anyone who wants to print the mechanism at home.

• From EPRI’s Power Intelligence Report, data centers already account for more than 20% of total electricity use in Virginia, with forecasts showing that share could rise to 39–57% by 2030.

• And one fun link to round out the week: Figure has been livestreaming its F.03 humanoids sorting packages for the past ~5 days. The task is to detect the barcode, pick up the package, and reorient it face-down on the conveyor. The full tour of BotQ is also worth a watch.

Presented by Protolabs: Print it Better with Industrial 3D Printing

Protolabs’ industrial 3D printing services are built for teams that need production-quality parts quickly, backed by engineering expertise. With 120+ industrial machines covering six 3DP technologies and a wide range of processes, materials, and secondary operations, Protolabs helps you match the right technology to performance and printability requirements. Quality control includes documented work standards, in-process checks, and optional inspection reporting.

Whether you’re prototyping or scaling to end-use production, Protolabs helps you Print it Better.

Startup News

• Aetherflux, now rebranded as Cowboy Space, raised $275M in Series B funding at a $2B valuation to expand from space-based solar power into orbital data centers and launch vehicles. The company’s new plan is to build a rocket whose upper stage becomes the data center once it reaches LEO instead of launching a separate satellite payload. The first mission later this year is a small Apex-built satellite to test infrared power beaming, then the first orbital compute node planned for next year, and 1 MW data-center upper stage targeted for 2028. Index Ventures led the round.

• Anduril raised $5B in Series H funding at a $61B valuation to expand manufacturing capacity, R&D, and defense production infrastructure. The company reported $2.2B in 2025 revenue and the broader strategy is still the same: software-defined defense systems, autonomous platforms, and factories built for high-rate production rather than low-volume bespoke programs. Thrive Capital and Andreessen Horowitz led the round.

• Config raised $27M in seed funding to build the data layer for robotics foundation models. The Seoul and San Jose based startup records human physical tasks, converts that motion data into robot-usable training data, and sells it to manufacturers building their own robotics AI. The company says it has collected more than 100,000 hours of human motion data, with a nearly 300-person data operation across Asia, and is targeting 1M+ hours. Samsung Venture Investment led the round, with participation from Hyundai, LG, SK Telecom, and others.

• Mind Robotics, RJ Scaringe’s robotics lab spun out of Rivian, raised another $400M in funding. The company is developing industrial robotics for next-gen factory automation.

Open Jobs

More jobs added weekly on our job board. If you’re hiring, promote your open role here.

Early Career:

• Cobot is looking for a Robotics Assistant in Seattle, WA

Mid-Level:

• Windborne Systems is looking for a Firmware Engineer in Redwood City, CA

• K2 Space is looking for a Satellite Mechanical Engineer in Los Angeles, CA

Senior to Staff:

• Saildrone is looking for a Senior Electrical Engineer in Alameda, CA

• Lumafield is looking for a Head of Application Engineering in Boston, MA

Tools From Our Sponsors

Manufacturing

• Express Manufacturing, Inc. – Southern California’s largest EMS provider with 40+ years of end-to-end electronics manufacturing expertise.

• Fictiv – On-demand custom manufacturing from prototype to production.

• Loombotic – Instant-quote custom wire harnesses. Upload drawings or design online, fast turnaround.

• Blitzpanel – Custom control panels made fast and easy. Design online for instant pricing or let us design for you.

Design & Simulation

• nTop – Computational design to accelerate product development.

• Onshape for Startups – Free access to Onshape Professional or Onshape Government (compliant with ITAR/EAR) for hardware startups and entrepreneurs.

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A quick note: we’re publishing at a slightly reduced cadence this week and next while we’re in the final stretch of putting on Kinetic. Planning a conference, it turns out, is a lot like planning a wedding: exciting, stressful, oddly personal, and lots of small details. Thanks, as always, for reading!

Interesting Guide: Fundamentals of Noise, Vibration & Harshness Testing

The engineering behind perceived quality is often tactile before it is analytical. A system can meet its specifications and still feel cheap, loose, or unfinished. Much of that judgment happens below conscious analysis; we feel it before we can explain it. NVH, short for noise, vibration, and harshness, is a field within automotive and mechanical engineering focused on unwanted sound and vibration in engineered systems.

The car you’re driving almost certainly has NVH engineered into it, and while the discipline is most formalized in automotive work, the same fundamentals apply anywhere a system is judged both by what it does and by how it feels and sounds.

For a practical introduction, Toyota’s training manual is a great plain-English guide written for technicians diagnosing how noise and vibration move through a vehicle. The basic vocabulary: sound is propagating energy, noise is unwanted sound, vibration is what you feel, and harshness is the combined tactile and audible response, typically in the low-frequency range (~15–300 Hz).

On the applied side, NVH is best described as a source-path-receiver problem. Identify what’s creating the noise or vibration, trace how it moves through the structure, then decide where to intervene: quiet the source, isolate the path, or treat the receiver with damping, absorbers, barriers, stiffness changes, or better mounts. While the mental framework is simple, almost nothing about applying it is. Real systems like cars are extremely complex to model from first principles, so most of the work is empirical: instrumenting the system, figuring out which resonances matter, adjusting stiffness or damping, and going back to the rig to see whether anything moved.

From two engineers writing about automotive testing in the late 1990s:

Automotive NVH testing, while extremely complex in practice, is conceptually pretty simple. Excitation from either the engine, powertrain, the road surface, or the air passing over the vehicle excites the structure and makes noise … Perhaps the most fundamental problem in automotive NVH testing is that the industry regularly builds products it can’t analyze. The limitations may be either technical (nobody knows how) or economic (we know how, but it is too expensive). The result is that testing is currently an inseparable part of the product development process.

Presented by SOSV: Physical AI Founder–Investor Matchup

Half the battle in fundraising is finding investors who actually understand what you’re building. For founders in robotics, manufacturing, and industrial AI, SOSV is hosting a free, virtual matchup pairing founders with active investors in the space, structured around curated 1:1 meetings.

Details here.👇

More From Around the Web

• A clever flex PCB trick used for mounting EKG electrodes.

• Core Memory gets a first look at Tesla’s new Semi factory in Nevada.

• The system-level RF architecture behind airport body scanners.

• In praise of the cowboy engineer, who knows the first version does not need to be elegant; it just needs to exist.

Engineering is a discipline that follows strict rules of mathematics and science, but someone had to discover those rules first. We know that 316 stainless steel has a melting point of between 1370°C and 1400°C, but do we even remember how we acquired that information in the first place? We know it because of what we call “Cowboy Engineers.” Melting points were discovered because someone once took a piece of 316 stainless steel and turned up the furnace until the steel melted. We know the bend radius of tubing and elongation percentages of mandrel wires because someone once bent and stretched these materials past their limits. — Component Supply

• YC’s latest Request for Startups list is worth reading (though applications have closed); you can tell hardware has entered the mainstream when Shenzhen is now part of the standard startup vocabulary.

• We’ve now sold past the venue count for Kinetic and have fewer than 10 tickets left! Use code ‘newsletter’ for last-call discounted pricing.

  • Also, our friends at Studio 45 are hosting a kickoff reception on Monday, 5/11.

Interesting Chart: Vehicle Noise and Vibration Phenomena

From VIT’s NVH and CAE Laboratory: a frequency map of the main noise and vibration phenomena in a vehicle.

Manufacturing & Startup News

• Lime, the Uber-backed company behind shared e-scooters and e-bikes, filed to go public showing $886.7M in 2025 revenue and a business that has outlasted much of the first micro-mobility cycle.

• Panthalassa, an ocean energy startup building floating wave-powered data centers, raised $140M in new funding to scale its pilot manufacturing facility and begin commercial deployments as AI compute demand pushes power generation into more exotic frontiers.

• Astranis raised $450M in new capital, including a $300M Series E round and $155M in debt financing, to expand production of its small GEO communications satellites as it targets growing demand from commercial telecom operators and U.S. military programs.

• Moment Energy raised $40M in Series B funding to scale its second-life EV battery storage systems, turning retired automotive packs into modular grid-scale storage.

• Skyroot Aerospace raised $60M at a $1.1B pre-money valuation, becoming India’s first space-tech unicorn as it prepares Vikram-1 for the first orbital launch attempt by an Indian private company.

Tools From Our Partners

• Jiga – Custom parts at digital speed, with trusted shop access.

• SolidWorks for Startups – Full access to SolidWorks’ product development tools, free for early-stage startups.

• Zoo – AI-native CAD for generating fully editable B-rep models from natural language or direct manipulation.

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Missed an issue? Hunting for that one link? Every tool, guide, and article we’ve ever shared is in here.

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P.S. If you find something interesting—an article, tool, funding round, project, really anything—send it our way!

P.P.S. 20,000+ engineers, founders, and operators read this newsletter. If you want to reach them, get in touch.

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