Tracking
Sign in Get Instant Quote

Latest

Article

Satellite 101: What is a CubeSat?

Imagine a box in space that’s about the size of a long tissue box and capable of taking pictures of the Earth. That’s exactly what Planet Labs is doing: They’re using a 3U (a 10×10×34 cm CubeSat) called a Dove that takes pictures of the Earth to learn how daily imagery helps one move from […]

Article

The High Cost of Late-Stage Design Changes

If you work professionally in product development, or even if you tinker in your free time, you already know that a single misstep can be the difference between releasing your product on time or being late to market. Sometimes, that’s the difference between success and failure in hardware design. It’s for this very reason that […]

Teardown

Netatmo Welcome Indoor Security Camera Teardown

After we tore down the Netatmo Weather Station, we just had to know whether the internal plastic parts are shared with another Netatmo product line. So, this week we got the Netatmo Welcome indoor security camera, which definitely looks like the Weather Station’s sibling. Look at how this thing pierces through your soul. Do you feel […]

Teardown

Netatmo Weather Station Teardown, Part 2: Indoor Module

Welcome to Part 2 of our Netatmo Weather Station Teardown. Alison Thurber from Mindtribe continues to be my lab partner, despite this embarrassing scene at Fictiv during our last teardown. We call this “Frunday.” What exactly is so fun about planking? Indoor Module The Netatmo Weather Station’s Indoor Module is taller than the Outdoor Module. In addition to measuring temperature, […]

Article

Hackable: Design for Disassembly in Electronics

All right, all right! I’ll confess: I’m part of the last generation to enter college without a cell phone—part of the last generation to graduate before iPhones were even on the market (Gasp! The horror!). My parents gave me my sister’s old phone as a sophomore, and I remember not wanting it, only begrudgingly accepting […]

Teardown

Netatmo Weather Station

San Francisco is famous for its micro-climates. It could be warm & sunny in Potrero Hill, while Presidio Heights is shrouded in thick fog. In order to provide hyper-local weather information such as these, Weather Underground crowdsources data from individuals with automated personal weather stations (PWS’s). The Netatmo Weather Station is the one of the cheapest available […]

Article

How to Increase Manufacturing Efficiency with Design

Creating innovative mechanical designs is hard (I should know—I do it for a living). Sometimes, you’re pushed to the very limit to imagine a concept or mechanism that could actually work. At times like this, manufacturing is a distant utopia that we can only hope to reach, so we ignore it. But, at the end […]

Article

How to Select the Right Battery for Wearables and Consumer Electronics

These days, it’s rare to encounter a consumer electronics (CE) device that isn’t “smart.” Intelligent features — heart rate monitoring or GPS tracking, for instance — mean that CE devices require more power than ever in order to provide consumers with the applications they care about, all within smaller, portable devices. As a result, battery […]

Article

Democratizing Manufacturing Through Education: Introducing the Fictiv Hardware Guide

In today’s rapidly changing manufacturing environment, engineers are constantly trying to find their way through a very complex ecosystem to gain a competitive advantage and leverage the right tools to build their next product. Just last month, we hosted an event where a Abby Soong, a Mechanical Design Engineer at Momentum Machines, said that her […]

Teardown

XBox Controller Teardown

Ever wish you could jump into a video game and see what that world is like? Well, we’ll do something even better—we’ll get into a video game controller and see what’s inside! We’re tearing down the original Xbox controller and the newer Xbox One controller, to see how the device has evolved. The Original Xbox […]