Every issue of Hardware FYI.

2026 82 issues

  1. Bringing a New Car to Market The steep valley of death for new automakers, CircuitHub’s robotic PCB assembly factory, mapping flight regimes, and more.
  2. Kitting Out Y Combinator's Lab YC’s new hardware lab, a16z’s American Dynamism 50, a map of PCB manufacturers, and more.
  3. Pop Goes the Hinge Diagnosing early iPhone Duo failures using engineering RCA frameworks, the gaps in IP68 testing for hinged devices, design as deterministic creativity, and more.
  4. What’s Happening With Robot Hands? Why robot hands are the bottleneck for humanoids, fusion-based alchemy, space mirrors that bring sunlight to the night, and more.
  5. Let’s Livestream Factories A factory floor on livestream, the art of the cost-down, why every smart feature is another way in, and more.
  6. How to Make a Car Fly The engineering behind a ‘flying’ Roadster, NASA's primer on pressure vessels, how articulated buses work, and more.
  7. Machines that Make Smaller Machines A new manufacturing method takes its first steps, orbital data center economics, decades of engineering wisdom decanted into 25 rules, and more.
  8. 45 Laws for Spacecraft Design (and Life) Akin’s Laws of Spacecraft Design, the AI spending supply chain, two ends of manufacturing from bootstrapped devices to Starlink’s megafactory, and more.
  9. Toast for Factories What restaurants can teach us about manufacturing, how DJI captured the drone market, implications for the future of CAD, and more.
  10. Supply Chain as a Moat The shifting electronics supply chain, Starship’s payload capacity, Dyson’s toothbrush defects, and more.
  11. Robotics Data is a Broken Business The business of robotics data, the engineering behind Raptor 3’s simplicity, giving idle industrial equipment a second life, and more.
  12. Renegade Engineering Wearables that don’t need a charger, building hardware with tiny teams, datacenter land use in context, and more.
  13. Bitter Lessons in Hardware The bitter lesson meets hardware’s brittle lesson, a year of cooktop failures, the many ways engineering teams can get to production, and more.
  14. On Benchmarks Making sense of engineering benchmarks, Skunk Works on prototyping, solar installation robots, and more.
  15. Old Tricks for New Robots The chasm between demos and useful robots, a new entrant for silent speech, the basics of quantum computing, and more.
  16. Let’s Talk Navier–Stokes CFD in the Boeing 787’s design, the foldable smartphone market, an open-weight model for investment casting, and more.
  17. $399 Robot, $412 Worth of Servos Teaching robots to walk through simulation, Formula 1’s forbidden materials, the gap between a promising battery and a viable business, and more.
  18. Chip Design Meets AI AI in the chip design flow, FreeCAD and KiCad demos using GPT-6 Astra, a tour of automated fish processing, and more.
  19. Inside the Idea Factory Moonshot factories, Hugging Face’s robot duck, reverse-engineering rocket engines, and a primer on cable testing.
  20. Claude Learns the Factory Standardizing factory test infrastructure, the slow collapse of optical disk drives, graduating from a garage machine shop, and more.
  21. Open-Sourcing the Inkjet Moat The most hated machine, a field guide to adhesives, additive manufacturing for eyeglass lenses, the basics of cost engineering, and more.
  22. Can America Still Make Things? A grill scrubber’s view on reindustrialization, an intuitive guide to energy, retrospective on the smart home, and more.
  23. Physical AI and the Factory Automation Trap Apple’s failed experiments in robotic automation, reconfigurable assembly lines, chemically etched sheet metal, China’s jet engine bottleneck, and more.
  24. AI Chips Need Liquid Cooling Google’s liquid-cooling buildout, a map to control theory, and the history of Delta Electronics.
  25. Can Anger Fuel a Nobel-Winning Idea? Blue LEDs, the rise of LFP batteries, sixteen years of electronics lore, and more.
  26. DARPA & The Impossible Frontier DARPA’s heavy-lift drone competition, explosive vegetable peeling, multi-modal sensing, and more.
  27. Pickleball’s Composite Problem Disposable paddles, the art of removing components, a self-sharpening pencil, and more.
  28. Why is Manufacturing Difficult? Complexities buried in manufacturing, recipe diagrams for engineers, stamping press choreography, and more.
  29. Why Headphones Need a Fake Head Tesla’s first Powerwall, a mouse for moving through CAD, and boats on a giant wheel.
  30. The Crypto Wallet That Wasn’t Alone Hardware espionage, inside IMAX 70mm projection, waterproofing circuit boards with epoxy, and more.
  31. The Crowdfunding Mirage Connected egg trays, $500M drone contracts, and the crowdfunding hangover
  32. The Cheap Drone Problem for Tanks Drone designs, medieval cathedral construction, a mirror in orbit, and more.
  33. The $800K Bounty to Go Mach 1 High-speed RC planes, Tesla’s “new” assembly lines, and the race to break Mach 1
  34. Never Trust The Autorouter Auction-floor lab sourcing, home robot sketches, revisiting EDA's oldest unresolved promise, and more.
  35. Why AR Glasses Still Don’t Scale Optical manufacturing bottlenecks, air conditioning as development infrastructure, and the anisotropy lesson every process quietly reteaches.
  36. The Solid-State Battery That Wasn’t The solid-state battery that wasn't, tracking objects in orbit, and inside an airport body scanner.
  37. Texture Lives in the Tooling CMF as manufacturing instructions, hidden surface texture in the PS5 controller, and Skunk Works rules for small teams
  38. Glue is All You Need Repairing Cybertrucks with glue, zero-ohm resistors, and board-level archives of every video game console
  39. Capital Constraints and the Starlink Flywheel Phased arrays for the masses, building a loft elevator from scratch, and more RF black magic.
  40. Application Notes as Cultural Artifacts The lost art of engineering writing, Toyota's lean origins, and de-institutionalizing your career.
  41. Sending Robots to Kindergarten Robot data factories, a lathe with vibes, and the on-demand composites bet.
  42. Goodbye, Board Spins Liquid metal circuit boards, actuator factories, direct modeling, and world models for robots.
  43. Thermoforming and the Art of the Niche Thermoforming, small manufacturing businesses, and the $25K question.
  44. Bambu Lab & The Open-Source Trap Bambu’s open-source controversy, why MCAD is harder for AI than code, and SendCutSend’s $110M raise.
  45. Bed of Nails Bed of nails test fixtures, Wing's drone workshop, and Starship's evolving heat shield.
  46. The Long Game of Raspberry Pi Raspberry Pi's education flywheel, Google's hardware graveyard, and operator factories for robot training data.
  47. Perceived Quality Lives in the Noise NVH testing, cowboy engineering, Lime’s IPO filing, wave-powered data centers, and more.
  48. RF Engineering is Black Magic Tribal knowledge of RF design, EV range vs. temperature on the dyno, OpenAI's expanding robotic division, and more.
  49. Industry 4.0 Was Early, Not Wrong Breadcrumbs across factory systems, lessons from the early 3D CAD era, and Figure AI's rumored UPS deal.
  50. Claude Learns to CAD Opus 4.7 learning CAD, backyard RAM fabrication, hardware startup lessons from Boosted, and more.
  51. Every Home is a Datacenter Compute behind the meter, turbine oligopolies, and a Rube Goldberg machine for burgers.
  52. The Board Design Class You Never Took Mid-band spectrum battles, CNC machining centers in custom pink, second-life EV pack energy storage, and more.
  53. Power Electronics Left the Grid Behind The US grid's century-old problem, motors that play music, heuristics for AI to write embedded firmware, and more.
  54. Why Hardware Development Frameworks All Rhyme Claude Code for test fixtures, hardware development frameworks, Kia's humanoid robot factory plans, and more.
  55. What ASML Built (And Why No One Else Can, Yet) ASML's engineering complexity, watchdog timers, the calling of an engineer, and more.
  56. What a Robotics PhD Doesn’t Teach
  57. Back to the World's Largest Electronics Market Sourcing guides at HQB, gigacasting & thixomolding, chip manufacturing, frangible nuts, and more.
  58. The Machines That Make the Machines
  59. Why Your Electricity Bill Doesn't Add Up
  60. Tooling at Prototype Speed
  61. Sunday Robotics & The Real-World Baymax
  62. Why Bent Plastic Turns White
  63. 2,400 Hard Drives and a Weekend
  64. 3D Printing Farms, Reborn
  65. Mechanically Simple, Electrically Crowded
  66. More Process Won’t Fix Systems Engineering
  67. Hardware Doesn’t Move at Software Speed
  68. SLA Printing & The Battle of Architectures
  69. On-Demand Manufacturing Can Eat the World
  70. The Tolerance Intuition Gap
  71. Inside the Humanoid Stack
  72. The Volkswagen Beetle Almost Failed
  73. Zero-Tolerance Machining Is a Myth
  74. The Anti–Venture Manufacturing Playbook
  75. Why Modular Construction Didn’t Scale
  76. Welcome to Kinetic Launching our inaugural conference
  77. The Most Expensive Computer You Own
  78. What the Datasheets Don’t Say
  79. How to Start a Machine Shop (From Zero)
  80. How Anduril Beat the Primes
  81. Improvised Manufacturing at Scale
  82. Burn Capital, Build Cathedrals

2025 95 issues

  1. End of Year Recap (Part Two)
  2. End of Year Recap (Part 1)
  3. When Not Shipping Is the Strategy
  4. Humanoid Robotics, Mapped
  5. A Closer Look at SpaceX’s Payload Stack
  6. Coloring Metal With Lasers
  7. On Safety Factors and the Illusion of Margin
  8. CNC Periodic Table of Elements
  9. How to Nail a Rocket to a Barge
  10. Manufacturing’s Missing ChatGPT Moment
  11. The Golden Age of Space
  12. Edge Connectors and the Idiot Index
  13. Powerwall, But Make It Vape-Powered
  14. The Drunken Walk of Robot Vacuums
  15. 110 Tips of Unsolicited Design Advice
  16. Street-Fighting Mathematics
  17. Why So Many Startups Fail
  18. Silicon Valley Wants to Build a City
  19. Build a Lab on a Budget
  20. The Art of Hacking Production
  21. Mapping America’s Machine Shops
  22. Boston Dynamics’ Forbidden Teardown
  23. The Expensive Part Is the Mold
  24. The Airline Model for Rockets
  25. Humanoids, Smoking Since 1939
  26. When Knives Sing
  27. Explosive Forming is Real
  28. PID Loops, But Make It Cooking
  29. Batteries Are Running California’s Grid
  30. 3D Printing Is Dead (Kind Of)
  31. Cartography of Silicon Valley
  32. Electrify Everything
  33. Bootstrapping Hardware in 2025
  34. Motion Profiles & Mapping Satellites
  35. An Engineer’s Guide to Starship
  36. Lessons from OceanGate’s Titan Implosion
  37. How Teams Decide What to Build
  38. Impact Extrusion & Trashcan Macs
  39. GPS Jamming & Fluid Simulation Pendants
  40. Inside Apple’s Hardware Hierarchy
  41. How to Build a Medical Device Startup
  42. Backflipping Robots and Moravec’s Paradox
  43. Factories, But Make Them Tents
  44. How QR Codes Became RF Filters
  45. Space Debris, by the Numbers
  46. Mapping U.S. Manufacturing MegaProjects
  47. Where PCBs Are Born Touring a Quick-Turn Factory in North America
  48. How SpaceX Builds Faster
  49. Why Vertical Farming Failed
  50. From Photo to Structured CAD Models
  51. When Honda Builds a Rocket
  52. Conformal Coatings & LLMs on a Pi
  53. What a Grill Scrubber Says About U.S. Manufacturing
  54. Inside Waymo's Robotaxi Factory
  55. What Actually Makes Money in Nvidia’s AI Servers
  56. DARPA Spy Birds & Open-Source Drones
  57. Lessons from 8 Years of Building Robots
  58. Soft Goods & Space Toilet Telemetry
  59. Textiles Are Just Soft Composites
  60. Inside a 124-Layer PCB
  61. How to Join Things (and Boil Water Fast)
  62. Mapping 3,400+ US Job Shops
  63. How to Start Metal 3D Printing for Under $10K
  64. Building Neuralink’s Machine Shop
  65. A Year of Building
  66. A Playbook for Evaluating Contract Manufacturers
  67. A Post-Mortem on Commodity Cycles
  68. Geothermal Gradients & Flight Control Failures
  69. The Cable-Driven World of Surgical Robots
  70. Mapping Tariffs on Electronics Supply Chains
  71. Digital Weights, Thermoplastic Planes, and Book-Scanning Robots
  72. A First Principles Guide to Factory Layout
  73. The World’s Smallest MCU
  74. The Capacitor Plague & Fake Solids
  75. Figure’s Factory and the Paradox of Early Automation
  76. The Economics of Aerial Drone Delivery
  77. Understanding Product Reliability Through Bathtub Curves
  78. PCB Layout Doesn’t Need to Be Painful
  79. Trips to the World's Largest Electronics Market
  80. Thermal Design Basics for Integrated Circuits
  81. ABCs of Raising Capital in Hardware
  82. Where Did Car Colors Go?
  83. How to Find Schematics for Any Device (Legally)
  84. Mechanical Keyboards to Capacitive Touchscreens
  85. Apple's Pixar Lamp Robot & Periodic Egg Cooking
  86. The State of Decarbonization in 2025
  87. Air, Angles, and Stadium Design
  88. The Return of Supersonic Flight
  89. How Text-to-CAD Works
  90. NASA's Plan for Humans on Mars & China's Tech-Industrial Ecosystem
  91. How Dyson’s Bladeless Fans Actually Work
  92. A Historical Take on CES 2025
  93. Teardrop Vias & Grain Direction in Sheet Metal Bending
  94. How a Garage CNC Shop Made $88K in 6 Months
  95. Rotational-Molded Pickleballs & YC Startup Ideas

2024 70 issues

  1. A Primer on Shoe Manufacturing
  2. Mapping Automotive Supply Chains & Pressure History of Injection Molded Parts
  3. Designing Snap Fit Joints & Terahertz Imaging Tech
  4. A Look at Marine-Inspired Biomimicry in Ship Propellers
  5. History of G-Code & BB-8 Robot Teardown
  6. Deep Tech Market Map: The Future of Aerospace and Defense
  7. Solar Power, But Make It Orbital
  8. Optical Sorting Machines & Lunar Lander Tech. Developments
  9. Anatomy of a Plastic Spoon Mold & Bolted Joint Design
  10. Electric Toothbrush Teardown & Star Shaped Solder Joints
  11. ASML's $100k/hr Machines & Power Electronics
  12. A Global Network of 4,000 Ocean Robots
  13. First Principles: Building a Small CAD Company
  14. How CAD Software Cost Airbus $6.1 Billion Dollars
  15. MIT Lecture Notes & New Manufacturing Simulation Games
  16. Nuclear Renaissance in the Age of AI
  17. How SpaceX Caught a Rocket Mid-Air
  18. Unpacking Container Port Efficiency & History Behind the Hose Clamp
  19. Waveguides in Meta's Orion AR Glasses
  20. The Basics of USB & Speaker Teardowns
  21. A Map of Manufacturing Distribution in China
  22. Designing Buttons in Consumer Electronics
  23. How to Read a Component Datasheet
  24. A Repository of 100+ Hardware Startup Pitch Decks
  25. Curiosity Rover Tread Wear & US Defense Supply Chain
  26. Investigation into Boeing Starliner Failures
  27. Metallurgy 101 & Climate Startups Post-Mortem
  28. First Principles: Tesla's Next Turn, Steer-by-Wire
  29. Gigacasting Competitors & Solar Climate Engineering
  30. Wind Tunnel Tested Olympic Swimsuits & Psuedo-Pressure Sensors
  31. Inflatable Space Habitats & 3D Printed Train Parts
  32. Desktop Wire EDM & HDMI Espionage
  33. Vision Pro Supplier List & Deep-Tech Market Map
  34. How to Build a Hardware Start-Up & Surface Texturing Plastic Parts
  35. Starfactory Tour & "Microwave" Powered Aircraft
  36. First Principles: How to Build a Formula One Car
  37. Investment Casting Basics & Coffee Bean CT Scans
  38. Starlink Latency & Machining a Continuous Wave Flag
  39. Apple's Reliability Lab Tour & Voyager-1 Data Transmission
  40. First Principles: The Mechanics of Humanoid Robots
  41. Current Sensing Basics & Solar Applications
  42. Motorcycle Valves & 7-Segment Displays
  43. Motor Cortex Implants & Micro-Fasteners
  44. Northern Lights & Ham Radios
  45. Radar Factories & Zero-G Combustion
  46. Record Plasma Temperatures & Molten Salt Energy Storage
  47. Zero Propellant Space Propulsion & Ferroelectric Capacitors for Energy Storage
  48. A New Record Fiber Data Rate & The Rise of the US Steel Industry
  49. Tidal Power Surging & Flight Computer Breakdown
  50. Software for Hardware & Neuralink Implants
  51. Specific Aperture Radar from Space & Astro Mechanica Deep Dive
  52. Neuralink’s First Human Patient & The Fundamentals of Internet Infrastructure
  53. Starship Launch & Hypersonic Flights
  54. Starships Third Test Flight & A Naturally Occurring Superconductor
  55. Iron-Air Battery Research & Space-Based Solar Power
  56. Rusting Cybertrucks & Computer Vision Farming
  57. A Semiconductor Bug-Eye & The World’s Fastest Racing Drone
  58. Factory Gameplay & Semiconductor Startups
  59. Boltless Boeings & Generative AI CAD
  60. Antique Power Electronics & Major EDA Acquisitions
  61. Magnetic Gear Boxes & Ingesting Electronics End-to-End
  62. Apple Vision Pro Internals & Electric Transformer Shortages
  63. Brittle Helmets & Apple Vision Pro Manufacturing
  64. 1930’s Auto Manufacturing & EE Lab Bench Essentials
  65. The ‘Ideal Switch’ & Injection-Molding IC Packages
  66. NASA Unveils the X-59 & CES ‘24
  67. Humanoid Robotics & Career Fairs
  68. EE Lab Tools & RF Course Notes
  69. Moon Trips & Autonomous Farms
  70. Happy New Year!

2023 11 issues

  1. Holiday Edition!
  2. Cybertruck LV Board Design Review & Dk/Df Tables in PCB Mfg
  3. Roadster Schematics & A $500M Close Call
  4. Capacitors Demystified & Fusion-Based Cancer Treatment
  5. Controlling Voltage with Your Mind & Multi-Millennium Fluorocarbon Memory
  6. Vacuum Arc Thrusters & Foam Science and Mfg
  7. Domestic Semiconductor Packaging & Microfluidics Manufacturing
  8. Announcing the Hardware FYI Discord! A new addition to the toolbox
  9. The Interviewer's Mindset A glimpse inside the hiring manager's POV
  10. Landing Your Dream Job in Tech. What they don't teach you in school
  11. A New Chapter - Hardware FYI We're launching a newsletter!

2022 39 issues

  1. Underrated Manufacturing & EE Interview Prep
  2. Wake Turbulence & Wire Harnesses
  3. History of Dynamite & Copper Mining Breakdown
  4. Indian Casting Factories & Hardware Tech Growth Trends
  5. Hollywood Hardware & Open-Source Silicon Manufacturing
  6. The Engineering of Flying Fast & PCB Etch Factor
  7. NAND & General Magic
  8. Sweat Sensors & HDI PCB Design
  9. Gate Drivers & Russian Use of American Semiconductors
  10. A Better Semiconductor & Interview with the Founder of LTspice
  11. Horse to Rocket Pipeline & The State of Mass Production
  12. Battery Charging Fundamentals & The Equipment Multiplier Effect
  13. Planes and Transistors & Poet Turned Mathematician
  14. Humanoid Robots & How Not to Screw Up Your Manufacturing Startup
  15. Top EE YouTube Channels & PCB Plating Process
  16. New Lego Factory & Switch Mode Power Supplies
  17. Q&A with Pete Staples & How America Can Win Semiconductors
  18. Battery Management Algorithms & Japanese Job-Shop Manufacturing Economy
  19. Li-ion Battery Digital Twins & Superconducting Diodes
  20. Semiconductor CEO Interviews & Silicon Carbide
  21. EE Video Games & All Things Capacitors
  22. RF Course Notes & Summit Becomes the Largest PCB Manufacturer
  23. Reading Power MOSFET Datasheets & SpaceX's Memo
  24. The Top Industrial VC's & DC-DC Control Theory
  25. The Fall of American Industrial R&D Labs & Ranking Every Chess Movie
  26. Intro to High-Speed Flight & Choosing an Oscilloscope
  27. Heating Wood to Save the Planet & Electrical Engineering Salaries
  28. Semi Equipment Shortage & Roku's Founding Story
  29. Airplane Bird Strikes & Chinese Manufacturing Under Mao
  30. An Interview with FixturFab & Google's HW Acquisition Spree
  31. An Interview with Elecia White & Beaming Solar Energy Down from Space
  32. The Three Ages of FPGA's & World Class Manufacturing
  33. The Free Hardware Event of the Year & The Coolest Aircraft You've Never Heard of
  34. The Hardware Renaissance & Patent Frenzy
  35. Intel's New $1B Fund & An Interview with Kyle Dumont from AllSpice
  36. Chips for Better Facial Authentication & A Case for Splitting Up Intel
  37. Interview with Alan Yu from Space Capital & Hacking a $2M Crypto Wallet
  38. Skydiving Out of a Failed Airplane & Zooming into a Microchip
  39. CATL and the Battery Race & Thoughts on Space Conflict

2021 12 issues

  1. The Tech of Terminator 2 & NASA Probes the Sun
  2. Moon Race & The Pizza Paradox
  3. The Fundamental Theory of Physics & A New Approach to Chip Floorplanning
  4. Cryptographic Semiconductor Fingerprints & Automakers + Custom Silicon
  5. Apple + the Right to Repair & Microfluidics IC’s
  6. GM Eliminating Seat Heaters & An Old, Used Tractor Going for $175k
  7. $1T Infrastructure Bill Breakdown & 7,000 Talks on C++ and Rust
  8. Facebook Is Now Meta & Zapping Molten Tin with Lasers
  9. Intel Spending $20B & The Physics Behind Duck Formations
  10. 1,000+ Abandoned Sailors & Apple’s History with Silicon
  11. Huawei Battles Their Own Chip Shortage & 15th Century Shipbuilding Techniques
  12. Foxconn Saves Lordstown & Amazon’s New Robot

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