Every issue of Hardware FYI.
2026 82 issues
- 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.
- Kitting Out Y Combinator's Lab YC’s new hardware lab, a16z’s American Dynamism 50, a map of PCB manufacturers, and more.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- How to Make a Car Fly The engineering behind a ‘flying’ Roadster, NASA's primer on pressure vessels, how articulated buses work, and more.
- 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.
- 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.
- Toast for Factories What restaurants can teach us about manufacturing, how DJI captured the drone market, implications for the future of CAD, and more.
- Supply Chain as a Moat The shifting electronics supply chain, Starship’s payload capacity, Dyson’s toothbrush defects, and more.
- 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.
- Renegade Engineering Wearables that don’t need a charger, building hardware with tiny teams, datacenter land use in context, and more.
- 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.
- On Benchmarks Making sense of engineering benchmarks, Skunk Works on prototyping, solar installation robots, and more.
- 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.
- 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.
- $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.
- 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.
- Inside the Idea Factory Moonshot factories, Hugging Face’s robot duck, reverse-engineering rocket engines, and a primer on cable testing.
- Claude Learns the Factory Standardizing factory test infrastructure, the slow collapse of optical disk drives, graduating from a garage machine shop, and more.
- 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.
- Can America Still Make Things? A grill scrubber’s view on reindustrialization, an intuitive guide to energy, retrospective on the smart home, and more.
- 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.
- AI Chips Need Liquid Cooling Google’s liquid-cooling buildout, a map to control theory, and the history of Delta Electronics.
- Can Anger Fuel a Nobel-Winning Idea? Blue LEDs, the rise of LFP batteries, sixteen years of electronics lore, and more.
- DARPA & The Impossible Frontier DARPA’s heavy-lift drone competition, explosive vegetable peeling, multi-modal sensing, and more.
- Pickleball’s Composite Problem Disposable paddles, the art of removing components, a self-sharpening pencil, and more.
- Why is Manufacturing Difficult? Complexities buried in manufacturing, recipe diagrams for engineers, stamping press choreography, and more.
- Why Headphones Need a Fake Head Tesla’s first Powerwall, a mouse for moving through CAD, and boats on a giant wheel.
- The Crypto Wallet That Wasn’t Alone Hardware espionage, inside IMAX 70mm projection, waterproofing circuit boards with epoxy, and more.
- The Crowdfunding Mirage Connected egg trays, $500M drone contracts, and the crowdfunding hangover
- The Cheap Drone Problem for Tanks Drone designs, medieval cathedral construction, a mirror in orbit, and more.
- The $800K Bounty to Go Mach 1 High-speed RC planes, Tesla’s “new” assembly lines, and the race to break Mach 1
- Never Trust The Autorouter Auction-floor lab sourcing, home robot sketches, revisiting EDA's oldest unresolved promise, and more.
- Why AR Glasses Still Don’t Scale Optical manufacturing bottlenecks, air conditioning as development infrastructure, and the anisotropy lesson every process quietly reteaches.
- The Solid-State Battery That Wasn’t The solid-state battery that wasn't, tracking objects in orbit, and inside an airport body scanner.
- Texture Lives in the Tooling CMF as manufacturing instructions, hidden surface texture in the PS5 controller, and Skunk Works rules for small teams
- Glue is All You Need Repairing Cybertrucks with glue, zero-ohm resistors, and board-level archives of every video game console
- Capital Constraints and the Starlink Flywheel Phased arrays for the masses, building a loft elevator from scratch, and more RF black magic.
- Application Notes as Cultural Artifacts The lost art of engineering writing, Toyota's lean origins, and de-institutionalizing your career.
- Sending Robots to Kindergarten Robot data factories, a lathe with vibes, and the on-demand composites bet.
- Goodbye, Board Spins Liquid metal circuit boards, actuator factories, direct modeling, and world models for robots.
- Thermoforming and the Art of the Niche Thermoforming, small manufacturing businesses, and the $25K question.
- Bambu Lab & The Open-Source Trap Bambu’s open-source controversy, why MCAD is harder for AI than code, and SendCutSend’s $110M raise.
- Bed of Nails Bed of nails test fixtures, Wing's drone workshop, and Starship's evolving heat shield.
- The Long Game of Raspberry Pi Raspberry Pi's education flywheel, Google's hardware graveyard, and operator factories for robot training data.
- Perceived Quality Lives in the Noise NVH testing, cowboy engineering, Lime’s IPO filing, wave-powered data centers, and more.
- RF Engineering is Black Magic Tribal knowledge of RF design, EV range vs. temperature on the dyno, OpenAI's expanding robotic division, and more.
- 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.
- Claude Learns to CAD Opus 4.7 learning CAD, backyard RAM fabrication, hardware startup lessons from Boosted, and more.
- Every Home is a Datacenter Compute behind the meter, turbine oligopolies, and a Rube Goldberg machine for burgers.
- 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.
- 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.
- Why Hardware Development Frameworks All Rhyme Claude Code for test fixtures, hardware development frameworks, Kia's humanoid robot factory plans, and more.
- What ASML Built (And Why No One Else Can, Yet) ASML's engineering complexity, watchdog timers, the calling of an engineer, and more.
- What a Robotics PhD Doesn’t Teach
- Back to the World's Largest Electronics Market Sourcing guides at HQB, gigacasting & thixomolding, chip manufacturing, frangible nuts, and more.
- The Machines That Make the Machines
- Why Your Electricity Bill Doesn't Add Up
- Tooling at Prototype Speed
- Sunday Robotics & The Real-World Baymax
- Why Bent Plastic Turns White
- 2,400 Hard Drives and a Weekend
- 3D Printing Farms, Reborn
- Mechanically Simple, Electrically Crowded
- More Process Won’t Fix Systems Engineering
- Hardware Doesn’t Move at Software Speed
- SLA Printing & The Battle of Architectures
- On-Demand Manufacturing Can Eat the World
- The Tolerance Intuition Gap
- Inside the Humanoid Stack
- The Volkswagen Beetle Almost Failed
- Zero-Tolerance Machining Is a Myth
- The Anti–Venture Manufacturing Playbook
- Why Modular Construction Didn’t Scale
- Welcome to Kinetic Launching our inaugural conference
- The Most Expensive Computer You Own
- What the Datasheets Don’t Say
- How to Start a Machine Shop (From Zero)
- How Anduril Beat the Primes
- Improvised Manufacturing at Scale
- Burn Capital, Build Cathedrals
2025 95 issues
- End of Year Recap (Part Two)
- End of Year Recap (Part 1)
- When Not Shipping Is the Strategy
- Humanoid Robotics, Mapped
- A Closer Look at SpaceX’s Payload Stack
- Coloring Metal With Lasers
- On Safety Factors and the Illusion of Margin
- CNC Periodic Table of Elements
- How to Nail a Rocket to a Barge
- Manufacturing’s Missing ChatGPT Moment
- The Golden Age of Space
- Edge Connectors and the Idiot Index
- Powerwall, But Make It Vape-Powered
- The Drunken Walk of Robot Vacuums
- 110 Tips of Unsolicited Design Advice
- Street-Fighting Mathematics
- Why So Many Startups Fail
- Silicon Valley Wants to Build a City
- Build a Lab on a Budget
- The Art of Hacking Production
- Mapping America’s Machine Shops
- Boston Dynamics’ Forbidden Teardown
- The Expensive Part Is the Mold
- The Airline Model for Rockets
- Humanoids, Smoking Since 1939
- When Knives Sing
- Explosive Forming is Real
- PID Loops, But Make It Cooking
- Batteries Are Running California’s Grid
- 3D Printing Is Dead (Kind Of)
- Cartography of Silicon Valley
- Electrify Everything
- Bootstrapping Hardware in 2025
- Motion Profiles & Mapping Satellites
- An Engineer’s Guide to Starship
- Lessons from OceanGate’s Titan Implosion
- How Teams Decide What to Build
- Impact Extrusion & Trashcan Macs
- GPS Jamming & Fluid Simulation Pendants
- Inside Apple’s Hardware Hierarchy
- How to Build a Medical Device Startup
- Backflipping Robots and Moravec’s Paradox
- Factories, But Make Them Tents
- How QR Codes Became RF Filters
- Space Debris, by the Numbers
- Mapping U.S. Manufacturing MegaProjects
- Where PCBs Are Born Touring a Quick-Turn Factory in North America
- How SpaceX Builds Faster
- Why Vertical Farming Failed
- From Photo to Structured CAD Models
- When Honda Builds a Rocket
- Conformal Coatings & LLMs on a Pi
- What a Grill Scrubber Says About U.S. Manufacturing
- Inside Waymo's Robotaxi Factory
- What Actually Makes Money in Nvidia’s AI Servers
- DARPA Spy Birds & Open-Source Drones
- Lessons from 8 Years of Building Robots
- Soft Goods & Space Toilet Telemetry
- Textiles Are Just Soft Composites
- Inside a 124-Layer PCB
- How to Join Things (and Boil Water Fast)
- Mapping 3,400+ US Job Shops
- How to Start Metal 3D Printing for Under $10K
- Building Neuralink’s Machine Shop
- A Year of Building
- A Playbook for Evaluating Contract Manufacturers
- A Post-Mortem on Commodity Cycles
- Geothermal Gradients & Flight Control Failures
- The Cable-Driven World of Surgical Robots
- Mapping Tariffs on Electronics Supply Chains
- Digital Weights, Thermoplastic Planes, and Book-Scanning Robots
- A First Principles Guide to Factory Layout
- The World’s Smallest MCU
- The Capacitor Plague & Fake Solids
- Figure’s Factory and the Paradox of Early Automation
- The Economics of Aerial Drone Delivery
- Understanding Product Reliability Through Bathtub Curves
- PCB Layout Doesn’t Need to Be Painful
- Trips to the World's Largest Electronics Market
- Thermal Design Basics for Integrated Circuits
- ABCs of Raising Capital in Hardware
- Where Did Car Colors Go?
- How to Find Schematics for Any Device (Legally)
- Mechanical Keyboards to Capacitive Touchscreens
- Apple's Pixar Lamp Robot & Periodic Egg Cooking
- The State of Decarbonization in 2025
- Air, Angles, and Stadium Design
- The Return of Supersonic Flight
- How Text-to-CAD Works
- NASA's Plan for Humans on Mars & China's Tech-Industrial Ecosystem
- How Dyson’s Bladeless Fans Actually Work
- A Historical Take on CES 2025
- Teardrop Vias & Grain Direction in Sheet Metal Bending
- How a Garage CNC Shop Made $88K in 6 Months
- Rotational-Molded Pickleballs & YC Startup Ideas
2024 70 issues
- A Primer on Shoe Manufacturing
- Mapping Automotive Supply Chains & Pressure History of Injection Molded Parts
- Designing Snap Fit Joints & Terahertz Imaging Tech
- A Look at Marine-Inspired Biomimicry in Ship Propellers
- History of G-Code & BB-8 Robot Teardown
- Deep Tech Market Map: The Future of Aerospace and Defense
- Solar Power, But Make It Orbital
- Optical Sorting Machines & Lunar Lander Tech. Developments
- Anatomy of a Plastic Spoon Mold & Bolted Joint Design
- Electric Toothbrush Teardown & Star Shaped Solder Joints
- ASML's $100k/hr Machines & Power Electronics
- A Global Network of 4,000 Ocean Robots
- First Principles: Building a Small CAD Company
- How CAD Software Cost Airbus $6.1 Billion Dollars
- MIT Lecture Notes & New Manufacturing Simulation Games
- Nuclear Renaissance in the Age of AI
- How SpaceX Caught a Rocket Mid-Air
- Unpacking Container Port Efficiency & History Behind the Hose Clamp
- Waveguides in Meta's Orion AR Glasses
- The Basics of USB & Speaker Teardowns
- A Map of Manufacturing Distribution in China
- Designing Buttons in Consumer Electronics
- How to Read a Component Datasheet
- A Repository of 100+ Hardware Startup Pitch Decks
- Curiosity Rover Tread Wear & US Defense Supply Chain
- Investigation into Boeing Starliner Failures
- Metallurgy 101 & Climate Startups Post-Mortem
- First Principles: Tesla's Next Turn, Steer-by-Wire
- Gigacasting Competitors & Solar Climate Engineering
- Wind Tunnel Tested Olympic Swimsuits & Psuedo-Pressure Sensors
- Inflatable Space Habitats & 3D Printed Train Parts
- Desktop Wire EDM & HDMI Espionage
- Vision Pro Supplier List & Deep-Tech Market Map
- How to Build a Hardware Start-Up & Surface Texturing Plastic Parts
- Starfactory Tour & "Microwave" Powered Aircraft
- First Principles: How to Build a Formula One Car
- Investment Casting Basics & Coffee Bean CT Scans
- Starlink Latency & Machining a Continuous Wave Flag
- Apple's Reliability Lab Tour & Voyager-1 Data Transmission
- First Principles: The Mechanics of Humanoid Robots
- Current Sensing Basics & Solar Applications
- Motorcycle Valves & 7-Segment Displays
- Motor Cortex Implants & Micro-Fasteners
- Northern Lights & Ham Radios
- Radar Factories & Zero-G Combustion
- Record Plasma Temperatures & Molten Salt Energy Storage
- Zero Propellant Space Propulsion & Ferroelectric Capacitors for Energy Storage
- A New Record Fiber Data Rate & The Rise of the US Steel Industry
- Tidal Power Surging & Flight Computer Breakdown
- Software for Hardware & Neuralink Implants
- Specific Aperture Radar from Space & Astro Mechanica Deep Dive
- Neuralink’s First Human Patient & The Fundamentals of Internet Infrastructure
- Starship Launch & Hypersonic Flights
- Starships Third Test Flight & A Naturally Occurring Superconductor
- Iron-Air Battery Research & Space-Based Solar Power
- Rusting Cybertrucks & Computer Vision Farming
- A Semiconductor Bug-Eye & The World’s Fastest Racing Drone
- Factory Gameplay & Semiconductor Startups
- Boltless Boeings & Generative AI CAD
- Antique Power Electronics & Major EDA Acquisitions
- Magnetic Gear Boxes & Ingesting Electronics End-to-End
- Apple Vision Pro Internals & Electric Transformer Shortages
- Brittle Helmets & Apple Vision Pro Manufacturing
- 1930’s Auto Manufacturing & EE Lab Bench Essentials
- The ‘Ideal Switch’ & Injection-Molding IC Packages
- NASA Unveils the X-59 & CES ‘24
- Humanoid Robotics & Career Fairs
- EE Lab Tools & RF Course Notes
- Moon Trips & Autonomous Farms
- Happy New Year!
2023 11 issues
- Holiday Edition!
- Cybertruck LV Board Design Review & Dk/Df Tables in PCB Mfg
- Roadster Schematics & A $500M Close Call
- Capacitors Demystified & Fusion-Based Cancer Treatment
- Controlling Voltage with Your Mind & Multi-Millennium Fluorocarbon Memory
- Vacuum Arc Thrusters & Foam Science and Mfg
- Domestic Semiconductor Packaging & Microfluidics Manufacturing
- Announcing the Hardware FYI Discord! A new addition to the toolbox
- The Interviewer's Mindset A glimpse inside the hiring manager's POV
- Landing Your Dream Job in Tech. What they don't teach you in school
- A New Chapter - Hardware FYI We're launching a newsletter!
2022 39 issues
- Underrated Manufacturing & EE Interview Prep
- Wake Turbulence & Wire Harnesses
- History of Dynamite & Copper Mining Breakdown
- Indian Casting Factories & Hardware Tech Growth Trends
- Hollywood Hardware & Open-Source Silicon Manufacturing
- The Engineering of Flying Fast & PCB Etch Factor
- NAND & General Magic
- Sweat Sensors & HDI PCB Design
- Gate Drivers & Russian Use of American Semiconductors
- A Better Semiconductor & Interview with the Founder of LTspice
- Horse to Rocket Pipeline & The State of Mass Production
- Battery Charging Fundamentals & The Equipment Multiplier Effect
- Planes and Transistors & Poet Turned Mathematician
- Humanoid Robots & How Not to Screw Up Your Manufacturing Startup
- Top EE YouTube Channels & PCB Plating Process
- New Lego Factory & Switch Mode Power Supplies
- Q&A with Pete Staples & How America Can Win Semiconductors
- Battery Management Algorithms & Japanese Job-Shop Manufacturing Economy
- Li-ion Battery Digital Twins & Superconducting Diodes
- Semiconductor CEO Interviews & Silicon Carbide
- EE Video Games & All Things Capacitors
- RF Course Notes & Summit Becomes the Largest PCB Manufacturer
- Reading Power MOSFET Datasheets & SpaceX's Memo
- The Top Industrial VC's & DC-DC Control Theory
- The Fall of American Industrial R&D Labs & Ranking Every Chess Movie
- Intro to High-Speed Flight & Choosing an Oscilloscope
- Heating Wood to Save the Planet & Electrical Engineering Salaries
- Semi Equipment Shortage & Roku's Founding Story
- Airplane Bird Strikes & Chinese Manufacturing Under Mao
- An Interview with FixturFab & Google's HW Acquisition Spree
- An Interview with Elecia White & Beaming Solar Energy Down from Space
- The Three Ages of FPGA's & World Class Manufacturing
- The Free Hardware Event of the Year & The Coolest Aircraft You've Never Heard of
- The Hardware Renaissance & Patent Frenzy
- Intel's New $1B Fund & An Interview with Kyle Dumont from AllSpice
- Chips for Better Facial Authentication & A Case for Splitting Up Intel
- Interview with Alan Yu from Space Capital & Hacking a $2M Crypto Wallet
- Skydiving Out of a Failed Airplane & Zooming into a Microchip
- CATL and the Battery Race & Thoughts on Space Conflict
2021 12 issues
- The Tech of Terminator 2 & NASA Probes the Sun
- Moon Race & The Pizza Paradox
- The Fundamental Theory of Physics & A New Approach to Chip Floorplanning
- Cryptographic Semiconductor Fingerprints & Automakers + Custom Silicon
- Apple + the Right to Repair & Microfluidics IC’s
- GM Eliminating Seat Heaters & An Old, Used Tractor Going for $175k
- $1T Infrastructure Bill Breakdown & 7,000 Talks on C++ and Rust
- Facebook Is Now Meta & Zapping Molten Tin with Lasers
- Intel Spending $20B & The Physics Behind Duck Formations
- 1,000+ Abandoned Sailors & Apple’s History with Silicon
- Huawei Battles Their Own Chip Shortage & 15th Century Shipbuilding Techniques
- Foxconn Saves Lordstown & Amazon’s New Robot