OddEngineer.com + Free Giveaway with Consultation and Bose Noise Canceling Headphones! While some got prison swole or Hot Cheetos swole in 2020, I got nerd entrepreneurship swole. I built a new thing for us freelance physical product engineers: OddEngineer.com. There, you can immediately book and pay for appointments with niche, hard-to-find engineering pros. Got questions…
On the 3rd installment of “How to Network with HW enginerds in Europe,” we fly to Kiev, Ukraine! (AKA Kyiv, Ukraine.) I only had two days in this city but managed to tour three facilities and pack in four meetings, proving Ukrainians are awesome. In this short visit, I learned a lot of interesting facts…
As I travel around the world searching for fellow HW nerds, I’m happy to share my findings with you, dear SolidSmack reader. In this article, I bring you the best events and organizations to check out in the San Francisco Bay area. There more than, perhaps, anywhere, the term “tech” gets conflated with “software”. However,…
On April 19-20, 2018, Hardware Massive put on the 4th Annual HardwareCon in San Jose, CA. For a while, the flashy shine of new hardware tech has been overshadowed by new software tech. In Silicon Valley especially, there’s a kind of cultural notion that software is high tech and exciting and hardware is not. I…
We’re stoked to welcome Hardware Massive with this special guest post by Greg Fisher, Founder at HardwareCon. Check out Hardware Massive and, if you’re in the San Jose area this week, you’ll want head over to HardwareCon to learn about the future of hardware. Having spent the last 13 years helping more than 900 hardware startups…
As if printing your own desk toys and battle armor wasn’t enough, researchers up at the University of Washington have recently developed a method for transmitting data via Wi-Fi using 3D objects without the need for electricity. The objects in question use a series of 3D springs, switches, and gears to translate motion into data…
It may look like a simple block of wood, but Nissha’s Mui does much more than sit on your wall as an aesthetically pleasing living room decoration; underneath that warm earthy texture is a touch-based internet-connected interactive display capable of displaying information and controlling IoT devices. The display is designed to match to your environment…
Imagine having an Echo (Amazon’s voice-activated home automation device) controlling every device in your home. That’s the idea behind Seeed’s latest endeavor, the ReSpeaker. The ReSpeaker adds voice recognition/interaction to everything from speakers and home appliances to IoT devices. What’s more, the device was designed using open-source hardware and can even be uploaded with your…
For independent designers and engineers wanting to tap into wearables, the headache of both incorporating and managing sensor data can stop an otherwise brilliant idea dead in its tracks. But what if figuring out how to track and measure data through health and motion sensors were, in fact, the last things worth worrying about? More…
In case you haven’t scratched your retro video game nostalgia with emulators, apps and more DIY projects than you can shake a sweaty handful of quarters at, Atari has announced that they want to take over living rooms once again. This time, however, as a range of smart home products. In a news release…
Responsible for everything from R/C lawnmowers to auto-lacing sneakers, the Arduino is the backbone for some of the most wild and crazy – but also sorta genius – projects within the past few years. Now, there’s a new kid on the block. Launching at Maker Faire Bay Area this weekend, the Arduino Primo is the latest and…
As a UX designer, Tobias Eichenwald believes we’re on the cusp of a shift that will move us away from generic Graphical User Interfaces to a new generation of Natural User Interfaces that engage multiple human senses including gesture, speech, haptic, visual interfaces and more. He is also the co-founder of Senic, a new hardware…
Last year, Nike turned the Air MAG shoes, that Marty McFly sports in Back to the Future, into a reality. They were pricey, yes, but available in limited quantities and sold exclusively to benefit the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Disease research. Now the shoe company is bringing that totally futuristic technology to the…
As the world of IoT continues to reveal new ways of doing the same things better, certain applications have clearly been better than others. The BRIXO blocks from “lifelong restless tinkerer” and Quantum Physicist Boaz Almog is one of those few applications. Almog, who also gave a 2012 TED talk about quantum levitation, has been…
The point of technology? Make our lives easier. It’s almost 2016, and I still have to press buttons? Puh-lease. How about a microbot made to push your buttons, literally? That’s the new invention from South Korean startup Naran.
I am currently certain that we are approaching the apex of our societal laziness. I would be surprised if future generations will even bother to walk or eat for themselves (they will probably create a button which will call a robot to do these things for them).
The Internet of Things. We all know that having an iPhone-controlled thermostat or a Wifi-capable pacemaker is the future, but is it safe? Like all things connected to the World Wide Web, it can be hacked quicker than you can say “Sony Pictures”…and if you don’t want Kim Jong-Un access to your Refrigerator, take some…