Lessons Learned After A Head-First Dive Into Hardware Manufacturing

February 9, 2026 by Maya Posch 11 Comments

Sometimes you just know that you have the best ever idea for a hardware product, to the point that you’re willing to quit your job and make said product a reality. If only you can get the product and its brilliance to people, it would really brighten up their lives. This was the starry-eyed vision that [Simon Berens] started out with in January of 2025, when he set up a Kickstarter campaign for the World’s Brightest Lamp.

At 50,000 lumens this LED-based lamp would indeed bring the Sun into one’s home, and crowdfunding money poured in, leaving [Simon] scrambling to get the first five-hundred units manufactured. Since it was ‘just a lamp’, how hard could it possibly be? As it turns out, ‘design for manufacturing’ isn’t just a catchy phrase, but the harsh reality of where countless well-intended designs go to die.

The first scramble was to raise the lumens output from the prototype’s 39K to a slight overshot at 60K, after which a Chinese manufacturer was handed the design files. This manufacturer had to create among other things the die casting molds for the heatsinks before production could even commence. Along with the horror show of massive US import taxes suddenly appearing in April, [Simon] noticed during his visit to the Chinese factory that due to miscommunication the heatsink was completely wrong.

Months of communication and repeated trips to the factory follow after this, but then the first units ship out, only for users to start reporting issues with the control knobs ‘scraping’. This was due to an issue with tolerances not being marked in the CNC drawings. Fortunately the factory was able to rework this issue within a few days, only for users to then report issues with the internal cable length, also due to this not having been specified explicitly.

All of these issues are very common in manufacturing, and as [Simon] learned the hard way, it’s crucial to do as much planning and communication with the manufacturer and suppliers beforehand. It’s also crucial to specify every single part of the design, down to the last millimeter of length, thickness, diameter, tolerance and powder coating layers, along with colors, materials, etc. ad nauseam. It’s hard to add too many details to design files, but very easy to specify too little.

Ultimately a lot of things did go right for [Simon], making it a successful crowdfunding campaign, but there were absolutely many things that could have saved him a lot of time, effort, lost sleep, and general stress.

Thanks to [Nevyn] for the tip.

Kodak MC3: Everything But A Phone In 2001

February 8, 2026 by Maya Posch 14 Comments

One of the constants in consumer electronics is that designers will try to put as many features into a single device as possible, whether it’s a Walkman with a radio tuner or a new class of devices that crams a photo and video camera in the same enclosure as a music player. At the time that the Kodak MC3 was released this made it a rather unique device, with it in hindsight being basically a smartphone without the phone, as [Tech Tangents] aptly notes in his recent video on the device.

Six years before Apple’s iPhone would be announced, and eight years before the first iPod with a video camera, the Kodak MC3 was in many respects bleeding edge technology targeted straight at tech enthusiasts. For less than $300 you got VGA-quality images, CompactFlash storage, and MP3 playback capability. The videos it produced were 320×240 resolution, h.263 encoded MOVs with a maximum length of 4 seconds at 20 FPS, or 4 minutes with a 64 MB CF card.

The unit that [Tech Tangents] got used came with a 128 MB CF card, but couldn’t use a 2 GB CF card, which is a shame. The screen on it got a lot of flak for not not having a backlight, but this was common for the era, as were the poor viewing angles. Ditto for the poor video quality, as anyone who invested in consumer digital cameras in the early 2000s can attest to. In that respect this Kodak device was probably a bit too ambitious with its features for the era, maybe to compensate for it completely missing the boat on the rise of digital camera technology around the time.

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Investigating The Science Claims Behind The Donut Solid State Battery

February 8, 2026 by Maya Posch 57 Comments

Earlier this year Donut Lab caused quite the furore when they unveiled what they claimed was the world’s first production-ready solid state battery, featuring some pretty stellar specifications. Since then many experts and enthusiasts in the battery space have raised concerns that this claimed battery may not be real, or even possible at all. After seeing the battery demonstrated at CES’26 and having his own concerns, [Ziroth] decided to do some investigating on what part of the stated claims actually hold up when subjected to known science.

On paper, the Donut Lab battery sounds amazing: full charge in less than 10 minutes, 400 Wh/kg energy density, 100,000 charge cycles, extremely safe and low cost. Basically it ticks every single box on a battery wish list, yet the problem is that this is all based on Donut’s own claims. Even aside from the concerns also raised in the video about the company itself, pinning down what internal chemistry and configuration would enable this feature set proves to be basically impossible.

In this summary of research done on Donut’s claimed battery as well as current battery research, a number of options were considered, including carbon nanotube-based super capacitors. Yet although this features 418 Wh/kg capacity, this pertains only to the basic material, not the entire battery which would hit something closer to 50 Wh/kg.

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When Clever Hardware Hacks Bite Back: A Password Keeper Device Autopsy

February 7, 2026 by Maya Posch 9 Comments

Sometimes you have this project idea in your mind that seems so simple and straightforward, and which feels just so right that you have to roll with it. Then, years later you stumble across the sad remnants of the tearful saga and the dismal failure that it portrays. Do you put it away again, like an unpleasant memory, or write it up in an article, as a tearful confession of past sins? After some coaxing by a friend, [Alessandro] worked up the courage to detail how he set about making a hardware-only password keeper, and why it failed.

The idea was so simple: the device would pretend to be a keyboard and type the passwords for you. This is not that unusual, as hardware devices like the Mooltipass do something similar. Even better, it’d be constructed only out of parts lying around, including an ATtiny85 and an HD44780 display, with bit-banged USB connectivity.

Prototyping the hardware on a breadboard.

Overcoming the challenge of driving the LC display with one pin on the MCU required adding a 74HC595 demultiplexer and careful timing, which sort of worked when the stars aligned just right. Good enough, but what about adding new passwords?

This is where things quickly skidded off the tracks in the most slapstick way possible, as [Alessandro] solved the problem of USB keyboard HID devices being technically ‘output-only’, by abusing the indicator statuses for Caps Lock, Num Lock, and Scroll Lock. By driving these from the host PC in just the right way you can use them as a sort of serial protocol. This incidentally turned out to be the most reliable part of the project.

Where the project finally tripped and fell down the proverbial flight of stairs was when it came to making the bit-banged USB work reliably. As it turns out, USB is very unforgiving with its timing unlike PS/2, making for an infuriating user experience. After tossing the prototype hardware into a box, this is where the project gathered dust for the past years.

If you want to give it a try yourself, maybe using an MCU that has more GPIO and perhaps even a USB hardware peripheral like the STM32F103, ESP32-S3 or something fruit-flavored, you can take a gander at the project files in the GitHub repository.

We’re always happy to see projects that (ab)use the Lock status indicators, it’s always been one of our favorite keyboard hacks.

A Failed SwitchBot Plug Mini And Cooking Electrolytics

February 7, 2026 by Maya Posch 8 Comments

Poorly designed PCBs and enclosures that slowly cook the electrolytic capacitors within are a common failure scenario in general, but they seem especially prevalent in so-called Internet-of-Things devices. The SwitchBot Plug Mini that [Denki Otaku] took a look at after many reports of them failing is one such example.

The location of the failed electrolytic cap in the SwitchBot Plug Mini. (Credit: Denki Otaku, YouTube)

These Mini Plugs are ‘smart’ plugs that fit into a regular outlet and then allow you to control them remotely, albeit not integrated into a wall or such like the Shelly 2.5 smart relay that also began dying in droves. Yet whereas with the Shelly relays this always seemed to take a few years to show up, generally in the form of WiFi connectivity issues, these SwitchBot plugs sometimes failed within weeks or start constantly switching the relay on and off.

After SwitchBot started an exchange program for these plugs, [Denki Otaku] decided to examine these failed devices from affected users. Inside a dead unit the secondary side’s 680 µF capacitor was clearly bulging and had cooked off its electrolyte as a teardown of a dead capacitor confirmed. After replacing this one capacitor a formerly unresponsive plug sprung back to life.

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Making A DIY Refrigerated Vest With Battery And Solar Power

February 7, 2026 by Maya Posch 27 Comments

Keeping a cool head is difficult at the best of times, least of all when it’s summer and merely thinking of touching bare skin to the pavement already gets you a second-degree burn. Unfortunately, it’s not possible to spend all summer in an air-conditioned room, but what if you took said room with you? Introducing [Hyperspace Pirate]’s air-conditioned vest.

Following on from last time’s adventures with a battery-powered air-conditioner that merely blew cold air onto one’s overheating body, this time the same compressor is used for a more compact build.

Since obviously using your body as part of the evaporator would be uncomfortable, instead a heat exchanger was used that transfers the delicious frosty cold to water-filled tubing, zip-tied inside a very fashionable vest.

The basic unit runs on a couple of LiPo packs, but a solar-powered circuit was also built and tested using two small-ish panels. Of course, the requisite backpack-sized setup for that configuration is somewhat bulky, but at least the panels can also provide shade in addition to power for the compressor, hitting two fiery birds with one frosty stone.

Compared to one of those solar-powered caps with a built-in fan, this unit with some refinement could actually be an improvement, as well as keeping you a lot chillier. We’re looking forward to [Hyperspace]’s trial runs in the upcoming Floridian summer, as well as future chilling adventures.

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Why PlayStation Graphics Wobble, Flicker And Twitch

February 6, 2026 by Maya Posch 14 Comments

Although often tossed together into a singular ‘retro game’ aesthetic, the first game consoles that focused on 3D graphics like the Nintendo 64 and Sony PlayStation featured very distinct visuals that make these different systems easy to distinguish. Yet whereas the N64 mostly suffered from a small texture buffer, the PS’s weak graphics hardware necessitated compromises that led to the highly defining jittery and wobbly PlayStation graphics.

These weaknesses of the PlayStation and their results are explored by [LorD of Nerds] in a recent video. Make sure to toggle on subtitles if you do not speak German.

It could be argued that the PlayStation didn’t have a 3D graphics chip at all, just a video chip that could blit primitives and sprites to the framebuffer. This forced PS developers to draw 3D graphics without such niceties like a Z-buffer, putting a lot of extra work on the CPU.

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