Resources / Hardware Notes
Notes from the workbench.
Short, practical engineering notes from active hardware projects — enclosure design, electronics architecture, DFM, battery sizing, and the supplier decisions behind production-ready hardware. One technical email when there's something specific to share, no marketing fluff.
Electronics & compliance
Why your EMC pre-screen belongs before the housing is locked
The cheapest failure mode in hardware: finding a ground loop the week tooling is committed. What to check while the geometry is still soft.
Antenna keep-outs nobody mentions until the test report
Ground-plane clearance, plastic vs. metal proximity, and where the antenna actually wants to live on a crowded board.
Decoupling caps: how many is actually enough?
Per-rail, per-pin, and the myth of 100 nF everywhere. Sizing the bulk and the bypass without cargo-culting the reference design.
Mechanical & DFM
Three numbers that decide if a plastic part is manufacturable
Wall thickness, draft, and rib-to-wall ratio — the small ratios that quietly decide whether a part molds clean, sinks, or warps.
A snap-fit that survives 500 cycles, not 5
Cantilever length, strain limits, and the difference between a snap that clicks once and one that lives in a pocket for two years.
Tolerance stack-ups: where the ±0.1 mm actually goes
Worst-case vs. RSS, datums that drift, and the assembly that wouldn't close until someone added the tolerances up.
Manufacturing & sourcing
What a supplier RFQ should ask that yours probably doesn't
Tooling ownership, MOQ ladders, and the change-order costs that appear after you've committed. The questions that price the real deal.
First-article inspection: the report that saves your launch
What to demand, what to measure, and what “pass” really means before you green-light a full production run.
Sizing a battery for a product that must last two years
Duty cycle, self-discharge, temperature derating, and the 20% of capacity you should design never to use.
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