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Congratulations! After a long design and prototype verification process, mass production has finally begun for your product. Let’s imagine that your first batch of a few thousand units sells out in a few weeks (hooray!), you place a bigger order with the manufacturer, and then an even bigger one in a few months. How do […]

Foamcore (also known as foamboard) is a lightweight building material that typically consists of a foam inner layer covered on top and bottom by paper. It’s cheap, easy-to-use and can quickly create scale models. There are 2 main applications for working with foamcore: 1. Early user testing Working with foamcore makes sense for applications where […]

One of the coolest new products we’ve seen hit the shelves for the holiday season is the Wilson X Connected Basketball. It uses Bluetooth LE and an accelerometer to track your shooting stats so you can improve your game. The ball also pairs with the Wilson X App so you can track shooting percentage and range […]

For this edition of our Hardware DNA series we’re taking apart a very unique product: The Muse brain sensing headband. What the heck is a brain sensing headband, you ask? Well, essentially it uses sensors to measure brain activity across your frontal cortex and then, using the app, gives you real-time feedback on what’s happening in […]

If you’ve worked with consumer electronics, you’ll have come across living hinges. They are found in a wide variety of components – clamshell packaging, attached bottle caps, and electronic cases, just to name a few. They are low cost, easy to manufacture, and have little wear or friction involved in operation — understandably a popular […]

As a bunch of Nintendo nerds, we’re really excited about this week’s teardown, where we’re looking at the evolution of Nintendo controllers since the very beginning. From the old-school NES controller with only 8 buttons to the game-changing N64 controller with the first joystick to the latest Wii U gamepad with a touch screen and […]

Chefs create recipes. Hardware Engineers create BOMs (Bill of Materials) and SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures). The BOM is an ingredients list for building your product, and the SOP is the set of instructions on how to build it. In this post, we’ll dive into exactly how to construct an excellent ingredients list that will help you […]

Here at Mindtribe, I regularly meet with teams excited to turn their fledgling product concept into a physical reality. Teams come in all shapes and sizes—both startups and big companies, with varying levels of experience and states of clarity around their product concept. My job is to understand their vision and help them transform it […]

Recently TiVo came out with a new set-top box called Bolt and the internet had a lot to say about it. Because, well, it looks like this: Is it winking at us? We’re not sure. But we are sure that we want to further investigate the design of this thing, as well as what lies beneath. Packaging […]

Inspiration It all started back in 1995, when I listened to the song Da Funk by Daft Punk. As a European, I had a lot of exposure to Daft Punk music, and after Discovery (2001), it became shall we say…an obsession. 🙂 I stumbled upon this YouTube video on how to make a Daft Punk helmet a while back, […]