Product engineering notes from EverBowl and beyond — design decisions, trade-offs, and lessons learned.
Balancing a smaller form factor with repairability on the Tracker. Miniaturization usually gets treated as a packaging exercise: shrink the dimensions, squeeze the components into a tighter enclosure, make the product look more compact. In a real hardware product, though, reducing size changes a lot more than the outside shape.
Durability choices for the Tracker against water, mud, impacts, and chewing. A wearable designed for a dog has a very different durability problem than one designed for a person. A human takes a device off before showering, avoids dropping it, and notices when something starts to loosen. A dog does
How we approached packaging as an engineering problem rather than simply adding more material. Introduction Packaging is easy to treat as the last step in product development. The product gets designed, the manufacturing process gets defined, and then the question becomes: how do we put it in a box and
How early user feedback became formal engineering inputs for Everbowl. Introduction A product rarely fails the same way it fails on a test bench. In the lab, we control the load, the environment, the assembly process, and how the product gets handled. In someone's home, none of that
How real interaction with EverBowl™ changed the way we thought about clearance, wear and durability. Designing a mechanical product around a spec is fairly straightforward. Designing one around how people, or animals, actually interact with it is a lot harder. A lot of our mechanical assumptions for EverBowl came from
An honest look at how simulation guided Everbowl's mechanical development, and where physical testing forced us to rethink the model. Introduction Simulation is one of the most useful tools in hardware development because it lets you ask questions before you've manufactured anything: where will this deform,
How clear engineering documentation prevented costly misinterpretation while taking Everbowl from design files to physical hardware. Introduction A CAD model shows what a part looks like. A manufacturing drawing has to communicate what the part actually needs to be. That difference mattered more and more as we moved Everbowl from
How asking "What are we actually testing?" made Everbowl prototypes more focused, faster, and more useful. Introduction A prototype is easy to build. A useful one is a lot harder. Working on Everbowl taught us that a prototype's value has nothing to do with how close
How thoughtful choices in color, material, finish, and light shaped Everbowl's identity long before its technology came to life. Introduction When people pick up a product for the first time, they don't start by evaluating its spec sheet. They make an almost instant judgment based on
How our "Stage 2.5" design freeze helped eliminate scope creep while keeping Everbowl moving toward production. Introduction Every hardware team eventually has to answer a hard question: are we done designing? The temptation is always one more improvement. A bracket that could be a little stronger. A