Product engineering notes from EverBowl and beyond — design decisions, trade-offs, and lessons learned.
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
How aligning mechanical, electrical, and firmware engineering early helped us reduce redesigns, shorten decision cycles, and build a more reliable product. Introduction Most engineering problems don't belong to a single discipline. A mechanical engineer designs a bracket that blocks a connector. An electrical engineer relocates a PCB and
How thoughtful design reduced repair time, simplified maintenance, and improved the ownership experience. Introduction Most hardware gets designed around one question: how do we assemble this? A much smaller number of products get designed around the equally important question of how do we take it apart. For consumer products, serviceability
Why a part that survives a load test can still fail in the field, and how designing for wear, not just strength, improved the long-term reliability of Everbowl. One of the first questions a mechanical engineer asks about a part is "will it break?" FEA, hand calculations, and
How real-world fabrication variability shaped the design of Everbowl, and why engineering for consistency matters more than designing for perfection. Introduction Every CAD model starts out in a world of perfect geometry. Holes sit exactly where they're supposed to, surfaces are flat, and every dimension matches the drawing
An engineering investigation into how sensor geometry, optics, and software together determine the true field of view of an integrated camera system. Introduction When you build a vision system out of off-the-shelf parts, it's tempting to assume that if the sensor and lens are mechanically compatible, they'
How Better Design Finishes Made Everbowl More Durable Aesthetics and engineering usually get treated as separate jobs on a product team. One person worries about how something looks, another about how it holds up. Working on Everbowl blurred that line more than we expected. A handful of changes we made
How Real-World Use Drove Mechanical Design Decisions No matter how carefully a product is engineered, its first encounter with real users almost always reveals something the design team did not anticipate. Engineers interact with products differently than users. During development, devices are handled deliberately, assembled with care, and operated according
Performance gains in product development usually get credited to new electronics, better sensors, or smarter algorithms. Every so often, though, the fix comes from something much smaller: a few millimeters of geometry. While developing one of our wearable tracking devices, we ran into an issue that looked, at first, like
Hardware redesigns rarely stay contained to one subsystem. A change in one place ripples outward, and what looks like a simple reduction in sensor count can cascade into new structural constraints, new joining challenges, and a fresh round of stress calculations. This is the story of moving our ring scale