A chick standing with a Pickup prototype.
Printed case with beautiful MJF texture.
Update on Pickupβputting the final touches on development and preparing for production. blog.supermechanical.com/2025/09/30/m...
30.09.2025 20:10 β π 0 π 0 π¬ 0 π 0
A sleeping chick between Pickup and Twine environmental sensors.
Got a brood of new Pickup alpha testers.
02.09.2025 22:54 β π 0 π 0 π¬ 0 π 0
Pickup prototype on top of insulated cooler.
29.05.2025 15:20 β π 0 π 0 π¬ 0 π 0
Pickup graph widget showing temperature dropping to freezing and holding the temperature for several hours.
What better way to test new database code than using Pickup to check whether popsicles will stay frozen in my cooler for the afterschool party? Trying to prove that dry ice won't be needed.
29.05.2025 14:47 β π 0 π 0 π¬ 1 π 0
Box filled with MJF printed prototype parts for Pickup
Kid smiles holding a real Pickup
Gifts in the mail! We're adjusting from injection molding to MJF printed parts. These can't do the same level of detail so these prints are helping me tune things, but they look great! Additive manufacturing has come far. blog.supermechanical.com/2025/05/12/a...
27.05.2025 16:27 β π 0 π 1 π¬ 0 π 0
Bowl of bananas, apple and a mango next to a Pickup VOC/particulate sensor.
Measuring fruit offgassing with Pickup's VOC/particulate cartridge.
23.04.2025 18:50 β π 0 π 0 π¬ 0 π 0
Pickup board and spectral cart testing outside on a rainy day.
Pickup getting some air. Testing lenses for the spectral cart in outdoor light.
28.03.2025 18:42 β π 0 π 0 π¬ 0 π 0
Distance sensor boards in a Pickup on a tripod, being tested against a wall.
Testing Pickup distance sensor carts β bouncing lasers off that far wall.
25.02.2025 22:45 β π 0 π 0 π¬ 0 π 0
Spectral sensor cartridge assembled and plugged into a prototype Pickup environmental monitor.
Testing color recognition on the (uncalibrated) spectral sensor. Reads a PCB as green.
Assembled spectral sensor, plugged into a preproduction Pickup! Got color sensing working, though it's still uncalibrated.
18.02.2025 15:38 β π 2 π 0 π¬ 0 π 0
Circuitboard for CO2/humidity sensor cartridge for Pickup environmental monitor
First samples of our sensor cartridge boards are done! Cases are being printed as I type.
24.01.2025 19:17 β π 0 π 0 π¬ 0 π 0
Running sample parts at an injection molder in Maine to get the right color and translucency.
Prepping the injection molding press for a sample run.
It's neat that contract manufacturing lets you make products without a lot of experience. But making innovative products requires that first-hand experience. Here's how hard it is.
blog.supermechanical.com/2024/12/23/y...
09.01.2025 15:48 β π 1 π 0 π¬ 0 π 0
Demolding injection molded handles for our thermometer.
It's hard to make hardware in America when you're small. How we're making the supply chain for our environmental monitor:
blog.supermechanical.com/2024/12/23/t...
31.12.2024 18:19 β π 0 π 1 π¬ 0 π 0
An anti-static package containing sensor samples.
Special delivery! Got samples of an unreleased sensor. 1% the size of comparable sensors, which makes it easy to fit into a cartridge for our pocket-sized environmental monitor.
28.08.2024 22:45 β π 0 π 0 π¬ 0 π 0
An engineer holding the Pickup data logger he's been developing, finally in assembled form with a case and everything.
That feeling when you finally hold the first physical instance of the thing you've been working on for a year.
This is why hardware development is hard to quit!
blog.supermechanical.com/2024/07/30/s...
02.08.2024 14:58 β π 0 π 0 π¬ 0 π 0
Diagrams of injection mold flow and draft from a moldability report. Exciting.
Making injection-molded parts is not as hard as you think, as long as you can swallow laying down a lot of money. I wrote about the grind as I finish up the molds for Pickup:
blog.supermechanical.com/2024/07/01/a...
08.07.2024 21:20 β π 1 π 1 π¬ 0 π 0
Cross section in CAD of the Pickup environmental monitor.
A lot of money was spent. New Pickup project update:
www.kickstarter.com/projects/sup...
03.07.2024 21:39 β π 0 π 1 π¬ 0 π 0
Final candidate Pickup PCBs. Need only a few tweaks.
We got production candidate circuitboards for Pickup! Nearly there.
blog.supermechanical.com/2024/05/14/m...
13.06.2024 18:20 β π 0 π 0 π¬ 0 π 0
Little baby chip trying to fit into adult pads on a PCB.
Big pads, little component. That's why you prototype the process. (From the Pickup environmental data logger we're manufacturing.)
03.05.2024 14:08 β π 0 π 0 π¬ 0 π 0
MQTT client reading data stream from the (in-development) Pickup data logger.
Boards spitting out data to MQTT. This goes to your friendly Pickup dashboard, but you can also tap into the stream directly or route it to your own brokerβno locked down ecosystem here.
Read the latest development update for our modular data logger: blog.supermechanical.com/.../09/the-s...
01.04.2024 19:54 β π 0 π 0 π¬ 0 π 0
Six printed iterations of the Pickup data logger's case, in development.
These are about a third of the Pickup case iterations. Latest Kickstarter update provides an inside view on making hardware.
www.kickstarter.com/projects/sup...
27.03.2024 16:49 β π 0 π 0 π¬ 0 π 0
Can you spot what was even shipped to me? Big box, tiny inserts.
Got some Pickup component samples. It's not just Amazon that likes to pack tiny things in large boxes.
16.02.2024 20:17 β π 0 π 0 π¬ 0 π 0
8 Pickup prototype boards to assemble.
Time to make the donuts. (Or, a batch of Pickup prototypes.)
Latest update: www.kickstarter.com/projects/sup...
02.02.2024 17:41 β π 1 π 1 π¬ 0 π 0