Supermechanical

A chick standing with a Pickup prototype.

Printed case with beautiful MJF texture.

Update on Pickup—putting the final touches on development and preparing for production. blog.supermechanical.com/2025/09/30/m...

A sleeping chick between Pickup and Twine environmental sensors.

Got a brood of new Pickup alpha testers.

Granular Slow progress lately. Maybe it’s the summer schedule. Maybe it’s because I’m back on the mechanical track. Multi-jet fusion: it’s different The new printed parts took a while to get to me (I su...

Learning about making 3D printed production parts, and how designing for multi jet fusion is different than injection molding.
blog.supermechanical.com/2025/06/27/g...

Pickup prototype on top of insulated cooler.

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.

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...

Bowl of bananas, apple and a mango next to a Pickup VOC/particulate sensor.

Measuring fruit offgassing with Pickup's VOC/particulate cartridge.

Pickup board and spectral cart testing outside on a rainy day.

Pickup getting some air. Testing lenses for the spectral cart in outdoor light.

Sensor party To make up for those boring logistics updates, we have tangible movement on actual stuff this time. Unfortunately not case plastics, but a bit of just about everything else. The case molds are stil...

In which we play with a bunch of sensor boards.
blog.supermechanical.com/2025/03/07/s...

Distance sensor boards in a Pickup on a tripod, being tested against a wall.

Testing Pickup distance sensor carts — bouncing lasers off that far wall.

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.

Sensor cartridges getting made, educational science Things are moving forward, slow but steady, which is about all you can ask for when sandwiched between Christmas and the Chinese New Year. We finally got a date for the first sample injection molded p...

Bringing up Pickup sensor cartridges...
blog.supermechanical.com/2025/01/27/s...

Update 13: Sensor cartridges getting made, tariffs, educational science · Pickup is an environmental monitor for the rest of us. Things are moving forward, slow but steady, which is about all you can ask for when sandwiched between Christmas and the Chinese New Year. We finally got a date for the first sample injection molded p...

Pickup update in which we try to untangle tariffs, which are currently in a quantum state. Also, sensor cartridge boards.
www.kickstarter.com/projects/sup...

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.

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...

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...

The small link at the end of the chain This update’s for the logistics nerds instead of the techies. Your first product is a supply chain You may have wondered why businesses can be built on importing existing products from overseas ...

When you're making a hardware product, you're really making two products. Been wanting to write about the experience of building a supply chain for a while.
blog.supermechanical.com/2024/12/23/t...

Boards, bugs, better interface Hi — after getting shiny new boards last month, this month we’ve been back to grinding on code. I’ll do my best to make this interesting, but no promises. Hardware We got around to testing all o...

Pickup update #11 is a little dull unless you're into the nitty gritty of hardware production. Always fun ("fun"?) to get your first batch of boards to start analyzing the failures! (3 out of 50, but easy fixes.)
blog.supermechanical.com/2024/11/14/b...

The production boards are looking autumnal. We have been boring lately. Though in general, most of the work of manufacturing is just grinding, on the supply chain as well as on our own engineering tasks. That’s one reason I was holding off on a...

Production circuitboards have arrived just in time for pumpkin spice season. Read this for a snapshot of the many balls you have to keep in the air (and the one I dropped) when developing a consumer electronics product.

blog.supermechanical.com/2024/10/08/t...

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.

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...

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...

Cross section in CAD of the Pickup environmental monitor.

A lot of money was spent. New Pickup project update:
www.kickstarter.com/projects/sup...

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...

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.)

Forward March March has been productive. We left off last time with a major decision to change out a key component, the microcontroller that handles all of our sensor IO and power management. We've had our heads do...

Tuning Pickup ambient light sensors. From outdoor to indoor is quite a dynamic range. Nerd details in our latest development update: blog.supermechanical.com/2024/04/09/f...

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 broker—no locked down ecosystem here.

Read the latest development update for our modular data logger: blog.supermechanical.com/.../09/the-s...

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...

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.

8 Pickup prototype boards to assemble.

Time to make the donuts. (Or, a batch of Pickup prototypes.)

Latest update: www.kickstarter.com/projects/sup...