Life & fun · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to I wrote down every expensive hardware development mistake I've seen
I've spent years watching hardware teams make the same mistakes — tooling committed before thermal was resolved, manufacturing processes not validated in PVT that only showed defects at volume, components going EOL unnoticed until the factory tried to order them. The pattern was always the same. The costs were always avoidable. Nobody had written it down. The result is The Hardest Hardware Lessons — covering the full journey from first prototype to end-of-life: EVT/DVT/PVT, factory evaluation, supply chain risk, mass production operations, field failures, and product lifecycle…
The Hardest Hardware Lessons is a guide documenting common costly mistakes in hardware development from prototype through end-of-life. It covers the full product journey including thermal validation, manufacturing… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Prices are shown for the 1 we have checked on their own sites, 1 of them free or with a free tier.
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Here's a "behind-the-scenes" look at my development of a cool sensor during my PhD (electrical engineering). This sensor is only about 1/3 of my total research for my degree and took about a year. I've been on HN for a while now and I've seen my fair share of posts about the woes of pursuing a PhD. Now that I'm done with mine I wanna share some anecdotal evidence that doing a PhD can actually be enjoyable (not necessarily easy) and also be doable in 3 years. When I started I knew I didn't want to work on something that would never leave the lab or languish in a dissertation PDF no one…
2024 · paulbupejr.com · its alternatives →
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canitbebuilt▲143Your hardware idea, inspected. Verdict, BOM, 3D model.
Jul 2026 · canitbebuilt.ai · its alternatives →
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Hey Hackers. This is a project I solo-developed that turns completed PCB assemblies into an easy to use boardview with some accompanying boardscans. There are lots of easier and better ways of doing this, but this is an experimentation to do it as cheaply as possible, with the highest quality and lowest chance of errors. The technical details are in the link. Most public boardviews are almost entirely the result of industrial espionage, other than a few encrypted subscription based software platforms that provide extensive access. The process output is released as donationware, as my main…
2024 · usoldering.com · its alternatives →
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Hey HN, I just wanted to share that after five months of intense work and countless caffeine-fueled writing sessions, "Master Software Architecture: A Pragmatic Guide" is now available. Writing this book was a crazy time. I entirely focused on it, and it took exactly 753 hours of writing, editing, and image editing & resizing(!) until the premiere. Yes, the last one (images) was a killer. If you ever think about writing a book, reserve a lot of time for it unless someone else does it for you. As a result, I am handing you the nearly 400-page book. It is a guide that will help you connect all…
2024 · leanpub.com · its alternatives →
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EasyCircuit▲178Hardware prototyping, as simple as vibe-coding
Jul 2026 · easycircuit.app · its alternatives →
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Modo▲148I’ve built hardware projects for years, and the gap between “I want X” and “parts ordered, files ready to print” always took weeks. Modo compresses that. Describe what you want (e.g. “a portable CO2 monitor with a display and buzzer”) and it generates: - A bill of materials with real components (MPNs, not hallucinated parts) - A printable enclosure generated from actual part dimensions - Wiring diagrams, firmware boilerplate, and assembly instructions - Design validation (power budget, pin conflicts, mechanical fit) Everything streams in real time as each phase completes. The key idea is…
Jan 2026 · modo.is · its alternatives →
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2012 · reddit.com · its alternatives →
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How Brinc grows hardware startups with Shenzhen ecosystem
2016 · content.blubrry.com · its alternatives →
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Prompt to production-ready Hardware designs for manufacture
May 2026 · vibeengineer.iorchestra.ai · its alternatives →
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Asian Startup Growth Stories and Insights
2016 · soundcloud.com · its alternatives →
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Adventures in Making and Breaking Hardware
2016 · nostarch.com · its alternatives →
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Discovering unexpected sophistication in everyday objects
2016 · oreilly.com · its alternatives →
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RaptorCI▲99Hello! With more and more AI coding agents popping up and companies expecting higher output have you noticed more issues in production or other bottlenecks? I’m a principal engineer at a leading cybersecurity company and we have a very lean engineering team and the expectations have shifted to us using AI to increase productivity instead of hiring. The result has been production becoming the most unstable it has ever been and bottlenecks around testing and releasing as we don’t have the resources to cope. I spent a few weeks of thinking of ways that AI could help our full SDLC and one thing…
Apr 2026 · getraptorci.com · its alternatives →
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Learn digital hardware design in the browser: write VHDL and SystemVerilog, simulate, read waveforms, and synthesize to a netlist. No installation required.
Jul 2026 · risingedge.pro · its alternatives →
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Hi HN, I've been working on this for a while and it was hard to decide when to stop, either on the way information is presented or when to stop with adding entries. It's not meant as a blog, but rather as a reference that keeps growing. Link: https://thehardparts.dev Currently I've created 4 main section: - Failure Modes: ways project go wrong - Red Flags: early signals that are worth taking seriously - Tech Decisions: common and not so common trade-offs for hard choices - Playbooks - guided approach for situations that repeat I've also focused on creating links between them to…
Apr 2026 · thehardparts.dev · its alternatives →
- 17IW
Hello! I wrote an introductory SRE Book: Site Reliability Engineering Tidbits and it's free today! These are short fun chapters about SRE, monitoring, debugging, observability, and resiliency. This book aims to provide hands on examples of implementing a number of concepts described in Google's SRE books. It also describes how i've seen SRE concepts impact some of the organizations I've worked in. A couple chapters are hands on debugging exercises going through the process of debugging applications based on data. I'm excited because every chapter describes something that I've done in paying…
2022 · amazon.com · its alternatives →
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Hardwave▲3Simulate hardware failures before they cost a respin
Jul 2026 · hardwave.dev · its alternatives →
- 20IW
Hello! I just published a book on Site Reliability Engineering. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09QNZC2LL This book is a collection of 28 chapters on SRE concepts, such as observability, monitoring, Service Level Objectives (SLOs), alerting, resilience and debugging. I adapted each chapter from blog posts I've written over the last 4 years. Most of the chapters detailed concepts that I applied while working at $dayjob, so they are 100% proven in real business settings :) ------ Some info on the backstory. Last year I started writing a book on my software development…
2022 · its alternatives →
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Howdy friends. I've been a zero to one product manager for 12 plus years and along the way I kept borrowing pieces from different discovery frameworks until I had a methodology of my own, one that actually raises the odds of an idea succeeding. This does not replace user interviews obviously, but it leads you in the right direction. Looking forward for your feedback
Jul 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Building a hardware startup and how to get manufacturing
2015 · youtube.com · its alternatives →
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I wrote High Output Software Engineering, a short book about the skills (decision-making and communication) engineers must focus on to create real value for organizations (other than code itself). The title is a reference to High Output Management, by Andrew Grove, because the skills and mental models laid out in the book should enhance "Output" (value being created) not necessarily "activity" (code being produced). My goal now is to spread the word about the book and put it in the hands of people or companies that will benefit from it. I've heard it's being specially helpful for startup…
Jan 2026 · leomax.fyi · its alternatives →
- 24LL
I've been developing SpiderFoot (an OSINT/recon tool) for 10 years now, so wanted to share my story and try to distill some lessons learned in the hope they might be helpful to others here who might be considering writing/open-sourcing their own tools. Here's the post: https://medium.com/@micallst/lessons-learned-from-my-10-year-open-source-project-4a4c8c2b4f64 And the repo if you want to check it out: https://github.com/smicallef/spiderfoot -- TL;DR version of lessons from the post.. Lesson 1: Writing open source software can be very…
2022 · its alternatives →
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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →