eclecticc | by Nirav Patel

I was chatting with a new hardware entrepreneur recently who asked an excellent question: What does "Hardware is hard" really mean? It being time consuming and expensive to iterate on, not being able to ship patches, requiring specialized skillsets, and h

I'm Nirav Patel, a hobbyist and hacker turned engineer turned suit (turned back into a hobbyist, and then a suit again?). I graduated from Carnegie Mellon University with an Electrical and Computer Engineering degree, spent a few years at Apple, joined th

We're proving that you can build great consumer electronics products that are designed to last… by building them. Expect another multi-year break from this blog!The post Fixing Consumer Electronics first appeared on eclecticc.

The thing I'm sharing today is a very early and very small slice of the project that is likely going to consume the next few years of my life. This is a parametric generator for M.2 expansion card mockups in OpenSCAD. I can't imagine this is useful to man

When looking into small form factor cases to build a Mini-ITX PC for my Rift, I found a few things: Like any other hobby, there is an obsessive (in a good way) community of small form factor enthusiasts. The metric they optimize for is case size in liters

It's remarkable how much and how little has changed with RepRap since I built a Mendel in late 2010. The basic architecture has proven incredibly robust. The most popular home 3D printers including the Prusa i3 MK3 that I bought still use an open frame wi

When building projects professionally, I try to take every shortcut possible to accelerate learnings around an idea and get useful results to inform the next iteration. When building projects personally, I do basically the opposite. Often when starting wi

A few month hiatus from this blog turned into five and a half years, but that is a much longer story. This one is about the state of desktop spherical displays in 2018. In 2011, I hacked together the Snow Globe spherical display from a laser pico-projecto

There was once a goofy experiment here around an augmented reality business card, but it depended on the now highly outdated Flash plugin. Until I can come up with another clever take on a business card, here's a regular old version:

The post This is why you won't hear from me for months first appeared on eclecticc.