The allure of building hardware

It’s been a hot week, my brain is melting, and AI is starting to suck some of the joy out of my job. It’s the perfect time for my brain to be in fantasy land.

I was thinking about the kind of company I want to build. It would probably be a database in the Datafusion ecosystem, but any road there seems a bit too long and daunting. I even lack a concrete use case. I recently watched Halt and Catch fire, and it raised many conflicting thoughts. More than the drama, I liked how a small team slogged through and built something they were proud of, and in doing so it brought them together.

I want to build something I am proud of with people I like, something that brings joy to the users. There are a few ideas that are holding my attention over long enough time-ranges, and they are all hardware projects.

• I really want to build a WriterDeck that is tailored to me. It has a large E-ink screen, great keyboard and syncs to the cloud.
• And I want to have an e-ink display that I can use to see the steps of a recipe.
• And I want to have a display that shows me the timings for the next trams and trains around my house.

And I want all of my projects to be open-source. This is quite niche, and I don’t think it is possible to scale this out, but I might be OK doing this as a boutique-hardware builder selling on crowdsupply and tindie. This fantasy was running in the back of my mind, and I recently met up with a friend and rambled on about everything. This is a written dump of those ramblings.

The hobbyist hardware ecosystem

The subreddits /r/writerdeck and /r/cyberdeck surprised and motivated me. The cyberdeck subreddit has 100s of people building computers of all shapes and sizes. I was inspired to see what people were building with such creativity and tenacity.

The same is true for /r/writerdeck, I’ve been lurking on the subreddit for over 2 years, and with the advent of AI, I am seeing many people building custom writerdecks recently. And through the writerdeck ecosystem, I came across Un Kyu Lee who experiments with, builds and sells custom writerdecks. I own one of his devices, and it sold out soon after I ordered one.

Two-person hardware companies

I wanted to buy a split keyboard that is travel sized and open source. I ended up buying a 3w6 from an indie store in Germany but in the process I discovered a who ecosystem of stores building keyboards to order.

It is just one or two people, who found a niche they are passionate about and are monetising it. They are even building on top of open source principles by forking, improving and releasing new versions of the keyboards.

This niche of made-to-order, self designed and open source hardware is very appealing for me.

Scaling up niche hardware

Even though these are niches, there is enough space to build a mainstream company on top. The writerdeck ecosystem has Freewrite and the split-keyboard ecosystem has Zsa. So it is possible to build a bigger business and team out of this. A couple more examples are Trmnl and Tidbyt (even with its acquisition).

For every indie business on Tindie, I think there is a bigger mainstream business. I don’t need to constrain myself to a made-to-order business if I feel like building something bigger.

The perks and perils of OpenSource Hardware (OSHW)

I recently read this Jeff Geerling article: I tested every IP KVM in my Homelab. The OSHW and the copy cat nature of things postively surprised me. I funded the JetKVM kickstarter campaign and I am very happy with the product. I realised it all started with PiKVM and from there many people built upon the OSS code and schematics, and launched competing products. The same thing is happening with JetKVM, there are many competing products that use the same base.

This is amazing. This is the whole point of open-source: you share things so they can be improved upon and hacked on. And copyleft licenses mean that any improvements are also shared which makes things better for everyone.

On the other hand, it makes me hesitant to share things I build if I have the intention to monetise them. If it’s easy to copy, then it will be copied and end up on Aliexpress. Even with GPL, there is no guarantee that the license will be honoured, especially by Chinese companies and Aliexpress sellers.

I think it’s better to share everything if I want to stay niche, but keep things closed if I want to scale up the business.

A hat-tip to the players

Honestly, every launch by a small company on Kickstarter is inspiring. Those are niche players aiming to make it big. And I try to cheer them on as much as I can. I will fund OpenPrinter in a split second. I don’t expect my Meticulous Espresso machine to get to me before 2027, if ever, but I am happy I got to hitch a wagon to their ride to see how difficult it is build complex systems. They were naive, optimistic, and jumped in head first into it.

Any time the discussion gets remotely entrepreneurial, I end up showing people this video from Decent Espresso:

Companies like Decent and Prusa are proof (and inspiration) that a bunch of geeks who are passionate about something can make meaningful mainstream change. However, even the thought of trying to build something is extremely daunting for me. I am not a hardware guy.

Some “fantasies” to pursue

That doesn’t mean that I don’t have ideas... I do. I am fascinated with e-ink and low power interfaces. I love distraction free single-purpose devices. Building something in this space is surprisingly accessible. With AI, it just became a hell of a lot more accessible to learn how to write and troubleshoot firmware.

And there is a lot of innovation coming to the space. People are now able to render e-ink displays at 60-75Hz. The sharp memory LCDs are great with super low power consumption. I think we can build better devices with these. I also like ideas with LED Matrix displays. I have the hardware to play with, and sometimes I think I need to find draw better boundaries with $work to build something. But honestly, I just need to focus on one thing and not get distracted by a new shiny idea every day.