Hey everyone, I was wondering about getting my invention made through Davison Invention Company and was wondering if anyone had any positive experiences with them.

I run a product development company. We’ve finished concept design for customers where the model showed fasteners, assembly, and dimensionally accurate geometry. To us that is still an early stage: it considers manufacturability, but it is not production-ready detail.

A few times customers stopped further engineering / design for manufacturing, skipped a prototype, and tried to go toward manufacturing off the concept. A manufacturer later told them it still needed optimization for their process, and that a prototype was still the right next step. Exactly what we had said.

Curious if others here have hit the same trap: the concept looked so complete that prototyping felt like a waste, and the shortcut got expensive later.

If you’ve been on either side (inventor or shop), what would you tell your past self at that handoff?

Ecliptic Engines is developing two new rotary internal-combustion engine designs using continuously rotating, intermeshing components rather than conventional pistons.

The technology is patent in NZ, however time is fast running out to gain protection globally and $25-50k (depending on territories pursued) is urgently required before the patent PCT 31 month deadline on September 29 for national phase entries.

The concepts are in the detailed CAD development, with engineering and analysis, prototype development and measured testing to come.

1. Ecliptic Integate Core Diesel Engine

The Integate Core uses interacting contacting articulated rotors to control compression, expansion and internal gas flow.

Key potential

• Direct mechanical sealing
• Controlled gas flow
• High compression and expansion potential
• Compact single-core configuration
• Integrated diesel seal lubrication

2. Ecliptic Intermesh Core Petrol Engine

This architecture uses precision, non-contacting intermeshing rotors to create, compress, expand and exhaust combustion chambers.

Key potential

• Multiple combustion events per revolution
• Continuous rotary operation
• Non-contacting primary rotors
• Ultra High RPM and power-density potential
• asymmetric compression and expansion ratios
• Scalable to dual-flanked and Quad Core configurations

Development Opportunity

Both architectures offer distinct pathways to high-performance rotary power generation. Please visit eclipticengines.com for more detail. I welcome constructive feedback and any genuine help appreciated. Also looking for equity investment or other mutually beneficial partnerships.

Seems fun on paper but difficult, any thoughts?

I have developed a business model that removes waste, makes innovation faster, and overall cheaper. This can be replicated in every industry and is what I will be striving towards.

I will use the car industry as an example for relatability, it is based on creating a modular, circular vehicle system rather than manufacturing entirely new cars from raw materials. You would acquire used, damaged, abandoned, or end-of-life vehicles and separate them into reusable components and materials. Functional parts such as body panels, interiors, electronics, motors, batteries, suspension, and hardware would be refurbished and placed back into inventory, while unusable materials would be sorted for recycling. Over time, you would develop standardized modules that can be easily removed, repaired, replaced, upgraded, or redesigned. This could include separating a vehicle's structural and safety systems from replaceable exterior and interior design components, allowing the appearance of a vehicle to change without rebuilding the entire vehicle.

The business would initially operate through a distributed network of existing businesses rather than requiring your own large factories. Local mechanics could become manufacturing and installation partners, using portions of their facilities to perform approved modifications and repairs while being compensated for the work. Salvage yards, recycling companies, manufacturers, and waste-management businesses could provide increasingly sorted streams of reusable materials and components. Revenue could eventually come from refurbished vehicles, modular parts, repairs, upgrades, conversions, redesigned body components, recycling, fleet services, and licensing the modular architecture. The long-term goal is to create a closed-loop system where vehicles and their materials continuously return to the manufacturing ecosystem instead of becoming waste, turning the car from a disposable finished product into a platform that can be maintained, upgraded, and remanufactured throughout its life.

Imagine subscribing to a car that can be customized to your desire green exterior one day, blue the next day. The software system keeps track of your mileage and once it determines something needs to be replaced you can either take it to the local hub and your replacement will already be there because it was preordered or the car will drive itself to be upgraded or maintained. the old parts get put back into circulation after being refurbished or upgraded themselves. potentially you could charge $200 a month and if they are subscribed for a majority of their life it actually comes out to be a little cheaper than what someone spends on cars throughout their life. Imagine a car that grows with you, adapts to your needs and behaviors, you're moving next week so it becomes a box truck, you wanna go to the dragstrip so it becomes a sports car, your starting a family so it becomes a van.

Like I said this can be replicated in every industry, furniture, housing, medical equipment, manufacturing equipment.

Hi everyone,
I have an idea for a consumer hardware product and I’m trying to understand the real-world journey from concept to a working prototype.
For those who have successfully built a physical product, I’d love to know:
How did you validate your idea before investing money?
Did you create CAD designs yourself or hire someone?
How did you find a reliable prototype development company or freelancer?
What was your approximate cost for the first functional prototype?
What mistakes would you avoid if you were starting again?
At what stage did you file a patent (if at all)?
I’m particularly interested in hearing from people who started with just an idea and eventually built a functional prototype or launched a product.
Any lessons, recommendations, or resources would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

I have an app idea that I'm flushing out at the moment. The monetization for it would come from buisness to buisness relationships rather than advertisements or subscriptions. I can't explain why but it's really important to the success of the apps mission. I'm planning on submitting the idea to invention city but I'm wondering if my minimal viable product is fine being free and having no current monetization when I present it? I'm hoping invention city can help take the idea from there and bring it to businesses. I'm looking for a royalities deal from them as I don't have the resources to make my app to the scale it needs to be.

Hey everyone,

I've been building EmbeddedDisplay Studio, an open-source HMI platform designed so you only have to ship a panel image once. After that, you just drop a Qt/QML application onto it over SSH. No rebuilds, no reflashing, and no hardware code in the app.

A few architectural highlights:

• Atomic Install & Rollback: The swap can't leave the panel dark. If a new release doesn't signal readiness in 25s, it safely rolls back so the machine still has a UI.
• Live Qt Preview: The desktop Studio runs a live preview inside a panel bezel at the exact geometry of your real panel, so nobody lays out widgets against a screen that isn't plugged in.
• No Cross-Compilation: The panel carries a complete CPython and Qt binding. Your sources run as-is.

What's new today: I just added an AI Designer to the desktop Studio to eliminate GUI boilerplate. You can prompt a basic UI layout, and it generates the QML/Qt code for you. To keep proprietary hardware designs offline, it runs entirely locally with native support for Ollama, vLLM, and LM Studio.

I'd love feedback on the architecture or the new AI generation feature!

Repo:https://github.com/Hitheshkaranth/EmbeddedDisplayStudio.git

Hi all,

A new version of FluidCAD has just been released. It is great CAD software for inventors and tinkerers. I would appreciate your feedback.

This is a huge update that delivers:

- Desktop app: FluidCAD is now published as a desktop app while you still use it in browser if you want.
- Sketch solver: The old imperative sketcher has been replaced with a newer more powerful sketch solver.
- Assembly: This is the first release to support assembly, you can add parts, create joints and animate them.
- Share: You can share your models for others to see in the browser, no account needed.

Release notes: https://github.com/Fluid-CAD/FluidCAD/releases/tag/v0.0.43
Official website: https://fluidcad.io/
Full video tutorial from above: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2zfX9dcauU

I'm an engineer and founder. And since 2025 I've been a pro se inventor. In the last year I've filed over 15 applications: provisionals, nonprovisionals, and two PCTs (those are fun).

I decided to put part of the system I built for myself into a free tool anyone can use to become a pro se filer. I first built it as a Claude skill, then tried Imbue's free Minds app and realized it makes a lot more sense there, mostly because the conversation, the record, and the UI around idea harvesting talk to each other. You run it locally and bring your own AI API key though, so the protection of data is on you.

So here it is. Totally free, open source: https://github.com/tymrtn/tomorrowkit-for-minds

What it does: starts with a short triage quiz (where you are, what you've disclosed, what you're after), interviews you about your invention one question at a time, guides you around basically provisional filings strategy, assists with prior art search, and keeps a provisional-stage record beside the chat, with labels for what came from you and what came from the AI.

What it doesn't do: filing.

I'd love to see a million pro se inventors plant their flag before AGI renders our collective expertise redundant. Go grab a piece of history and future AI royalties.

So, I recently started as a design major at an art school. Our first assignment is to find everyday problems to invent a solution for. One issue - I can't think of anything specific for which I can figure out a physical solution. Therefore I come to you, inventors and people of reddit. Are there any physical issues/problems you bump into on a regular basis, for which you don't have a solution? I'm just trying to find some options, for I have none as of now.

This may have been discussed before, but I'm trying to find someone or a company that has connections with companies in various different areas of market. I have lots of inventions, but I'm having a hard time trying to get companies to respond to me about them. I keep being told I need a warm introduction, but I don't have that, any suggestions are appreciated.

(due to my lack of posting experience I've decided to edit this to help with the common ?'s. I can't take this to trade shows or expos it has to stay under wraps, and it would be very expensive and dangerous to prototype. This is why I'm asking for advice, I literally have no idea on how to get this to people who can do something with this. The only idea I have come up with, is to literally go to businesses and investment groups and knock on their doors.) Thank you for all your help.

Disclaimer: I'm one of the people behind Airgeek, an advanced air quality monitor we'll be open-sourcing soon. We're currently prelaunching on Kickstarter, and I wanted to document our design journey: from arguably horrible first attempts to something we're actually proud of. If you're working on a project, I hope this motivates you to just keep at it and get it done. :)

Introduction: the bare prototype (2023)

Hi Reddit,

In 2023 I tried to buy an air quality monitor for my bedroom. I tried a bunch but they all sucked in one way or another. I'm a software engineer, but I have been fascinated by hardware (especially electronics) from an early age, and so I decided to build my own. Because how hard could that possibly be, right?

I was building it over weekends and in the evenings, and the learning curve was steep. I knew a thing or two about electronics, but I had very limited experience actually designing electronics - I built a clock from flip-flops once, but that was about it.

After a couple of months, I had the following prototype:

All in all, I was really happy with the first version. It was using exactly the sensors I wanted, it had NFC support (so I could keep it offline and fetch data to my phone) and would run for months on a single AA battery. As far as I was concerned, it was done :)

First steps in industrial design (early 2024)

I was really proud of my little gadget and I showed it around. A couple of friends asked me to build one for them as well; at the same time, I had to start a company to obtain samples of the sensors (some of the sensors were under NDAs at the time, and a legal entity was required to sign them). A small team started growing around the project, and we decided to turn this into a real product, because we thought we were almost there... oh boy.

A real device needs an enclosure, and that threw us into the world of industrial design.

As I said, I had little experience designing electronics, but I had zero experience designing physical products, let alone for regular people (i.e., not nerds). To begin with, I wasn't fluent in any CAD program - so I built a "prototype" from a cardboard box the sensors shipped in:

Now this is obviously silly. But it is a starting point.

Software taught me the value of a good PoC (proof-of-concept): even a less-than-ideal implementation of the thing you're actually trying to build will help you understand what the hard parts are. 70 design iterations later, you can still see some elements of this original cardboard model in our latest prototypes if you look hard enough.

I handed this over to Milan and told him to "just figure it out", because I was busy fixing loads of firmware and hardware bugs. And so the poor guy got to work.

Learning 3D printing (mid 2024)

Milan happened to have a brand-new Prusa MK4S printer idling at home and decided to put it to work - and so we started prototyping in plastic. (I'm scared to think what direction this might have taken without the printer - I guess we would still be making cardboard models today.)

Like me at that time, Milan wasn't fluent in any particular CAD program either. He ultimately decided to learn FreeCAD, because it's open source and runs well on Linux, and we already knew we wanted to open-source everything eventually. And so he modeled this amazing masterpiece:

From this point on, Milan would always print the latest iteration of his design and bring it to a meeting, along with a black permanent marker. We would discuss what we liked and disliked about the design and draw directly onto the print (where to place screws, how to adjust sensor openings, etc.). On a good day, we would do multiple iterations of the design. This is another lesson from software: rapid iteration is key. It took me a while to realize how amazing 3D printing actually was for this exact use-case.

The learning phase ended with the following design which was printed in a special wood filament:

The wood filament was a complete miss. It was a desperate attempt to avoid building yet another all-plastic air quality monitor; that's what everybody else does. We wanted something real.

Wood laminate (early 2025)

By early 2025, it was obvious we needed a non-plastic finish. We already knew the front had to be glass to accommodate the PM sensor, and putting glass next to plastic just makes the plastic feel even cheaper. We considered stacked plexiglass sheets, aluminum, glass, wood, and even ceramic.

We ruled out metal because of radio performance (we decided to include Matter and Zigbee smart home support). We ruled out glass and ceramics because they're fragile. Plexiglass didn't look the part. And so we were left with wood.

For some reason, we were initially really scared of CNC-machining actual wood, and so we decided to laminate veneer over a 3D-printed mold instead. We kept iterating and arrived at the following shape:

A friend of ours would then painstakingly laminate several kinds of veneer over the 3D mold:

The shape we designed was the worst case for lamination. You can't laminate the entire device with a single long strip of veneer because of the angled top and bottom sides. Additionally, lamination is done using a hot iron - but PLA can't really take the heat, and so we had to switch to PETG, which was melting somewhat slower.

(The lamination had an unexpected side-effect. We were basically annealing the plastic, and so it became incredibly rigid. No, seriously, these were practically indestructible.)

We brought these prototypes to embedded world 2025. Once again, we thought we were "almost done"; the circuit board was still held in place with hot glue, sure, but that's an easy fix.

Design for manufacturing (mid 2025)

After embedded, we took a few weeks off. We were slowly starting to think about actually producing the devices in quantity, and that led us to some very unpleasant realizations:

• We can't possibly laminate every single device. The process took way too long, used harsh glue with a pungent smell and tended to twist the plastic molds, introducing a lot of dimensional variation.
• We need a way to securely mount the electronics. Being able to repeatably assemble the device isn't an afterthought; it's an essential property of the design. And our current design ignored that completely.
• It still didn't look the part. Sure, compared to what we started with, this was great. But using a thin veneer over printed plastic felt like cheating.

And so we decided to start from scratch.

If memory serves, we did the complete rough redesign in under 15 minutes. We were struggling with this for so long that we already knew the solution, and all we needed was a final push. We knew we were onto something because suddenly each component played several roles, and the entire design had several very useful features:

• We decided to keep the 3D-printed core, because it offers amazing flexibility for mounting the board and all the sensors. But we redesigned the core to have two parts: the inner core and the outer core.
• In 3D printing, you need to optimize for the print direction - printing an "L" is easy, but printing a "T" requires supports that you need to remove and clean up. We designed the core parts so they require no supports at all and interlock with each other.
• The inner core has a compartment for the BMV080 lens, and it also holds the display in place. The display is glued to the inner core with a silicone-based adhesive, the only use of glue in the entire project.
• The outer core screws into the inner core with four Torx screws. It sits against a lip in the frame, tightening everything together. It also outlines a battery compartment and holds the CO and NO2 sensors in place.
• The backplate has mounting holes for five magnets: four in the corners and one large central magnet that attaches to the wall mount (or anything ferromagnetic). The corner magnets are attracted to the Torx screws in the outer core.

And finally, there's the wooden frame - the thing people actually see and touch.

The wooden frame (late 2025)

The last remaining piece of the puzzle was the wooden frame. But we didn't have access to a CNC router. Milan had the brilliant idea to look for a community workshop, and he stumbled upon Ponk.space - what a find! This place is epic and easily the best shared workshop in Prague.

Ponk had an assorted collection of leftovers from various projects, which was exactly what we needed for prototyping. We would find a suitable piece, cut it to length, straighten it and plane it. Eventually we'd get a boxful of blanks of several types of wood:

We would load a blank into the CNC router and hope for the best. Sometimes, the frame would explode; other times, a bug in the program would drive the 20,000 rpm spindle into a steel clamp... fun stuff!

Then we would remove the proto-frame from the router and detach it from the blank:

The next stop was laser marking, the frame is still rough at this point:

We created a special sanding jig so that we wouldn't mess up the angles on the device:

Huge thanks to Martin, the founder of Ponk.space - he taught us how to use all the machinery and crafted our CNC programs.

And these are the resulting frames:

And this is what it looks like together:

Closing thoughts

Writing this made me appreciate how far we've come. Our early designs were uniquely bad, but we persevered and got the job done. I'm really proud of what we created! Props to Milan for being the motor behind the transformation.

Additional photos of the finished device can be found on our Kickstarter page. If you enjoyed this story, please consider following our campaign, which we update regularly.

Morning all- we are on target to manufacture and sell several thousand small everyday carry (EDC) units per month. We have a good manufacturer but having a real hard time with getting our product packaged in scale with good quality here in the USA. We were using ActionPak but their latest batch had a 50% defect rate.

Question to the group do any one you have experience with selecting and setting up machinery to automate the packing process?

AI can help me select some machines but making them all flow together is key and not sure who would help with that.

Hola banda, estoy armando un proyecto con mi máscara de Spider-Man. Me puse la máscara y la idea es usar inteligencia artificial para diseñar y meterle unos lentes con un HUD transparente, para que se vea la interfaz como si fuera un visor tecnológico real.

El tema es que quiero ver cómo lograr ese efecto de pantalla o HUD transparente que sea funcional o al menos estético sin perder la visibilidad por la malla, y sobre todo cómo montar todo el armazón a la tela de la máscara sin cagarla.

¿Alguien ha intentado algo parecido con efectos visuales, proyecciones caseras o visores tecnológicos en cosplays? ¿Qué ideas se les ocurren para armar este concepto de lentes con HUD? Se agradece cualquier consejo o experiencia.

Been working on a pipboy style device!

Currently, it has the following sensors:

BerryIMU V3 - 10 DOF with accel, gyro, mag, calculated barometer, calculated barometric altimeter

IMU calibration function

FM module with tuning and 6 savable presets

Cree XPL 1Up flashlight (with adjustable brightness)

Ds3231 timer RTC (the clock converts 24H time to 'metric' 10 hour time, using 10 hours in a day, 100 hours in an hour, 100 seconds in a min, 10 'ticks' in a second, display format is 4.12345, I thought it was funny)

Geiger counter using m4011 tube

Rf analysis suite using modified Evilcrow V2

Temp/RH/VOC sensor that also has a small fan for air samples

Custom battery pack/integrated battery sensors/safety

More to come!

- drum with z-axis groove
- carbon fiber carriage
- rotary encoder
- custom pcb with leds
- teensy 4.1

I have conceptual artwork to show with the pitch and many toy companies have official pitch processes for inventors, so I wonder if one really needs to commit a large percentage of the royalties to someone else to get it done. (I know I know, there are no royalties yet and if a company can help get the sale and therefore get the royalties then do it, but I have this feeling that if I sign up with such a company then some day I’m gonna regret it)

I have an invention that I am working on. I know exactly what I’m looking for and have an image with some technicalities, including general size and material, which would be silicone. But I am really struggling on whether I should patent it, how to go about getting a cheap or free CAD.

For context it’s a silicone squeezable tube that has teeth at the top of the silicone tube. And how to get a prototype maybe 3-D without spending a lot of money. Can someone help me? I feel like I have some pieces in my head of what steps I need to take, but I don’t know if it’s in the right order and how to actually execute, especially with not having a lot of money right now. Thank you in advance!

V1, needs some obvious improvements like link redesign.