2025-10-27 20:00:02
Crowdsourcing has become a go-to for independent and open-source hardware creators hoping to turn a cool prototype into a polished product. But many projects fail along the way, often for nontechnical reasons.
Helen Leigh is Crowd Supply’s director of business development and its former head of community. She helms the annual Teardown hardware conference.
Helen Leigh is the director of business development at Crowd Supply. A division of Mouser Electronics, Crowd Supply is a crowdfunding site for small hardware manufacturers making novel products. Leigh spoke with IEEE Spectrum about what makes a crowdsourcing project successful, and how Crowd Supply is trying to help.
What are some of the biggest mistakes applicants make?
Helen Leigh: Here’s a big one: setting your price too low. Engineers tend to focus just on the product and the cost of the bill of materials, right? But logistics is expensive. Putting your product on a shelf, taking it off, putting it in a box, putting a label on it, all of that.
Another one is when people say they’ve made something for X market, but they’ve never spoken to a single person in their target market. We advise people to throw themselves to the wolves of Reddit and social media.
How does Crowd Supply help applicants?
Leigh: We help with all the nonengineering parts of bringing a product to market, including financial spreadsheets, fulfillment guidance, and product photography. If a campaign is successful, we typically place a house order for at least as many as were sold in their campaign, paid in advance. But what’s become very important in the last few months is navigating compliance. Incoterms are really important now.
What are Incoterms?
Leigh: Say you were manufacturing some watches in China and shipping them to our warehouse in Texas. What happens if the boat goes down? Who bears that risk?
In the past, the term we mostly used was DDP: delivered duty paid. That’s where a creator is paying all the taxes and tariffs, getting everything to our warehouse free and clear, and we take it from there.
But in that scenario a tariff comes in and suddenly you, as an indie creator, are having to pay much more. You’re probably losing money now, which could destroy you as a creator, right? One way we take on the burden of risk is by offering FCA [free carrier] Incoterms, which basically means we pick it up from your place of assembly and it becomes our responsibility, including freight and the tariffs.
What impacts are you seeing from tariffs?
Leigh: Delays, of course, but tariffs haven’t stopped people from making stuff. I really do believe we’re in a golden age for indie developers. We have more choice than ever, plus technical education and documentation has never been better or more accessible, thanks to companies like Adafruit and Raspberry Pi.
One silver lining of tariffs is that designers are now forced to take into consideration the entire supply chain, which ultimately does make their designs better.
What’s your favorite Crowd Supply success story?
Leigh: The most obvious one would be SlimeVR. They do trackers that go on your body for virtual reality. They raised US $7.6 million, so they are very financially successful, but the way they have managed their community is what inspires me. They have openly talked about how vital community contributions have been to their software stack. It’s a nice example of what can come from opening your hardware.
This article appears in the November print issue as “Helen Leigh.”
2025-10-25 02:00:03
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.
Enjoy today’s videos!
Welcome to this world—standing 180 cm tall and weighing 70 kg. The H2 bionic humanoid—born to serve everyone safely and friendly.
Starting at US$29,900 plus tax and shipping.
[ Unitree ]
The title of this one, “Eagle Stole our FPV Drone,” pretty much sums it up.
[ Team BlackSheep ]
Historically, small robots couldn’t have arms because the necessary motors made them too heavy. We addressed this challenge by replacing multiple motors with a single motor and miniature electrostatic clutches. This innovation allowed us to create a high-DOF, lightweight arm for small robots, which can even hitch onto a drone.
Thanks, Kyu-Jin!
Just FYI, any robot that sounds like a tasty baked good is guaranteed favorable coverage on Video Friday.
[ Cleo Robotics ]
Oli now pulls off a smooth, coordinated whole-body sequence from lying down to getting back up. Standing 165 cm tall and powered by 31 degrees of freedom, Oli continues to demonstrate natural and fluid motion.
[ LimX Dynamics ]
Thanks, Jinyan!
Friend o’ the blog Bram Vanderborght tours the exhibit floor at IROS 2025 in Hanghzou, China.
[ IROS 2025 ]
In a fireside chat with Professor Sam Madden, Tye Brady, Chief Technologist at Amazon Robotics, will discuss the trajectory of robotics and how generative AI plays a role in robotics innovation.
[ MIT Generative AI Impact Consortium ]
Prof. Dimitrios Kanoulas gave an invited talk at the Workshop on The Art of Robustness: Surviving Failures in Robotics at IROS 2025.
[ IROS 2025 ]
This University of Pennsylvania GRASP talk is by Suraj Nair from Physical Intelligence, on “Scaling Robot Learning with Vision-Language-Action Models.”
The last several years have witnessed tremendous progress in the capabilities of AI systems, driven largely by foundation models that scale expressive architectures with diverse data sources. While the impact of this technology on vision and language understanding is abundantly clear, its use in robotics remains in its infancy. Scaling robot learning still presents numerous open challenges—from selecting the right data to scale, to developing algorithms that can effectively fit this data for closed-loop operation in the physical world. At Physical Intelligence, we aim to tackle these questions. This talk will present our recent work on building vision-language-action models, covering topics such as architecture design, data scaling, and open research directions.
2025-10-24 21:00:03
Researchers in the U.S. Pacific Northwest recently delivered a piece of assistive technology whose design began with a simple but important question: What will the person using this tech need?
Last month a team of engineers and occupational therapists from Whitworth University in Spokane, Wash. delivered a learning station they’d designed for a first grader with cerebral palsy.
David Schipf, assistant professor of engineering and physics at Whitworth, says the project’s success was due to the collaborative efforts between team members—engineers, physical therapists, and occupational therapists—and the child and his family. After multiple consultations with the family, the Whitworth team delivered their system.
“The station is very user-friendly, allowing Ryken to focus on his first-grade studies and putting him at eye-level with those speaking to him,” says Schipf. “He will also be able to move throughout the house as needed.”
The first grader, Ryken, has a form of cerebral palsy along with other disabilities, which include epilepsy, hearing, and visual impairments.
Ryken’s mother had initially contacted Schipf because Ryken was unable to participate fully in his education. And she’d discovered a lack of suitable equipment on the market that Ryken could use to meet his needs.
As advocates for user-centered design (UCD) have pointed out, functional assistive tech needs to “answer the needs” of the person it’s designed for—not just the needs of people designing it.
As one example, Shipf points to the station’s high-contrast black background, which allowed Ryken to view anything placed in front of him easily. “It had to have some adjustable features for his caregivers and for his teacher,” Schipf says. “And his mother wanted the seat on the learning center to be able to be raised up and lowered according to what he was doing at the time. So if he’s learning with his teacher to have it be lower to the ground, and then if he’s in the kitchen with his mom, to have it raise up to counter height.”
“The raising and lowering came from an electrical raising and lowering kind of a piston that we purchased,” he adds. “And it’s usually designed for kitchen tables for families that want a kitchen table that can raise and lower. So it had the load capacity that we needed. And then we just had a pretty large onboard power bank that could also provide an AC 120 voltage power source for the raising and lowering platform. … And then several of the mechanical components were custom designed and 3D printed.”
Katie Ericsson, assistant professor of occupational therapy at Whitworth, highlighted one of the students who worked on the project. This student suggested that emphasis also be placed on the aesthetics of the project, reminding the team that, “Hey, this is going to be in their home, and his mother doesn’t want this to look ugly in their home.”
A team of engineers and occupational and physical therapists in Washington state developed a customized communications device to help a father and his disabled daughter remain active and mobile—but also within reach of emergency services if assistance is ever needed.David Schipf
Schipf, Ericsson, and students are also working on another project to benefit those with disabilities. The project focused on developing an emergency communication device for a young woman in the Spokane area. She is in her 20s and is mobile but has speech difficulties. The project originated from her father’s concern for her well-being in case something happened to him while she was outdoors or traveling through the city.
The device fits within a fanny pack. The concept behind the device is simple. In the event of an emergency, the device is intended to send an SMS message to preprogrammed recipients with the press of a button.
“This father, he’s a little bit older, and he has some health problems,” Schipf says. “And he’s really concerned that he’s going to be on a hike with his daughter and that he’s going to pass out or something’s going to happen to him, and then she is going to be left alone without anybody to understand her speech and anybody to help her out. … And so we designed an electrical system that fits in a fanny pack.”
The device, Schipf says, has big, textured buttons that allow the wearer to send geolocated SMS alerts, in case of emergency. “So it’s location tracking and an SMS service,” he continues. “And then the other button on the device plays an audio message that tells any stranger she encounters to call her father.”
Both devices showcase the power of both collaboration and assistive technology. Although these devices were created for specific individuals, the technology used to make them can be modified or duplicated to serve the larger disability community as a whole.
“I know both the engineering students and the occupational therapy and physical therapy students, it’s much more meaningful to them when they get to see the face and talk to the actual clients,” says Ericsson. “It’s much more meaningful than just a textbook case study that we give them.”
2025-10-24 02:00:02
IEEE Senior Member Jill I. Gostin has been elected as the 2026 IEEE president-elect. She will begin serving as president on 1 January 2027.
Gostin, who was nominated by the IEEE Board of Directors, received 18,546 votes in the election. Senior Member David Alan Koehler received 14,193 votes.
At press time, the results were unofficial until the IEEE Board of Directors accepts the IEEE Tellers’ Committee report in November.
Gostin retired earlier this year as a principal research scientist at the Georgia Tech Research Institute, in Atlanta. Her work focused on sensor systems and software. She also served as the systems engineering, integration, and test lead in the software engineering and architecture division.
Gostin credits her career success to her publications; service and technical awards; large program management experience; and leadership of academic, industry, and government groups.
She has held several IEEE leadership positions including 2023 IEEE Member and Geographic Activities vice president and chair of its board, and 2020—2021 Region 3 director. She is a former chair of the IEEE Atlanta Section and the IEEE Computer Society’s Atlanta Chapter.
Gostin served on the IEEE Computer and IEEE Aerospace and Electronic Systems societies’ boards of governors and was the vice president of finance for the Sensor Council’s Executive Committee. She has also led or been a member of several IEEE organizational units and committees, locally and globally.
Her leadership was recognized in 2016 when the Georgia Women in Technology named her as its Woman of the Year. Gostin also is the recipient of the 2025 IEEE Women in Technology & Leadership Award.
2025-10-23 00:00:03
What do water bottles, eggs, hemp, and cement have in common? They can be engineered into strange, but functional, energy-storage devices called supercapacitors.
As their name suggests, supercapacitors are like capacitors with greater capacity. Similar to batteries, they can store a lot of energy, but they can also charge or discharge quickly, similar to a capacitor. They’re usually found where a lot of power is needed quickly and for a limited time, like as a nearly instantaneous backup electricity for a factory or data center.
Typically, supercapacitors are made up of two activated carbon or graphene electrodes, electrolytes to introduce ions to the system, and a porous sheet of polymer or glass fiber to physically separate the electrodes. When a supercapacitor is fully charged, all of the positive ions gather on one side of the separating sheet, while all of the negative ions are on the other. When it’s discharged, the ions are randomly distributed, and it can switch between these states much faster than batteries can.
Some scientists believe that supercapacitors could become more super. They think there’s potential to make these devices more sustainably, at lower-cost, and maybe even better performing if they’re built from better materials.
And maybe they’re right. Last month, a group from Michigan Technological University reported making supercapacitors from plastic water bottles that had a higher capacitance than commercial ones.
Does this finding mean recycled plastic supercapacitors will soon be everywhere? The history of similar supercapacitor sustainability experiments suggests not.
About 15 years ago, it seemed like supercapacitors were going to be in high demand. Then, because of huge investments in lithium-ion technology, batteries became tough competition, explains Yury Gogotsi, who studies materials for energy-storage devices at Drexel University, in Philadelphia. “They became so much cheaper and so much faster in delivering energy that for supercapacitors, the range of application became more limited,” he says. “Basically, the trend went from making them cheaper and available to making them perform where lithium-ion batteries cannot.”
Still, some researchers remain hopeful that environmentally friendly devices have a place in the market. Yun Hang Hu, a materials scientist on the Michigan Technological University team, sees “a promising path to commercialization [for the water-bottle-derived supercapacitor] once collection and processing challenges are addressed,” he says.
Here’s how scientists make supercapacitors with strange, unexpected materials:
It turns out your old Poland Spring bottle could one day store energy instead of water. Last month in the journal Energy & Fuels, the Michigan Technological University team published a new method for converting polyethylene terephthalate (PET), the material that makes up single-use plastic water bottles, into both electrodes and separators.
As odd as it may seem, this process is “a practical blueprint for circular energy storage that can ride the existing PET supply chain,” says Hu.
To make the electrodes, the researchers first shredded bottles into 2-millimeter grains and then added powdered calcium hydroxide. They heated the mixture to 700 °C in a vacuum for 3 hours and were left with an electrically conductive carbon powder. After removing residual calcium and activating the carbon (increasing its surface area), they could shape the powder into a thin layer and use it as an electrode.
The process to produce the separators was much less intensive—the team cut bottles into squares about the size of a U.S. quarter or a 1-euro coin and used hot needles to poke holes in them. They optimized the pattern of the holes for the passage of current using specialized software. PET is a good material for a separator because of its “excellent mechanical strength, high thermal stability, and excellent insulation,” Hu says.
Filled with an electrolyte solution, the resulting supercapacitor not only demonstrated potential for eco- and finance-friendly material usage, but also slightly outperformed traditional materials on one metric. The PET device had a capacitance of 197.2 farads per gram, while an analogous device with a glass-fiber separator had a capacitance of 190.3 farads per gram.
Wait, don’t make your breakfast sandwich just yet! You could engineer a supercapacitor from one of your ingredients instead. In 2019, a University of Virginia team showed that electrodes, electrolytes, and separators could all be made from parts of a single object—an egg.
First, the group purchased grocery store chicken eggs and sorted their parts into eggshells, eggshell membranes, and the whites and yolks.
They ground the shells into a powder and mixed them with the egg whites and yolks. The slurry was freeze-dried and brought up to 950 °C for an hour to decompose. After a cleaning process to remove calcium, the team performed heat and potassium treatments to activate the remaining carbon. They then smoothed the egg-derived activated carbon into a film to be used as electrodes. Finally, by mixing egg whites and yolks with potassium hydroxide and letting it dry for several hours, they formed a kind of gel electrolyte.
To make separators, the group simply cleaned the eggshell membranes. Because the membranes naturally have interlaced micrometer-size fibers, their inherent structures allow for ions to move across them just as manufactured separators would.
Interestingly, the resulting fully egg-based supercapacitor was flexible, with its capacitance staying steady even when the device was twisted or bent. After 5,000 cycles, the supercapacitor retained 80 percent of its original capacitance—low compared to commercial supercapacitors, but fairly on par for others made from natural materials.
Some people may like cannabis for more medicinal purposes, but it has potential in energy storage, too. In 2024, a group from Ondokuz Mayıs University in Türkiye used pomegranate hemp plants to produce activated carbon for an electrode.
They started by drying stems of the hemp plants in a 110 °C oven for a day and then ground the stems into a powder. Next, they added sulfuric acid and heat to create a biochar, and, finally, activated the char by saturating it with potassium hydroxide and heating it again.
After 2,000 cycles, the supercapacitor with hemp-derived electrodes still retained 98 percent of its original capacitance, which is, astoundingly, in range of those made from nonbiological materials. The carbon itself had an energy density of 65 watt-hours per kilogram, also in line with commercial supercapacitors.
It may have a hold over the construction industry, but is cement coming for the energy sector, too? In 2023, a group from MIT shared how they designed electrodes from water, nearly pure carbon, and cement. Using these materials, they say, creates a “synergy” between the hydrophilic cement and hydrophobic carbon that aids the electrodes’ ability to hold layers of ions when the supercapacitor is charged.
To test the hypothesis, the team built eight electrodes using slightly different proportions of the three ingredients, different types of carbon, and different electrode thicknesses. The electrodes were saturated with potassium chloride—an electrolyte—and capacitance measurements began.
Impressively, the cement supercapacitors were able to maintain capacitance with little loss even after 10,000 cycles. The researchers also calculated that one of their supercapacitors could store around 10 kilowatt-hours—enough to serve about one third of an average American’s daily energy use—though the number is only theoretical.
2025-10-22 22:59:30
This article is crossposted from IEEE Spectrum’s careers newsletter. Sign up now to get insider tips, expert advice, and practical strategies, written in partnership with tech career development company Taro and delivered to your inbox for free!
Your relationship with your manager is the single most important relationship you have at work. We can’t control who our manager is, but we can shape that relationship to better work for us.
Managing up is an important skill, and something I didn’t even realize I could do until I was a Senior Engineer at Facebook. I could have unlocked considerably more career support and investment if I had worked better with my manager.
Here are three core ideas that made a meaningful impact on how I approach my manager relationship:
First, understand your manager’s motivations. Many early-career engineers are completely clueless about how their managers are evaluated. Ultimately, your manager is assessed on the overall impact of their team. Your manager will often spend time giving feedback to reports and ensuring engineers are unblocked. But they may also need to remove people from the team or cancel projects. You need to determine what your manager cares about and how your work fits into their priorities.
Second, understand your boss’s preferred communication style. Many software projects come with a README file that describes how to use them. Imagine you had to write a README file for your manager: the need-to-know information to best interact with them. This document would include their preferences and pet peeves around communication, their preferred work environments, and their strengths and weaknesses. Once you have a README file, either something you wrote on behalf of your manager or something you collaboratively put together with your manager’s input, apply it to your interactions.
Finally, figure out how to work productively with your manager as you plan your tasks. Instead of asking how you can get involved in something new, bring value. Provide data, insights, or proposals that move the conversation forward, rather than simply waiting for an assignment. Also, no manager wants to deal with surprises. Ensure that you communicate ahead of any surprises, and you’ve thought about next steps when things inevitably go wrong.
You can control, at least partially, your manager’s investment in you. This is not about after-work drinks or political maneuvering — managing up is a critical skill for career advancement, whether we do it consciously or not.
—Rahul
We need more power engineers. A recent study by consulting firm Kearney and IEEE found the global power sector will need between 450,000 and 1.5 million more engineers by 2030 to support critical infrastructure. Especially as demand for electricity skyrockets and renewable energy scales up, a shortage in talent could threaten to derail the energy sector.
This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to three scientists for their discovery of “macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in an electrical circuit.” The scientists’ experiments in 1984 and 1985 led to the development of quantum technology. 40 years later, quantum computing is a fast-growing field. Keep an eye out for more stories from IEEE Spectrum on this topic, and in the meantime, check out our 2021 interview with one of the laureates.
Biomedical engineering student Ximena Montserrat Ramirez Aguilar aims to use AI to help prevent type 2 diabetes. In 2023, Ramirez founded her school’s IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society student branch. She develops AI algorithms that help diagnose a range of medical issues, aiming to keep people healthy before they become ill.