Where prototypes become products.
Engineering Square is not advice-only. We keep a real bench in Austin, Texas — printers, mills, PCB test rigs, and a firmware station — where boards get brought up and enclosures get printed. This is the room the hardware practice ships out of.
Made in Texas.
Two unretouched photos from our own bench. The control board on the left drives the 3D-printed leaf shutter on the right — one system, built end to end in-house.
Control board on the bench
A control PCB mid bring-up — the OLED shows a live 'Shutter Adjust' readout, driven by an MCU dev board with power regulation and tactile controls wired up for functional test. This is the board that runs the shutter beside it.
3D-printed leaf-shutter prototype
A servo-actuated leaf shutter — the iris — in an FDM-printed housing mounted to a camera lens. The printed layer lines and the servo linkage are right there in frame: a working prototype driven by the control board, not a render.
What's in the room.
Fabrication, electronics, firmware, and a live automation testbed — enough to take a product from a sketch to a working, testable unit without leaving the building.
FDM 3D-Print Fleet
A fleet of FDM printers runs prototype enclosures and short-run production parts in-house, under the PrintForge brand. Enclosures are printed alongside the board they house, so fit, thermals, and access are solved on the first prototype instead of the third.
- Process
- FDM
- Brand
- PrintForge
- Output
- Enclosures + short runs
- Made in
- Texas
CNC Machining
Subtractive machining under the Mill & Layer brand handles the parts FDM can't hold — tighter tolerances, stiffer materials, cleaner finishes. Prototypes and short production runs are cut here without waiting on outside tooling.
- Process
- CNC milling
- Brand
- Mill & Layer
- Materials
- Plastics + metals
- Use
- Precision parts
PCB Bring-Up & Functional Test
Boards come back from fab and go straight onto our own bench. We bring them up, power them, and validate against the firmware that will actually run on them — on functional test rigs, not on a datasheet — so the first physical unit is one you can trust.
- Stage
- Bring-up
- Rigs
- Functional test
- Instruments
- Bench PSU, logic
- Output
- Validated boards
RP2040 / Pico Firmware Bench
MCU firmware is developed against real silicon at the bench — RP2040 / Raspberry Pi Pico-class parts driving sensors, custom wire protocols, and the plumbing that moves data off the device. Every build ships OTA-updatable so the firmware keeps improving after it leaves the room.
- MCU
- RP2040 / Pico
- Firmware
- C / C++ / MicroPython
- Buses
- I2C / SPI / UART
- Fleet
- OTA-ready
Fusion 360 CAD Workflow
Mechanical design and design-for-manufacture live in Fusion 360, modeled alongside the electronics rather than bolted on after. The output is print- and CNC-ready geometry, so what's on screen is what comes off the bench.
- Tool
- Fusion 360
- Focus
- DFM
- Output
- Print / CNC-ready
- Coupling
- Board + enclosure
Workspace-Pod Automation Testbed
NovaCube workspace pods run in-house as a live testbed — sensing occupancy, access, and climate and acting on it. It's the same IoT stack we build for clients, on our own PostgreSQL and Node backend, so we run what we recommend before it ever reaches you.
- Platform
- Nova pods
- Sensing
- Occupancy / access / climate
- Stack
- PostgreSQL + Node
- Role
- Live testbed
The lab is where hardware & robotics ships.
Everything on this bench feeds one accountable practice: PCB design, embedded firmware, mechanical design, and robotics, wired to the same backend and dashboard our software team builds. One team from the board to the cloud — no integration seam, because there isn't one.
- 01PCB design & validation
- 02IoT & embedded firmware
- 03Mechanical & industrial design
- 04Robotics & automation
- 05Prototype → production