Last week we announced the official launch of Quarter20. After a whirlwind 12 months of building and testing our product with companies building industry-changing technologies, I’m proud to share more publicly how we’re changing the game for hardware team collaboration and communication.
In 2023, I decided that I was done taking screenshots of CAD. Throughout my career, I’ve spent a lot of time in CAD - I’ve designed gearboxes, created production test fixtures, and analyzed battery thermal runaway propagations. But mainly, my time in CAD wasn’t spent designing – it was spent spinning around CAD for my colleagues and taking screenshots to make PowerPoint decks.
It’s a common adage that hardware is hard. I don’t disagree. But I have a hot take why it’s hard. Hardware is hard because of the coordination required to bring a hardware product to life. At times, I felt that I was spending more time updating my coworkers than actual engineering work. It takes me 30 minutes to make changes to CAD. It takes me 5 hours to update design review decks, sit in product meetings, and explain to vendors why I made that change and how it impacts the rest of the product. It takes me 5 minutes to plan a thermal cycle test. It takes me 2 days to set up the test, run it, log my results, write up my results, and share with the team.
Put another way, hardware is hard because it exists in the physical world. And existing in the physical world means that someone can’t just run some code and see the same output anywhere in the world. It means that for anyone to understand the choices I have made, I need to document my work (and document it well) in order for it to be traceable and reproducible. Good documentation is really hard to make because there’s a million things in your head, a million photos on your phone, you don’t know where to begin, and you have nothing but a blank PowerPoint deck to start with.
At Quarter20, we believe that good documentation doesn’t have to be a challenge, nor does it need to be a dreaded part of your day. We make documentation simple and automated - so it shows off your work, rather than being another “to do” on your list.
Are you waiting until the last minute to write work instructions because you know the CAD will change? Use Quarter20.
Are you tasked with leading a design review but you don’t want to spend hours making a deck, only to spin up CAD during your meeting (which, of course, will likely crash)? Use Quarter20.
Building hardware is really fun - the joy of seeing your product come freshly shrink-wrapped off a production line is unmatchable. Having a perfect CMF match from your golden sample to your production parts is magical. Documentation and the BS administrative work around hardware engineering has taken the joy out of engineering. I’m building Quarter20 to have more moments of joy and fewer moments of screenshotting. As a bonus, it also makes hardware a little less hard.
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