Longan Vision - How Cutting Features Fixed Firefighter Adoption

Enzo Jia was in Indianapolis for FDIC and offered to come record in person, which is how this conversation happened. He is President and Co-Founder of Longan Vision, which makes an AR and thermal heads-up display that mounts to a firefighter's helmet, and he joins DeAndre Harakas and Grant Chapman to trace what four co-founders out of the same McMaster University lab learned building something that has to work inside a burning building. The problem is easy to picture. A firefighter searching a dark, smoke-filled room is holding a thermal imaging camera in one hand, so one hand is gone. Longan Vision moves that view in front of their eyes and adds recording, streaming, and a way for a chief to push a message that sits in the firefighter's field of view rather than vanishing into radio chatter. The version history is the most interesting part. Generation one had every feature they could think of. Generations two through six were almost entirely subtraction, driven by fire departments telling them the weight mattered more than the feature list, and by the fact that every added feature generates heat inside a device whose job is keeping heat out. Off-the-shelf display optics did not survive the environment, so they went back to first principles and built their own. The controls tell the same story, since firefighters operate the device through heavy gloves, which is why it uses a rotary knob, why the knob got clickier over successive versions, and why changing modes eventually took two clicks instead of one. Enzo also describes a prototyping path worth copying, moving from high-temperature 3D prints for ergonomics to machined blocks for material testing, and only cutting tooling once users had weighed in. Longan Vision is about two years into the market now with 10 to 15 fire departments globally, including testing with the Tokyo Fire Department, a World Expo showcase, and work with a NATO partner in Europe, and the platform is moving into mining and oil and gas. He closes on advice for founders, and on why he is glad he did not know what was ahead when they started.Special Guest: Enzo Jia.

Software got its Google Docs moment years ago, the one where files stopped circulating as email attachments and everyone simply worked in the same place at the same time. Mechanical CAD followed. Electronic design took longer, and this conversation is about what changed when it arrived. Justin Sears is Head of Product Marketing for SaaS at Altium, and he came to electronics from a decade in big data having never designed a board or written code, which gives him a useful outsider's read on how hardware teams actually work. He joins DeAndre Harakas and Grant Chapman in person at Glassboard in Indianapolis, after a dinner in Silicon Valley hosted by Duro seated Grant at the end of the table and Justin at the head of it. Grant describes the change from the inside. Glassboard had hand-built a git repository to version Altium files, which mostly worked, and three months after moving to the cloud platform the design review meetings got shorter, the scheduled client calls disappeared, and the email traffic dropped, because the conversation moved into the tool where an engineer could answer in context instead of three days later. The traceability side matters just as much, giving a medical device client a design history file they can rewind to day one, and giving Glassboard a way to handle the roughly 20 percent of inbound work that amounts to fixing a board after a component went end of life. The two of them also work through where AI genuinely fits. Requirements are the right starting point because they have always been written down, while layout is a dark art passed between engineers and never documented, which is exactly the training data a model does not have. Grant argues for AI as a filter and a garbage collector that surfaces what deserves an engineer's attention, rather than something making changes on its own. The conversation closes on supply chain, notification burnout, why Glassboard calls itself the gateway drug dealer for Altium, and DeAndre's point that client visibility is really a retention strategy, the same reason the Uber map made waiting bearable.Special Guest: Justin Sears.

Serhii Zatsarynin spent years at Siemens Healthineers running in-vitro diagnostics in Ukraine, in a world where every human touching the process counts as a potential error, and then came home to find the most important test in his life, the one he and his wife were running while trying for a baby, was a strip in a cup read by eye. That gap is where Ovul started. In this in-person conversation with DeAndre Harakas and Grant Chapman, Serhii opens with a line that runs against the usual framing on this show, which is that hardware is not hard anymore. His case is that prototyping speed has changed what's possible, and he backs it with Ovul's own path, a working prototype in 30 days, pilot units with users about two months in, and roughly one iteration every two weeks after that. The product is a reusable digital saliva microscope that reads saliva ferning, a crystallization pattern tied to estrogen that was discovered in 1945 and has been sold for years as a manual device requiring a week or two of training to interpret. Serhii's move was to take the human out of that step with image recognition. The conversation covers the parts of hardware that surprise first-time founders, including early units that broke every time a user opened them, why a device designed to have no interface ended up needing light indicators, the painful stretch between a few working prototypes and fifty consistent ones, the discovery that you cannot injection mold the shape you 3D printed, and why Ovul chose Wi-Fi over Bluetooth despite the cost, because a device left at home has to sync without the user thinking about it. Serhii also talks about raising capital with product already in market and finding investors unsettled rather than reassured by it. The second half is about where users took the company, from ovulation detection into perimenopause and menopause transition, with around 360 serial production devices now in the field surfacing patterns the team didn't go looking for, and why Ovul deliberately collects no name, email, or phone number. He closes with a first distribution partner in Canada and the advice Grant calls the lesson of the episode, which is to go sell the thing even if it's ugly, because free feedback and paid feedback are not the same feedback.Special Guest: Serhii Zatsarynin.

This one is the peanut butter and jelly of connected hardware, a software consultancy that builds for hardware startups sitting down with a hardware development firm. Peter Tuszynski, CTO at intent, joins DeAndre Harakas and Grant Chapman to talk about what AI has actually changed about bringing an IoT product to life, and what it has not. Peter's answer is more grounded than most. He has seen individual engineers go from 1.5x to 7x on output, but he calls that unrealized capital gains, because shipping more code just means shipping more unverified code until the whole process gets the benefit of that speed. Grant's framing matches, that the real return on AI today is de-risking rather than velocity, since teams using it well are looking under rocks they would never have turned over, and every time you speed up one stage the bottleneck reappears further down the line. At intent the bottleneck turned out to be manual QA, because their projects involve a phone, a peripheral, and a cloud backend, and the messiest failures live between the phone and the peripheral where Bluetooth is low bandwidth and the device landscape is a mess. So they built a QA agent that is agnostic of the underlying model, wired up to drive iOS or Android, a tethered peripheral over CLI, and a test case repository, and found that newer models can read a human readable test case and work through it the way a QA engineer would. The conversation also covers why embedded was supposed to be out of reach for AI and what actually changed, which came down to giving a model a board to flash and a way to verify what it flashed, and from there to giving models control of lab equipment and closing the loop between the physical world and what a model can touch. Peter traces the progression from prompt engineering to context engineering to harness engineering to loop engineering, and the two of them get into designing hardware to be testable in the first place, the carpenter and the CNC machine as the analogy for engineers worried about their craft, why prompting has started to look more like talking than writing, and why play, not work, is how anyone actually figures out what these tools are good for. Filip Pietraszkiewicz closes with advice for founders on getting something clickable in front of users as early as possible.Special Guests: Filip Pietraszkiewicz and Peter Tuszynski.

Epitel just closed a $26 million Series B to expand remote wireless EEG monitoring, and Mark Lehmkuhle, the company's CTO and founder, and J Carroll, its Director of Software Engineering and Architecture, join DeAndre Harakas and Grant Chapman to talk through how the technology got out of the lab and into the world. Mark describes Epitel as a machine learning company for detecting neurological disorders that happens to build its own wireless wearable EEG sensor, a small chicklet-sized device with two gold electrodes that sticks to the scalp with a single piece of adhesive and conductive hydrogel. The hardware, in his framing, is the means to an end, because the product is really about converting a huge stream of data into clinically actionable information. The origin traces back to a decades-old NIH anti-seizure screening program at the University of Utah, where capturing rare seizure events in rodent models meant recording EEG around the clock for nearly the lifetime of the animal. Nothing existed to do that, so they built it, using a concept borrowed from the wireless tire pressure monitor in a car, with thumbnail-sized transmitters that could record continuously for six months. The conversation gets into the electrode research behind the current product, including recreating a study from the early 1970s to determine the minimum number of electrodes needed to still see the electrographic signature of a seizure, which came down to four locations, and a second study on how close together those electrodes can sit. Mark also explains why any of this matters commercially, since self-reporting remains the primary outcome measure in many trials and is roughly fifty-fifty at best. The rest is about the part Mark says is genuinely hard, which is human factors rather than the tech stack. Their users run from neonates to people in their 90s, seizure forecasting raises the question of what a percentage chance means to any individual, and a sensor nobody wears produces no data at all. J talks about garbage in and garbage out, why knowing a recording is bad beats not knowing, and why usability is a first class citizen on his engineering team. Grant and DeAndre add the lily pad analogy for small companies that cannot cross the pond in one jump, why Epitel's first FDA clearance was a milestone rather than a sellable product, why connected devices are never finished as long as they are supported, and why a little ignorance may be the only thing that gets a first-time founder to launch at all.Special Guests: Justin ("J") Carroll and Mark Lehmkuhle.

Roxie Alsruhe had never done anything in hardware or manufacturing when she came home from the hospital with her first born and ran straight into a problem that a lot of families quietly deal with, which is knowing when a bottle of breast milk expires without having to decode a CDC chart while you are exhausted. That problem became HoopDee, a set of NFC-enabled silicone rings that stretch onto any bottle and sync to an app with a tap, so everyone in the house can see what is in each bottle, where it has been sitting, and when it expires. In this episode Grant Chapman and Drew Westrick talk with Roxie about a founder journey that ran backwards from the usual hardware story. She started with an ugly PowerPoint instead of a prototype and shared it with friends until she knew the problem was real, then tested the tap-to-sync experience with stretchy bottle bands and NFC tags bought off Amazon, and released the app months before the hardware existed so she could iron out workflows and collect feedback while manufacturing caught up. They get into the reality of hardware once it arrived, including longer timelines and higher tooling costs, simplifying the design down to a single over-molded piece of silicone with a laser-etched secondary process, and the test rig her dad built to stretch samples a thousand times to find the right formula. The back half is go to market, which Roxie is candid about being the hardest part, because her core audience is first-time parents who have not experienced the problem yet. She talks about why the conversion rate at in-person expos is so much higher than anything online, how grandmothers and sisters at her booth end up selling the product better than she can, and why TikTok Shop and affiliates are the closest digital version of that moment. She closes with advice for new hardware founders, which is that everything takes longer, keep reserves, and keep asking for feedback even when it stings.Special Guest: Roxie Alsruhe.

A vision system can see a car enter a work zone in milliseconds. Getting that warning to a worker standing two miles down the highway, wearing a helmet and running a jackhammer, is a completely different problem. Derek Bleyle, VP of Product at ClearObject, and Tim Hagan, Principal Data Scientist at ClearObject, join host Grant Chapman and guest host Elijah Clarke, hardware engineer at Glassboard, to tell the story of Clear Work Zone, from a design thinking workshop with the New York State Thruway Authority to a production system protecting crews today. ClearObject spent eight years building software for connected products before this, and the episode is an unusually honest look at what that team had to learn. They started with commercial off the shelf everything, discovered that phones and smartwatches could not deliver the range, battery life, or control they needed, and ran a six week proof of concept that ended with one of their developers soldering a wearable together in a hotel room the night before the demo. That demo was enough to earn buy in from the customer and from their own leadership, which is the real lesson for anyone trying to get a hardware idea moving. From there the conversation gets into the engineering. Why they alert when a vehicle actually enters the zone rather than trying to predict it, because alert fatigue kills a safety product on day one. Why Wi-Fi HaLow was the only wireless option that could cover a two and a half mile closure with low latency when Bluetooth is too short and cell service does not exist. How they budgeted two and a half seconds from event to a worker getting clear, and drove the end to end system down to four tenths of a second. What it takes to build a device that survives sunlight, dust, rain, vibration, and being thrown in the back of a truck with a helmet on top of it. Derek and Tim also talk about the shift in mindset that happens when a product moves from convenience to safety critical, the difference between the buyers who run safety organizations and the workers actually wearing the device, and the value of building in the hundreds instead of the thousands so real users can live with a product long enough to tell you what is actually wrong with it. If you are building a connected hardware product, this is a clear look at the path from idea to something people trust with their lives, and a reminder that the last 20% of the functionality is where 90% of the effort lives.Special Guest: Derek Bleyle.

Some founders chase a new idea every few years. Dan Evans did the opposite: he got world-class at one genuinely hard technology and rode it across an entire career. In this episode, Dan, the CEO and founder of Babba, joins DeAndre Harakas and Grant Chapman for a conversation that is equal parts engineering deep dive and founder's playbook. Babba makes a portable baby bottle cooler and warmer built on thermoelectric (Peltier) cooling, the same notoriously nonlinear, power-hungry technology Dan first mastered at his previous startup, RecoverX, in the sports and wellness recovery space. RecoverX was acquired by Hyperice just months after launch, and Dan turned that hard-won expertise toward a new problem: warming and cooling breast milk safely, quickly, and on the go. The engineering half of the conversation is a genuine masterclass. Dan and the Glassboard team get into why thermoelectric cooling is so hard to control that being off by an inch means being off by a mile, how he whiteboarded the physics during the pandemic and proved the doubters wrong, and why balancing mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, fluid dynamics, and food science (you cannot cook or denature the milk) made this one of the hardest products any of them has worked on. The other half is about everything that happens after the engineering works. Dan talks through hearing past the noise of a rough prototype to what customers actually care about, why hardware's go-to-market is as brutal as the build, and why the capital moat around hardware survives even as AI speeds up design. Then he gets refreshingly honest about fundraising: 700 personalized investor outreaches, the second and third-order networks that actually lead to a check, building to be acquired, and the strange transition from venture-startup craziness to running a healthy small business. What we get into: Getting great at a "party trick" almost nobody can do, then finding every nail that needs the hammer The RecoverX story: four years of R&D, a launch, and an acquisition by Hyperice just months later Why thermoelectric cooling is so nonlinear that you have to nail the math and the engineering together The ugly alpha prototype vs the pretty 3D print, and why bridging the two is the hard part Not cooking the milk: balancing mechanical, electrical, and fluid engineering with food science The six-month roadblock, and selling into high-consideration baby purchases vs the athletic market Hearing through the noise of a prototype to what customers truly care about, and asking for the brutal feedback Why hardware's go-to-market is as hard as the build, and why the capital moat stays even as AI accelerates design The three pillars of fundraising and sales, 700 personalized outreaches, and second and third-order networks Building to be acquired, and the leadership shift from startup to small business A few lines that stuck with us: "Get really good at a party trick that almost nobody else knows, then find all the nails that need the hammer." "With thermoelectric cooling, when you're off by an inch, you're off by a mile." "The people you message might not be the people who invest in you. They might be the bridge to the person who does." "If you can find joy in the journey and not just the destination, you'll make a really good entrepreneur." About the guest: Dan Evans is the CEO and founder of Babba, which makes a portable baby bottle cooler and warmer built on thermoelectric cooling. He previously founded RecoverX, a thermal-control company in the sports and wellness recovery space that was acquired by Hyperice, and he has built his career around mastering one hard technology and applying it across multiple products. The Hardtech Podcast is hosted by DeAndre Harakas and Grant Chapman of Glassboard.Special Guest: Dan Evans.

The walker is one of the most common and least reimagined products in healthcare. Matt Cumella set out to change that. A doctor of physical therapy with a board certification in geriatrics, Matt spent years in post-acute and aging care, and in this episode he joins Grant Chapman and Drew Westrick to trace the whole arc, from a formative burn-trauma ICU rotation to building Nuvio. He makes a simple but overlooked point: for the people he treated, the hardest moment often was not walking, it was standing up. Nuvio's first walker was reengineered around that, with an H-frame you step inside of (rather than shuffling behind), and ergonomic handles set at the right height to help someone rise out of a deep couch or chair. From there, Matt and the team pushed further, adding sensors to put a physical therapist's eye into the device and turn every session into meaningful, reimbursable data. What we get into: Matt's path from sports-med dreams to a burn-trauma ICU rotation that reset his whole view of the field Why daily independence, not peak performance, became the goal, and why a small loss of mobility can cascade into a house of cards in older age The walker everyone settles for, four posts and tennis balls, and why the real problem is sit-to-stand, not walking The H-frame design: stepping inside a ring of stability, the kitchen-sink demo, and a walker that folds and stands on its own Designing for three stakeholders at once: the patient, the home environment, and the caregiver who loads it into the car The pivot from the analog "acoustic" walker to a smart one, and the goal of putting a physical therapist in your walker Why the data matters: reimbursement, evidence, and moving from "how far did you walk" to the next 10 to 20 metrics The art of a properly constrained product, working through prototype to production, and continuity of care from hospital to home A few lines that stuck with us: "It's less about the top 5% of performance. It's getting 85% of your points back." "How do we put a physical therapist in your walker?" "We built a device that, even if you didn't know it was smart, would still win." "Product can be for anybody." About the guest: Matt Cumella is the founder and CEO of Nuvio and a doctor of physical therapy with a board certification in geriatrics. He spent years in post-acute and aging care before building Nuvio, a reimagined walker and, increasingly, a sensor-driven care platform for people working to regain their mobility and independence. This episode of The Hardtech Podcast was hosted by Grant Chapman and Drew Westrick of Glassboard.Special Guest: Matt Cumella.

This is a special one. Grant Chapman flies solo (a Hardtech Podcast "after dark" on a Friday) with Ben Wrightsman, founding board member of AMVIC, the Advanced Machine and Vehicle Innovation Center. Ben is a Hoosier lifer who has spent 30 years at the center of Indiana's hard-tech story, and he is exactly the kind of guest who can connect electric race cars, battery chemistry, contract manufacturing, and the coming wave of humanoids into one throughline. The conversation traces his arc from teenage electrician to Purdue, to Delphi's electric race car program and the EnerDel battery pedigree that quietly runs through nearly every EV today, to a decade building the Battery Innovation Center from fewer than six clients into a 600-plus-client powerhouse. That story becomes the blueprint for AMVIC: a nonprofit built to accelerate the entire machine, not just one subsystem, and the organization behind the upcoming AMVIC AIM IN Summit. What we get into: Ben's 30-year arc: electrician, Purdue, electric race cars, and the Delphi and EnerDel battery pedigree behind modern EVs How a scrappy battery lab on a landlocked naval base grew from fewer than six clients to more than 600, and pivoted from government dependence to a thriving private-market model Why hardware has to crawl, walk, run, always in that order, and why you should rent a manufacturing line before you ever build your own "Small fingerprints on very cool big things," and the quiet power of being the connective tissue in an ecosystem From the Battery Innovation Center to AMVIC: going from one subsystem to the whole machine, and why it is structured as a nonprofit Why the real AI story is a manufacturing renaissance: power, fiber, high voltage, and the data-center buildout nobody sees Humanoids, the dangerous jobs nobody wants, and why the robots are not coming for your job (with a Y2K and internet reality check) The origin of the AMVIC AIM IN Summit: how a 25-person dinner with a crazy idea became a sold-out summit built on demos, not sales pitches A few lines that stuck with us: "We have small fingerprints on very cool big things." "Hardware has to crawl, walk, run, and you have to do it in that order." "The renaissance in AI and data centers is really about manufacturing." "Compound interest is a hell of a drug." About the guest: Ben Wrightsman is a founding board member of AMVIC, the Advanced Machine and Vehicle Innovation Center, a nonprofit accelerating advanced machine and vehicle innovation. Over 30 years he has worked across electric racing, batteries (Delphi and EnerDel), contract manufacturing, and the Battery Innovation Center, and he is one of the driving forces behind the AMVIC AIM IN Summit. Join us at the event: The AMVIC AIM IN Summit is September 23rd in downtown Indianapolis, starting at 8:00 AM, with a Critical Energy panel, an OEM and innovation panel, a humanoid showcase, and Ben speaking. Register here: [event registration link] This special episode of The Hardtech Podcast was hosted solo by Grant Chapman of Glassboard.Special Guest: Ben Wrightsman.