Two years ago, the Othermill desktop CNC mill made machining radically more accessible. Priced at $2,200, it found its way beyond general small-scale milling and into electronics prototyping; it can mill copper away from an FR-1 PCB blank to make a circuit board. Other Machine’s latest work is the Othermill Pro, whose spindle speed and rapid movement are 60% and 70% faster than the original’s, respectively, and whose accuracy makes it possible to fabricate traces as small as six thousandths of an inch.

In this episode of the Hardware Podcast, we talk with Ezra Spier, the vice president of product & software at Other Machine Co., maker of the Othermill. Spier walks us through the development process for the improved machine and gives us an overview of the desktop prototyping market.

In this episode of the Hardware podcast, we talk with Chris Meringolo, an engineer at ThingWorx, and Brian Jepson, an editor at O’Reilly Media. This conversation took place during the LiveWorx 2016 conference, where the three of us presented a hands-on connected-device tutorial that we’re calling the O’Reilly IoT Learning Lab.

In this episode of the Hardware Podcast, we talk with Jonathan Bachrach, a professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS) Department at UC Berkeley, and co-founder of Otherlab, a research-driven lab and incubator that sits at the intersection between software and machines.

Coco Krumme is a data scientist who’s worked at the intersection of applied math and agriculture, and her recent “Silicon Valley Magnets” project gently satirizes Silicon Valley’s “techno-utopian mythology.” In this episode of the Hardware podcast, we talk about how connected sensors, AI, and data science are changing agriculture, and reflect on the different ways that Silicon Valley and farmers are inclined to solve problems.

In this episode of the Hardware podcast, we talk with Carl Bass, president and CEO of Autodesk. He’s an articulate thinker on algorithmic design, collaborative tools, and the nature of craft, and we talked for nearly two hours when we visited him to record this episode.

Manu Prakash, a bioengineering professor at Stanford University, talks about radically inexpensive microscopes and the democratization of discovery in this episode of the Hardware Podcast. Prakash’s Foldscope is a “completely functional, foldable, origami microscope.” He says that “every kid in the world should carry a microscope in their pocket,” and so far, more than 50,000 Foldscopes (the parts of which cost only $1) have been shipped to more than 130 countries.

In this episode of the Hardware podcast, we talk with writer and digital rights activist Cory Doctorow. He’s recently rejoined the Electronic Frontier Foundation to fight a World Wide Web Consortium proposal that would add DRM to the core specification for HTML. When we recorded this episode with Cory, the W3C had just overruled the EFF’s objection. The result, he says, is that “we are locking innovation out of the Web.”

In this episode of the Hardware Podcast, we talk with Rob Chandhok, president of Helium, a startup with a platform for connecting sensors and control elements over the Internet. We talk about the process of taking a prototype to production, and the blend of hardware and software that allows smart edge devices to last an eternity on a single battery.

In this episode of the Hardware Podcast, we talk with Ken Shirriff, a software engineer at Google and writer of a fascinating series of electronics teardowns. His posts on power supplies, like Apple’s MacBook and iPad chargers, offer detailed looks at how the real things differ from counterfeits. And his writeup of Apple’s remarkably complex Magsafe connector is illuminating.

In this episode of the Hardware Podcast, we talk with Marcin Wichary, design lead and typographer at Medium. Wichary is an authority on the history of keyboards, and he’s traced their development from an early period of enormous variation (when each manufacturer arranged arrow keys in a different order) through today’s relative stability.