Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by gus_massa 143 days ago
A few repost are ok, https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html but after a few (whatever that mean) repost people start to get angry. Specially if it's your own project and specialty if it's commercial.

Usually more technical post get better traction, so if you have some interesting side quest building the device, it may be better. But it must be interesting. What is your favorite anecdote about building the device to tell to your fiends over a beer? (Bonus points if it's a technical friend.)

Some ideas from https://www.youtube.com/@Clickspring . But the guy is extremely good so it's a very high bar, it's not necessary to be as good as this guy to post here. (Anyway, I prefer a blog post with photos than a video.)

If you have two accounts, you can ask hn@ycombinator.com about how to merge them, or perhaps they will tell you to just use one of them and never use the other again.

1 comments

To be honest, I’m not trying to hold back on technical details. At its core, this is simply an integrated bearing structure, so the overall concept itself is quite straightforward.

What we’ve been more cautious about sharing at this stage are the manufacturing and process details, since the project is still in its early phase. I understand that this can sometimes come across as being less transparent, and that’s a fair concern.

One example that genuinely surprised us during testing was that laser engraving caused slight deformation, which affected how smoothly the ring could spin. Because of that, we decided to move to a different engraving method to preserve performance.

Either way, I truly appreciate the feedback and suggestions. Until I’ve properly edited my “beer story,” I’ll take a step back from posting here for now.

Thanks again for taking the time to engage and share your perspective.

> What we’ve been more cautious about sharing at this stage are the manufacturing and process details, since the project is still in its early phase. I understand that this can sometimes come across as being less transparent, and that’s a fair concern.

It's not necessary to tell all the details, everyone has a secret sauce. Also some details are boring. Other details change too much.

> One example that genuinely surprised us during testing was that laser engraving caused slight deformation, which affected how smoothly the ring could spin. Because of that, we decided to move to a different engraving method to preserve performance.

That's very interesting! Ensure to add it. Can you rectify the ring after the laser engraving? Is the engraving customized and it is the last step?

Publicly available 3D structural diagrams: https://spinity.co/3d.gif Demonstration video:https://www.reddit.com/r/fidgettoys/comments/1oxa574/just_fi...

We originally planned to use electro-etching to put the Spinity logo on every ring by default. In hindsight, that wasn’t a great idea for a brand that’s just being born.

One user even joked that when the ring spins, “spinity” sometimes reads like “stupid” — which was a very fair reminder that branding should earn its place, not demand it.

So we took the community’s advice and removed the default logo entirely. The outer surface is now intentionally left blank, which also aligns better with our minimalist design philosophy. Engraving is only done when someone explicitly requests customization.

That’s why, process-wise, engraving is always the very last step. If something goes wrong there, the part becomes scrap — which is painful, but it’s the only way we’ve found to preserve predictable spin performance in such a thin system.

In the public demo images, we also deliberately hide what we consider our main structural innovation: the internal ball-loading port on the inner ring. The opening is just slightly larger than the bearing balls (around 1.3 mm), and that detail is what allows us to compress the total ring thickness down to about 2 mm.

One of my favorite moments was a user telling us they had tried to 3D-print a bearing ring themselves and couldn’t get it to work — which makes sense. At this scale, additive manufacturing just doesn’t hit the tolerances needed for consistent motion.

Thanks for pushing me to be more open. I’m still learning how to balance protecting early-stage process details with showing genuine respect for a technically-minded community like HN.