Design Meetups & Starsonder & Patifact — May 2026 Recap

In May, I worked quietly on a lot of foundational paperwork for the startup; I attended a handful of design events and hardware meetups; and I spent a weekend building a small web app named Patifact to assist with filing hardware patent applications.

Social Calendar

On May 20th, I attended Dumbo Design Day where many of the design studios located in Dumbo, NYC held open offices to invite the rest of the community. I attended the open house held at Pensa, an award-winning industrial design firm in Dumbo, before heading over to the Dumbo x Design Closing Party held at Superfine restaurant and bar from 6pm-late.

Following the closing party, I rang in my birthday at midnight back in the city. Later that week, I also had the opportunity to present Mixfinity at a hardware product Show 'n' Tell held at the Fat Cat Fab Lab makerspace's new event space in the West Village, NYC.

Startup Stuffs

After launching Starsonder Inc last month, the new company and brand for Mixfinity and other future hardware products, I completed some further incorporation paperwork last month ahead of fundraising. I also kicked off the first informal meeting for my informal advisory board — so far comprising one of my closest friends from Scotland who is himself also a hardware product founder.

I did get carried away one weekend and built a small web application to assist myself and, in the future, other hardware product builders with drafting patent applications. Patifact connects to your Github account and allows for the upload of other design documents and written text. The Patifact copilot can suggest novel ideas worth consideration for the filing of a patent, or you can upload an existing patent application and the copilot can surface new claims not covered in your original patent or application. Patifact is a portmanteau of the words "patent" and "artifact", or, together, patent artifacts: documents, models, drawings, and other records that capture or otherwise describe an invention. I am mostly dogfooding this for internal use while I complete development of this year's Mixfinity hardware release and another future product, and if you are also a hardware engineer that may be interested in beta testing this web application, feel free to get in touch.

Mixfinity Product Updates

May was mostly a month for quiet work in the home office. I struck up conversations with several important vendors for chips and displays, and continued firmware work supporting Bluetooth. I also did some initial work on the cloud backend to be able to support flash-on-demand programming of music tracks onto the tape: upon scanning a purchase order barcode, a desktop application on my PC is now able to connect to a backend web application to provision, download, and flash audio assets onto the Mixfinity tape.

Month Ahead

The first week of June was New York Tech Week. My next recap post will cover some of the events I participated in. I attended 8 different events of the course of the week, including a very cool 4th edition of the recurring annual NY Tech Week Soccer Championship. More to follow in the next blog post.