The team behind Flipper Zero, a portable hacking multitool, who write about its manufacturing, shipping, features, and testing.
Commenters find the project updates insightful about hardware production difficulties and like the iButton write-up, though one notes the logo link goes to the blog index.
Their development blog is very detailed: https://blog.flipperzero.one/review-and-producing-plan/ . It's definitely past the "pipe dream" phase IMO, the drawings they've posted in the blog post demonstrate an awful lot of work and are a far cry from "idea kicking around." But, I also have pretty low expectations for the firmware for a while, and the delivery timeline as well.
I think they've decided to do the initial firmware development internally, which is a bit worrying but doesn't seem too unreasonable to me given that the signal-to-noise ratio for open sourcing this before it's done is probably pretty bad (while you may pick up a few contributors, responding to the "hax wen" crowd is almost certain to slow you down at first).
What a cool device. Small word of advice to whoever maintains the FlipperZero website ("webmaster" in the old days): clicking on the logo on any of the Blog pages leads to the blog index, which is not terribly helpful for someone who – like me – landed on a blog article page and then was wondering what this was all about. It would make more sense if the logo, like the "Home" link in the navigation, consistently lead to https://flipperzero.one instead of https://blog.flipperzero.one. Same thing goes for https://shop.flipperzero.one fwiw.
I've never done that myself, but I backed an SDR device called Flipper Zero on Kickstarter some time ago, and I found their updates on the project status very insightful.
Through their posts, you can make an idea on how complex and how much work there is on developing, manufacturing, certifying and delivering a hardware device.
Link: https://blog.flipperzero.one/
I loved their post on the iButton. https://blog.flipperzero.one/taming-ibutton/
I've never actually come across this interface. It's not common in Australia, I still really enjoyed the write up and seeing how they overcame the difficulties.
> The prototype of our character is the cyborg dolphin Jones from the story "Johnny Mnemonic" by William Gibson.
https://blog.flipperzero.one/story-contest/
This is exactly what's happening. Chips in high-demand have gotten very expensive. https://blog.flipperzero.one/manufacturing-and-shipping-update/