The Past, The Present and The Future

Happy New Year and welcome to a new edition of our weekly blog “Inside SoftCircuits Labs”

For most people, the new year is a time of reflection and planning. Well, planning is something that I do everyday (for work and also as a recreational activity), but reflecting on the past and counting our projects, successes and failures, that is something for which I need to set a task reminder (and I still  end up procrastinating). So, I thought I will do this reflection and planning while writing this week’s blog.

For me, a lot has changed in the past couple of years - personally and professionally. In 2024, we finally moved our base from the busy (and polluted) streets of Delhi to a small lab on the foothills of Himalayan mountains. And also, we had a baby.. And these 2 major events changed everything about how we work. While 2024 was all about settling down in a new place and focusing on our new family member, 2025 was spent getting back to the old routine in a new environment..

Time seemed to pass differently in 2025. Sometimes things were moving so slowly, projects were stuck in a limbo and sometimes a month went by in the blink of an eye. We finally finished the internal projects that we started in 2024 (upgrading our CNC router to a metal CNC and a wood burner for indoor heating). Alongside, we took on some projects for research institutes and industrial IoT. And after 2 years, we started meeting people from industry and other institutes to discuss tech and hardware. I like to think of the last 2 years as our paternity break, where we didn’t take any client projects, and worked on building the foundation for our future lab, learning to go with the rhythm of the new place and figuring out new meaning of work-life-balance. I feel we are really lucky that we could choose to slow down, in order to figure out our plans for the second phase of our lab.

Unfortunately, we could not take out time in 2025 to document and open source the projects that we have done over the years. And I hope in 2026, we will finally get to open source our in-house hardware projects. (Or if we still get pre-occupied with some other projects, maybe we will just dump everything on GitHub and do the documentation later. This way, we will at least take one step towards an open hardware journey). We are also planning to take more deep tech development projects and finally complete our robot that has been gathering dust in our lab for years. 

And that’s all I have for this edition. I am sure it will be really interesting when I read it again at the end of this year. Hope you all also had a wonderful start of the new year and I will see you next week.