It’s easy to squeeze the juice out of a Juicero juice bag with your bare hands. But for some reason, the $400 Juicero machine was built to squeeze charcoal briquettes into diamonds. Ben Einstein, a product designer and venture capitalist, took one apart to see what was inside.
Excerpts:
- Juicero’s Press is an incredibly complicated piece of engineering. Of the hundreds of consumer products I’ve taken apart over the years, this is easily among the top 5% on the complexity scale.
- Because the door must transmit the force of the entire drivetrain pushing against the juice packs, we see MASSIVE machined aluminum components.
- It is exceptionally rare to see a custom power supply on a first-time hardware startup’s product as these are inspected very carefully as part of UL/ETL certification, creating additional cost and risk.
- Like many of the other systems on this product, the motor is seemingly custom to account for the exceptionally high rated power (stalls at 5A at 330V DC, which is hard to believe, possibly even a misprint on the motor casing) and sports a custom encoder system designed by Juicero (yellow arrow)
- Removing the sheet metal frame sheds light on a few more custom-machined aluminum drivetrain components. The number, size, complexity and accuracy of these parts is somewhat mind-blowing for a young hardware startup.
At least the engineers had fun designing this!