Like a lot of rural areas, Montezuma, Kansas has rough backcountry roads. Toolboxes in trucks that are driving these roads bounce around, scrambling their contents. Thirty years ago, an unknown maintenance engineer in the area grew tired of this, and designed a toolbox that would not only keep the tools in place during rough transport, but would also present them ergonomically once on-site.

The result is these Triangle Toolboxes, produced by manufacturer Montezuma. The triangular cross-section presents the tools in a stadium seating format, and the angle of the locking lid keeps the contents in place, even as you weather potholes.

The company offers a broad range of sizes and styles, with top-handled units for lighter tools, and side-handled units for heavier stuff.

They also offer units with a single drawer on the bottom, riding on ball-bearing slides…

…as well as licensed, DeWalt-branded models.

And for in-shop use, the company manufacturers companion rolling carts with drawers.

A perhaps unintended bonus of the form factor: No one will leave their coffee cup on top of it.

The units are made of aluminum or steel, and prices run from around $100 to around $850, depending on size, material and options.

Here's what we looked at this week:

A designey divot tool from Formawerx and Discommon Goods.

Nike Hydraulics' sleek mid-century design for an adjustable drafting table.

A portable, drill-powered oscillating tool blade sharpener.

This Nimble Prosthetic Fin for amputee swimmers is by industrial designer Alberto Essesi.

João Teixeira's simple, alluring, bent plywood Tokyo Bench.

Engineer Tej Grewal shares his settings for 3D printing transparent objects out of PETG.

An architecture firm's wishful solar-powered motorcycle concept.
In Switzerland, the world's largest glue-up?

Architect Didi Lenz's PIXEL: Milk-crate-like modular furniture for working adults.

What the milk crate is to college-aged kids furnishing dorms or homes, the PIXEL is to adults doing work. Designed by Austrian architect Didi Lenz, it's a plywood cube (roughly 36cm / 14 3/8" cubed) that can be used as a standalone storage object, or stacked like milk crates to build benches, cabinets, tables, seating, et cetera.

"PIXEL isn't furniture," Lenz insists. "PIXEL is a flexible module that can serve various functions in space for everyone. A high table for a workshop, a desk for students, a shelving system for a store, a bar for a party. Anything's possible with inspiration and improvisation. This is exactly what PIXEL is made for – it's an all-purpose tool at times of constant change."

Accessories include lids, trays, tops, wheeled bases, seat cushions, shelving racks, organizer inserts and a whiteboard holder.

PIXEL is in production by Austrian office furniture manufacturer Bene, where Lenz is an Innovation Ambassador.

Furnituremakers among you undoubtedly remember your most difficult glue-up: A countertop, bench or tabletop of unwieldy dimensions. Well, you probably won't complain again, after seeing what these folks are doing. Swiss timber company Huesser Holzleimbau, which specializes in creating glue-lam beams, recently won a contract to manufacture two burly beams for a bridge.

Twenty-eight employees (including people from the office called onto the shop floor to pitch in) worked together on the most massive glue-up I've ever seen:

Once all of the separate glue-ups were put together, the resultant part was 27.3 m (90 ft) long, with a width and height of 1320 x 1360 mm (52 x 54 in). Counting the steel brackets embedded into the beam, it weighs 24.1 tonnes (53,130 lbs)! And they made two of them.

Located in Obersaxen, Switzerland, the Lochlitobel Bridge was erected last month to span a gorge.

As for why they made it out of wood and not steel, it was actually faster and required less logistics to make it out of wood. Glue-lam beams have 1.5 to 3 times the strength-to-weight ratio of steel, and could thus be fabricated offsite, trucked to the site and hoisted into place with less equipment than would have been required with heavy steel.

"During the entire construction period, no auxiliary bridges would have been possible, and there would have been virtually no convenient detour options," writes the Canton of Graubunden, where the bridge is located. "To minimize traffic restrictions, the two wooden load-bearing girders, each weighing 25 tons and over 27 meters long, were prefabricated and then installed on site with millimeter precision. This process ensured high quality and, from the dismantling of the old bridge to the commissioning of the new one, a road closure of only eight weeks."

Solar-powered cars require surface area for the panels, and designers have come up with different solutions for this. Clean energy company GoSun envisions a roofrack-mounted unit that unfurls its panels when the vehicle's parked.

Engineer Omid Sadeghpour built a similar system for his Tesla Model Y, using telescoping carbon fiber tubes.

Worksport, an American manufacturer of tonneau covers, has proposed this Solis Solar Tonneau Cover.

Now Italian industrial designer Danilo Petta and Turkish architect Öznur Pinar Cer propose a solution for motorcycles. Petta and Cer's firm, Mask Architects, has released images of this Solaris concept, an electric motorcycle intended to be charged exclusively by solar.

Tucked beneath the tail...

...are two deployable solar panel wings.

This being an architecture firm, the concept is extremely light on details—how exactly do those wings unfurl?—and heavy on social-good theory:

"SOLARIS® is more than a vehicle—it is an environmental intervention. Operating exclusively on solar power, it eliminates CO2 emissions, reduces noise pollution and demonstrates a decentralized model of clean mobility. By removing the need for fuel or charging stations, SOLARIS® brings renewable transportation to remote regions, developing communities, protected natural areas and countries with fragile infrastructure. It becomes a catalyst for social, economic and ecological transformation, enabling mobility where it has never been accessible before."

It's an interesting concept, but without the intervention of a Honda or a Yamaha, will likely remain just that.

Canadian engineer Tej Grewal is working on a component for his company, Qube Technologies, which monitors oil and gas emissions. The desired end product, a dial, will have a translucent 3D-printed PETG cover through which readings can be viewed. To that end, he's been messing around with the slicer settings for his 3D printer to maximize the part's translucency, and now he's nailed it:

In a nutshell, he advises:

"Reduce all the speeds to 20mm/s."

(The slower speed provides a smoother and more uniform extrusion, which is better for clarity.)

"Set the number of wall loops to 1."

(So the part is mostly a solid infill block, instead of lots of overlapping lines.)

"Remove the top shell and bottom shell, number of top and bottom layers 0."

(So that the whole part is just infill.)

"Set the infill density to 100%, and change the infill direction to 0° or 90° (slicer specific)."

(This is so that the inside is completely solid and with straight, aligned lines, letting light through.)

"Nozzle flow 1.01 if your printer set flow is <0.99."

(In other words, don't under-extrude; you want to avoid gaps, which would make the part cloudy.)

Thanks to Grewal for sharing the tips!

This bent plywood Tokyo bench is by Portuguese furniture designer João Teixeira.

The bent plywood form references the Japanese torii (the traditional gates you see at shrines), while one end of it curves over the upholstered piece to provide a landing pad.

Teixeira already has a smaller version of the bench, the Tokyo Bench Kids, in production by British furniture company Curve Lab.

As for when the grown-up version will go into production, Teixeira says only that it's launching "soon."

This Nimble Prosthetic Fin is by industrial designer Alberto Essesi. While most prosthetic legs we see are designed for walking, here the Milan-based designer has addressed the activity of swimming instead.

"The Nimble prosthetic fin redefines mobility for below-the-knee amputees. At its core is an innovative, 3D-printed flexible lattice structure. This centerpiece is engineered to reduce stress on the user's limb while simultaneously generating powerful thrust with each kick, all within an incredibly lightweight carbon fiber construction."

3D-printed rubber and plastic round out the carbon fiber.

This appears to be a concept, as opposed to something headed for production; Essesi doesn't say.

We started off with a clear goal - how to make eyecare at home easier, more comfortable, and effective. We were working on a product family of eye-care masks — the Hydrating Sleep Mask (2nd Gen), the Moist-Heat Eye Compress, and the Rechargeable Heat Mask — each built with a specific function in mind.

The Hydrating Sleep Mask creates a soft, sealed environment that helps your eyes stay moist overnight. Designed with thoughtful materials - soft silicone eye cups, adjustable parts, and a knit fabric exterior to stay comfortable in any sleeping position. Small vents ensure a pressure balance while still maintaining a seal, and the whole system is adjustable . It's lightweight, breathable, and designed to disappear on your face.

The Moist-Heat Compress is a simple, single-use warm compress for moments when you need quick relief. It's easy to activate, easy to use, and designed to fit naturally into your routine without any setup or tech. Even though it's disposable, it still follows the same design language as the rest of the line, so the whole family feels consistent.

The Rechargeable Heat Mask brings in a bit of high-tech comfort. Soft padding, a performance-knit fabric, and a vaulted design keep heat where your eyelids need it without applying pressure. Dual-zone heating and multiple temperature settings let users personalize the experience. A USB-C battery makes it portable and simple to recharge, and the travel case lets you take it anywhere.

Across all three masks, we kept the design language tight and intentional — shared materials, similar silhouettes, familiar touchpoints, and packaging that feels like part of the same system. This cohesion matters. When a customer buys one Blinkjoy product, they instantly understand the next one. The result is a line that feels unified, purposeful, and familiar.

View the full project here

IDD Cologne 2025 premiered this fall as the new interior design event to complement the long running trade fair mothership of IMM in January and its alternative urban off-show, Passagen. Whilst organized by Koelnmesse, the century-old giant of Germany's expo world, IDD itself is a new decentralized urban affair, held at design locations throughout the city and focussing on premium brands.

I spent some time at Design Post, the show's unofficial nerve center, where a few refreshingly interactive pieces where on show, and lectures, panels and workshops let the visitors get involved.

Designpost Cologne. Photo by Anki Delfmann.

Design Post sits in a former post-and-freight depot from 1913, now repurposed as one of Cologne's most distinctive design hubs.

Cabrio by Extremis. Photo by Anki Delfmann.

A crowd-favourite was Cabrio by Belgian brand Extremis, inspired by convertible cars.

Cabrio by Extremis. Photo by Anki Delfmann.

The soft top of the two-seater outdoor sofa closes to give shelter and privacy, also somewhat similar to a covered chairlift.

Cabrio by Extremis. Photo by Anki Delfmann.

Potentially the most fun marketing add-on of the expo were the vintage "Scenery Simulators", letting visitors enjoy sofa perspectives from around the world, on the moon, and with a bear sitting next to them.

Surfbench by Kim André Lange. Photo by Anki Delfmann.

Another stunning interactive piece was Surfbench by German designer Kim André Lange. The wooden ribs convert playful kinetic energy into a beautifully organic wave motion that makes the bench come alive like a sea slug.

Surfbench by Kim André Lange. Photo by Anki Delfmann.

As an added effect of the meticulous design and engineering, the bench can be used flexibly from both sides, without the wave movement being perceptible by the people sitting on it.

Wagner Design Lab at IDD Cologne. Photo by Anki Delfmann.

German chair company Wagner had a big space inside Design Post, enhanced by a mini airstream caravan outside that was converted into a tiny hotel room.

Wagner Design Lab at IDD Cologne. Photo by Anki Delfmann.

The caravan showed off their modular interior systems and the Nesting Sofa, which can be opened and closed to adjust the desired amount of interaction with the outside world.

Wagner Design Lab at IDD Cologne. Photo by Anki Delfmann.

The interactive idea was carried on in shelf components reminiscent of Verner Panton…

Wagner Design Lab at IDD Cologne. Photo by Anki Delfmann.

…And the 3D-printed W3D rocking stools designed with Hadi Teherani, aiming to improve back health.

Hannes Bäuerle of Material Bank. Photo by Anki Delfmann.

The most crowded event was the completely booked-out lecture and workshop about Material Trends with Hannes Bäuerle of Material Bank, in collaboration with Dornbracht. Trend predictions ranged from Sensual Rawness and Techno Poetry to Neo Nature, Circularity, Tactile Statements and Emotional Colours.

Hannes Bäuerle of Material Bank. Photo by Anki Delfmann.

Workshop participants (mostly architects, interior designers and students) were tasked with assembling material systems for hotels and explaining and defending their choices to the audience.

Hannes Bäuerle of Material Bank. Photo by Anki Delfmann.

Tom Dixon lighting. Photo by Anki Delfmann.

Last but not least, lighting claimed its space at the exhibition, led by Tom Dixon's iconic lamps that have had some structural, material and texture updates like frosted glass, textile and ribbed surfaces.

Tom Dixon lighting. Photo by Anki Delfmann.

Tom Dixon lighting. Photo by Anki Delfmann.

Quasar Lum Leather Wall Lamp. Photo by Anki Delfmann.

Dutch lighting brand Quasar showed their Lum Leather Wall Lamp and Moonlight Suspension.

Adilo by Secto Design. Photo by Anki Delfmann.

Secto Design from Finland, who hand-craft wooden lamps, presented their newest model Adilo, made from ultra-thin birch plywood with an innovative fold-out structure,

Design Post Cologne. Photo by Anki Delfmann.

Looking forward to see what the future will bring for this brand new design event – in Europe and overseas!

Last week we looked at Franz Kuhlmann's mid-century adjustable drafting table, which was drool-worthy. Here's another one from the same antique re-seller, Mid-Century Friends, which is a good deal sleeker:

This one was manufactured in the 1950s by Sweden's Nike Hydraulics.

(The branding on the frame, "Nike Eskilstuna," references both the company and its location. Eskilstuna was something like Sweden's Cleveland, in terms of being a center of industry.)

They were selling this one for $3759, but it's been snapped up.

Last year we looked at this $349 Tiger's Teeth invention, which resharpens oscillating tool blades.

The company has since released a drill-powered version, which runs $149.

Now there's a competing product from the Netherlands, called SharpTool. It's a lot smaller than the Tiger's Teeth gizmo, and is also powered by a drill.

The tool appears to be new; at press time it wasn't yet listed on the company's website, nor had the price been announced.

When golf balls land on the putting green, they can leave a little crater, or divot. This disrupts the putting surface, and golf etiquette demands that golfers repair any divots they've caused. To this end golfers carry these divot tools, which look like some kind of Klingon artifact:

You stick the prongs into the turf around the divot, then lever the handle towards the center of the hole to even out the surface.

Plastic ones cost less than a buck, though you can spend $20 to $100 on a metal one. However, if you'd prefer to spend more, there's this:

That's the Divot Tool 2, created in a collaboration between design brand Discommon Goods and L.A. design studio Formawerx. The stainless steel tool is formed using a 5-axis CNC machine, yielding what the companies call "a truly uncompromising example of design and craftsmanship colliding to create a wonderful and functional sculpture."

The tool runs a cool $795.

Here's what we looked at this week:

Design Engineering student work: The Nozzlemate improves firefighter safety.

The Granubot: An automatic screed leveler from Germany.

Siso's unusual knockdown hardware for mitered edges.

Apple's new product, the iPhone Pocket, comes in 16" and 32" lengths.

Changing battery form factors allow for an unlikely portable gaming console hack.

Furnituremaker Frank Strazza using his modern rendition of an 18th-century frame saw design for marquetry.

Hoto's designey rotary cutter features some nice UX touches.

An industrial designer's unusual (conceptual?) writing instrument.

Simes' Shift Pro is a multifunctional urban pole.

Outside-the-box thinking: Using vibrations to de-ice an airplane wing in-flight.

Brass and crystal Art Deco luxury light switches, only $987 each! (Before tax.)

The Eureka Bottle: A modular, easy-to-clean thermos that at least two different industrial designers thought of.

Bene Office's sustainable, closed-loop 3D-printed recyclable desktop organizers.

A bad-ass adjustable drafting table and square from mid-century Germany.

In 20th century Germany, Franz Kuhlmann was an industrial equipment manufacturer. Nestler was a company that made drafting boards. In the 1950s, the two companies collaborated on this cast iron, steel and wood adjustable drafting table:

It's got a counterbalanced adjustment mechanism:

I'm especially digging the swing-arm square:

The one you see here is being sold by antique reseller MidCentury Friends.

This line of bFRIENDS desktop organizers is by British industrial design firm Pearson Lloyd. They're 3D printed by British manufacturer Batch.Works, out of recycled plant-based plastic that was formerly packaging, and make for quite the vibrant deskscape.

"bFRIENDS is an ambitious project to develop legitimate and deliverable closed–loop circular design principles into the workplace," Pearson Lloyd writes. "All products can be returned directly to Batch. Works. to be recycled into material for reprinting and reuse."

"The PLA can be integrated back into the production cycle and we can convert it into a new accessory. All bFRIENDS that are made from more than one material can be separated from one another by type at the end of a product's lifetime, allowing them to be fed into different cycles. Our collection makes it easy to see how we can complete the cycle and help preserve resources."

The bFRIENDS line was designed for Austrian furniture manufacturer Bene Office. (See also: bFRIENDS Power Modules.)

Several years ago, British industrial designer Jake Naish designed this Forss bottle. The brilliant concept was that the interchangeable sections provide a thermos that you can easily clean, and adjust the volume of.

Alas, it remained just a concept. But now an Oregon-based startup called Eureka is bringing a similar design to market.

The Eureka Bottle consists of a base—tapered to fit in an automotive cupholder--and two different Boost sections, one with a handle, one without.

You can thus carry 20, 40 or 60 oz with you.

The sections are made of stainless steel, with silicone sealing rings, and you can easily disassemble the sections for cleaning.

The three-piece set runs $56 on Kickstarter, where it's been successfully funded with 13 days left to pledge at press time.

The designer of the product says that they have "over 25 years of industrial design experience," but they don't provide their name; I was hoping it was Naish, but he's too young to have been in the game that long.

When I think about AI and product design, I often go back to a simple, illustrative example: when we first put a camera on a mobile phone. At the time, something like that required a fifty-page document to capture the requirements. Today, I could ask an AI, "We're adding a camera to a phone—what are the technical considerations?" It would instantly generate a decent draft. That part of the process can be automated now. But what about the idea of putting a camera on a phone in the first place? That spark—that's human. That's the boundary I see with current AI. Maybe someday AI can propose those ideas too, but right now, that leap still comes from us.

Kouji Kodera, Founder of i8 Labs

That's how I frame the role of AI today. It's an accelerator. It's there to help us move faster, especially in the iteration stage. It can help test ideas, refine requirements and explore options—but it's still up to the human to steer the direction. Creativity, at least for now, remains a human trait.

But "faster" doesn't mean pumping out more products. It means compressing the cycle from idea to market. There are a lot of iterations in that path—technical constraints, challenges to solve, decisions to make. AI can help with those cycles. It can surface best practices across industries and suggest relevant solutions. You don't need a hundred people to do that digging anymore—you can get insights quickly and start moving forward.

Editor's Note: This essay is part of a new series exploring how AI is transforming the way physical products are imagined, designed, and built. Hardware is the New Salt will spotlight several thinkers and makers at the intersection of AI and product design and their insights into this dynamic technology ecosystem. This series is supported by Enzzo, who offers an AI-first product development platform created to support the next generation of builders.

That time savings is powerful. You can bring products to market sooner. But you can also reinvest that time into creativity, stacking more meaningful features before launch. Often, the real inflection point in adoption happens not with a single new feature, but when five or ten come together and create something richer. AI helps us get to that threshold faster.

We've seen this pattern before. When GPS was first added to feature phones in the late 2000s, it wasn't useful immediately. The screens were small, and the apps were limited. It wasn't until smartphones evolved—bigger screens, integrated maps, real-time navigation—that GPS became indispensable. AI is going through the same early stage. Think about the image generators that used to draw people with six fingers. It takes years of iteration before a tool becomes truly usable. The difference now is that we can iterate faster, so we'll reach maturity sooner.

But we have to be careful. One of the biggest concerns I see is confidentiality. If you're feeding proprietary plans into a public AI tool, that information could leak. Some companies are solving this by using private, open-source models hosted on secure servers. But there's a tradeoff—your model won't learn from the outside world, so its knowledge is more limited. Still, it's a safer route for sensitive work.

Adoption of AI will vary by industry. Customer service and fraud detection, for example, will move quickly. They deal with general or anonymized data, and the cost benefits are clear. In areas like product design—where creativity, IP, and long-term strategy are key—companies will be slower and more cautious. And yes, cultural differences play a role. Some companies in Japan still don't allow employees to access corporate email on their phones. That says a lot.

Despite the challenges, I'm bullish on AI. I've always been excited by new technologies and features. I see a lot of potential in how AI can support areas like financial forecasting and portfolio planning. If you have historical data on past product lines, AI can model future revenue, optimize pricing, and suggest launch timing. It's incredibly helpful, especially at scale. Doing that work by hand is a pain.

And in project management, there's massive room for improvement. Today, we spend so much time in meetings just gathering updates. Imagine if AI could collect input, highlight delays, and flag risks—that would cut the need for status meetings by half, maybe more. Instead of spending time catching up, teams could spend time solving problems. That's a real gain.

And so to quote Mr. Andressen, is software still "eating the world"—I think it's time to remember that software doesn't run without hardware. Zoom calls –great software, but useless without a computer or a phone. The magic happens at the intersection of the two. That's where you can really differentiate.

So when I hear the phrase "hardware is the new salt"—I get it. Salt is essential. So is hardware. But I'd argue hardware is even more fundamental than salt. We literally can't live the lives we lead without it.

About the author: A twenty-plus year veteran of the wireless industry, Kouji has held a succession of senior product-focused positions, first with Mitsubishi Electric, Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications, HTC and most recently with Motorola Mobility. Kouji led various functions including product planning & management and content & service, leading the efforts to deliver overall product and user experience vision. Kouji was the creator of Moto Z with Moto mods at Motorola, HTC One at HTC, Xperia, Walkman phones and Cybershot phones at Sony Ericsson.

Extensive experience in wireless and consumer market. Specifically, in creating breakthrough products, blending application service, software and hardware into new categories of product, leading or turning around businesses for iconic brands, and leading start-ups. Industry-wide reputation for integrity, home run products, on-time delivery and openness to new ideas and partners.People come 1st. They are central to product, experience and how business is conducted. As a result of forming strong teams, have led numerous landmark products: including 1st music phone (Walkman phone), 1st camera phone (Cyber-shot phone), 1st 4G smartphone, 1st modular phone (Moto Z withMotoMods) and HTC One series.

Recently Kouji have founded i8 Labs, where he utilizes existing smartphone technology & expertise into a new solution to create new innovative business models, as well as commercial activities.i8 Labs is created with an intent to capitalize on a fast growing Smart Sensor market with a mission oftransforming the world to a smarter and more sustainable living. As a co-founder and chief executiveofficer, Kouji is responsible for developing, and driving the vision for i8 Labs and then turning thosevisions into reality. i8 Labs works to solve common City Performance Measurements in the areassuch as Transportation, Environment and Safety by using real time data and analytics.

You can pick up a light switch and cover plate for about $10 at a big box store. But those products are just for us mortals. The super-rich might prefer to spend (literally) 100 times more per switch, for something really special. Hence we have these Lalique luxury electrical switches, which start at €853 (USD $987) a pop, excluding VAT.

French luxury electrical hardware company Meljac typically works with brass, and here they've partnered up with French glassmaker Lalique to create products using both of their materials and styles. Lalique specializes in crystal Art Deco jewelry and interior design elements.

Their collaboration has yielded this "elegant synthesis of materials: delicate panes of Lalique crystal slot perfectly into brass plates manufactured by Meljac, which magnify the shimmering crystal reflections…. adding an exquisite fragment of discreet, authentic luxury to the wall."

I don't deny that these things are beautiful; but it's still shocking to me that we live in a world where people have that kind of money to throw around. If the freaking light switches cost a gee, how much is everything else in that house?

If you've ever flown out of an icy region, you've sat inside the plane while the ground crew sprays the exterior with that orange or green fluid. That de-icing solution removes ice and frost from the wings, allowing the plane to safely take off.

Image: Alex Pereslavtsev, GFDL 1.2

But what happens once the plane is in the air? The wings can continue to collect moisture, particularly as it flies through clouds in sub-freezing temperatures. As ice builds up on the wing, it disrupts the airflow over it, reducing lift and increasing drag. Obviously this is not good.

Thus airplane design teams have devised in-flight anti-icing measures. Just as your car uses the engine's heat to warm the cabin, airplanes use the high temperatures generated by the aircraft's engine to rout hot air across the leading edges of the wings.

Problem solved—as long as the airplane is powered by heat-generating turbine engines. But the future of flight is moving towards alternative propulsion systems, like electric, hybrid-electric and even hydrogen. These systems don't generate the amounts of heat required to de-ice a wing in flight.

Thus the Fraunhofer Institutes, a network of European research institutes, are working on a new method. The Fraunhofer Clean Aviation project sees airplane wings embedded with piezoelectric actuators. These actuators each turn a small amount of electricity into low-frequency vibrations. Sensors on the wing tell the actuators how much to vibrate, and then they shake the ice off, similar in concept to a dog ridding itself of water after a bath.

Notably, the actuators use far less electricity than would, say, heating elements embedded in the wing.

The researchers have proven this method in testing, though not yet in real-world conditions.

"Our experiments in the icing wind tunnel showed that electromechanical deicing works," says researcher Denis Becker. "As the next step, we will be conducting further tests in the wind tunnel to get the system ready for in-flight testing."