Curie
Portfolio · Daniel Kitchen
Curie diffuser on a living room table, amber bottles loaded, LED indicator lit, a person seated in the background.

Curie.

A three-bottle piezoelectric essential oil diffuser. From 3D-printed concept to twenty-three paying customers.

Curie is a consumer essential oil diffuser I took from rough 3D-printed concept to shipped product. Industrial design, custom PCB, Arduino firmware, native iOS app, retail packaging. The mechanical design was mine — self-taught in Shapr3D, no formal background. Hardware and firmware specs were mine too, executed by two contract engineers I managed directly without a PM layer. Twenty-three units shipped to paying customers.

Three generations of Curie side by side: a rough white PLA print on the left, a refined white print in the middle, and the final matte-black production unit with visible mist on the right.
01Iteration

Three generations.

The first print, on the left, was a rough PLA shell with a piezoelectric transducer bolted in — just enough to prove the mist concept worked in the form factor I wanted. The second iteration refined the geometry, the airflow path, and the internal layout for serviceability.

The third, in matte black, is the production unit. SLA-printed housing, amber glass quick-connect bottles, custom PCB. The plume above it is the device running.

Hands working on Curie components — a partially assembled unit on the right, a round PCB with 'Curie' silkscreened on it in the center, essential oil bottles and 3D-printed housing pieces arrayed on a desk.
02Stack

Hardware, firmware, app.

The PCB was laid out in Eagle by a contracted electrical engineer, against requirements I specified — rotary encoder input, four-LED status feedback, piezoelectric driver circuit, WiFi for app control. The silkscreen on that round board reads "Curie."

Firmware was written in Arduino by a contracted programmer, against a pin-map and behavior specification I drafted: timer-driven piezo pulses at four intensity levels, click-based UI, status feedback. The mechanical design — the housing, the bottle retention, the mist path, the base — was entirely mine in Shapr3D.

Hand holding an iPhone running the Curie iOS app, showing three essential oil slots — Lavender Bulgarian, Peppermint Eucalyptus, Cinnamon — each with its own strength slider and auto-timer schedule.
03Control

Three oils, independently scheduled.

The iOS app presents each bottle slot with its own strength slider and auto-timer schedule. Multiple oils can run simultaneously at independent intensities. Hardware, firmware, and app were built in parallel and integrated iteratively — a change to the firmware behavior spec usually meant a matching change in the app the same week.

Curie retail packaging: a matte-black box with the Curie wordmark in white, resting on a wooden bench. Curie diffuser sitting next to an Amazon Echo speaker on a dark table, the diffuser's blue LED visible, both devices roughly the same height.
04Shipped

Twenty-three units to paying customers.

Curie went out in retail-grade packaging to twenty-three paying customers. It lived on the same shelves as their existing smart-home gear — shown here next to an Echo for scale. I handled manufacturing coordination, assembly, packaging, and fulfillment.

The project wasn't scaled past that initial run. But it crossed the gap that mattered: from an idea in a notebook to a product people paid for, built, shipped, and used.