Lumen One: a laptop dock built to last ten years

The dock in your drawer is not broken

Ask around your office and someone will produce a dead docking station from a drawer. Take it apart — if you can, because most are glued — and you will usually find one failed USB-C connector on a board where everything else is fine. A twenty-pence part killed a two-hundred-pound device, and nobody could replace it because the connector was surface-mounted under a shield and the manufacturer publishes nothing.

We have been designing computing accessories for eleven years and this pattern is not an accident. Ports are the part that wears; they are also the part that is hardest to replace. Design the product the other way round and the whole calculation changes.

How Lumen One is put together

Lumen One splits into a main board and four port cards. Each card carries a single connector on a mezzanine header, held down by one captive Torx screw. If the USB-C port on the left dies in year six, you order a card for £14, undo one screw and carry on. The case is aluminium and opens with the same driver. There are eleven screws in the entire product and no glue anywhere.

• Four hot-swappable port cards: USB-C 100W, dual USB-A, HDMI 2.1 and 2.5 Gb Ethernet.
• Full schematics, board files and a printed service manual ship in the box, not on request.
• Firmware is signed but user-replaceable — you can build and flash your own.
• Ten years of spare-part availability, held in escrow so it survives us going out of business.

Where the money goes

This is a manufacturing campaign, so the numbers are mostly tooling and parts. We have already spent about £70,000 of our own money getting to a working DVT unit.

• £74,000 — First production run of 1,200 units Components, PCB assembly and test at a contract manufacturer in Wales. This is the largest single line and the one with the least flexibility.
• £38,000 — Aluminium tooling and extrusion dies Two dies, one for the body and one for the end caps, plus first-article inspection.
• £26,500 — Certification CE, UKCA, FCC and USB-IF compliance. Testing houses charge per configuration and we have four port cards to certify.
• £21,000 — Spare-part inventory Two thousand port cards held from day one, because a ten-year promise means nothing without stock behind it.
• £15,400 — Packaging, manuals and shipping Including the printed service manual and a tool in every box.
• £11,500 — Contingency and platform fees Roughly six per cent held back for the surprises that always arrive.

We are not asking you to believe a dock will last ten years. We are asking you to look at how many screws it has, and then decide.

Who is behind this

Lumen Robotics is nine people in a converted dairy outside Cambridge. We have shipped two products before — a rugged field tablet used by three water utilities, and a serial interface box that is still in production after seven years and still has spares available, which is the only sales pitch we care about. Ivan Petrov leads hardware; our production engineer spent a decade at a contract manufacturer and knows exactly how a design gets quietly value-engineered into fragility.

Risks and challenges

Hardware crowdfunding has an ugly reputation and it is mostly earned by teams shipping their first product. We are not in that position, but the risks are still real. Certification is the biggest schedule risk: if the HDMI card fails EMC on the first pass we lose four to six weeks and about £4,000 in retest fees. Aluminium extrusion lead times have been volatile and a die correction adds three weeks. Component pricing on the USB-C PD controller has moved twice this year and we have quoted at the higher figure to protect the budget. If the campaign funds, the honest delivery window is nine to twelve months, and we will publish a monthly production log whether the news is good or not.