About Hone

Engineers who ship what they design

Hone started in 2016 to put laboratory-grade measurement in the hands of people making decisions in the field. That work produced the Lab Red, the Lab Black and the cloud platform beneath them. It also produced a team that has taken hardware from a first sketch to a production line, and now does the same for other companies.

We are based in Broadmeadow, Newcastle. Optics, electronics, firmware, industrial design and machine learning sit in one building, which is why an instrument here can be changed to suit a job instead of the job being changed to suit the instrument.

Hone Lab Red, dual Gold winner at the 2021 Australian Good Design Awards.

A Hone engineer assembling an instrument in the Newcastle workshop

What we do

Three things, and they depend on each other.

We build our own instruments

The Lab Red for grain, the Lab Black for liquids, and a soil carbon service around them. Designed and calibrated in Newcastle, built by manufacturing partners against packages we produce, supported for the long run.

The instruments →

We engineer other people’s products

Mechanical, electronics, firmware, industrial design, machine learning and spectroscopy, from an idea or a prototype through to a pilot run and into production. The same team, the same process, on your product.

Engineering services →

We run the cloud platform under both

Hone Foundation carries sign-in, users, data and fleet management for our instruments, and can do the same for a connected product of yours. Hone Create is where the measurement models are built.

The platform →

Better management through improved measurement.

A measurement is only worth making if someone changes a decision because of it. That test decides what we take on, for our own instruments and for client work.