A day full of activities

By Sara Baracchini July 21, 2016 Discover Aimo project

Good afternoon people!

What have we been up to today? Well, a bunch of things actually! Lara and I started the day in a pretty stressful way since we had some trouble waking up this morning (I have to admit that we were 5 minutes late to the morning meeting), but fortunately everyone waited for us!

So we started the day by going to HAX, which is an accelerator for start-ups. They offer a 6 months program, in Shenzhen, to innovative groups of people coming with great ideas. It was very interesting and our host, Benjamin, welcomed us very warmly. He started by presenting us the company and by presenting us a few projects that they have been supporting lately, and there were some pretty amazing things! After the introduction speech, we had a very interesting interactive session of Q&As where Benjamin gave us some insights about the start-ups world.

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Then, all the teams pitched and got a very relevant feedback from Benjamin and an expert designer. It is always so interesting to pitch in front of experienced people who don’t know your project, because every audience always brings up ideas or comments that make us move forward!

So that was about it for the morning. In the afternoon we moved to the electronics market in Huaqiangbei, where Sorina and JB went already the other day, to get some missing components. We also went there because, thanks to the Hibachi team, we discovered that there is a stand there that does 3D printing, in good quality. So we know that in case of any trouble or emergency we always have a backup plan! I went with JB and Lara to look for some LEDs that are going to be between the button and the base of Aimo while Alexis and Link looked for a motor on their side. This market is so big you can find anything! And the prices are just not comparable to what we could imagine in Switzerland! While we were at the market, Sorina went back to Seeed in order to keep the work on our beautiful PCBs.

There are here some pictures of the electronics market, pretty fin right? (As you can see, Lara had some fun on a “scooter luggage”, and, fun fact, she apparently have one of those in Switzerland already! Im not so sure it’s really convenient though…)

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Later, Lara and JB joined Sorina at Seeed where Lara worked very hard not to burn our PCBs and she managed to make the LEDs that we bought earlier at the market work! Yay! JB fought with the Internet connexion in order to finish and post his article for the CHIC blog and kept reviewing the design as well.

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IMG_2016-07-21 20:21:43Alexis, Link and I went back to the hotel to work. The guys actually didn’t find the motor they were looking for at the market to they bought instead a DVD player that they disassembled in order to get the motor that was inside (this is the kind that we need!). Always good to be handy! Link then kept working on the app while listening to a old but gold playlist while Alexis was most of the day with Link, and later he reviewed the mechanical design in order ti make it printable in steel! Exciting news, right! On my side, well I wrote this post and worked on the business model for deposit boxes in neighborhoods and Aimo lockers in public places such as train stations, airports or universities for example.

Tomorrow is going to be our last day at Seeed so we’ll need to be suuuuuuper efficient so that, I hope, we’ll be able to show you the results of our hard work! Stay tuned!