Aimo

This trip comes to its end! But even the day before leaving China, there is always time to work! So today, the whole team together, we went to the new new offices of Seeed Studio (you read right, there are 2 new, because in fact we have discovered another of Seeed’s new offices). This was the final sprint! We all have worked together in order to (try to) have something functioning by the end of the day!

I, personally, have been writing articles and helping around when I could. I also have had an interview with a journalist from CCTV, in which I talked about the CHIC experience from a business student perspective. Lara put our website online and has had an interview for the television! Alexis and JB filed and sanded our 3D prototype in order to be able to fit all the pieces together (we will need a few adjustments for the steel 3D printing). Sorina has been working on making the electronics parts work and Link on the software.

So basically today is assembling the prototype together, trying to fit all the components inside and making for the basic functions (and dealing with all the unexpected issues coming into the process!). For now, the LEDs are working, everything fits in, the pairing is working, the main software applications are working (the opening of the lock with the phone in your pocket, the sharing of the keys), we are still having some issues with the motor (but nothing that our engineers can’t fix!). And right now, Sorina and JB are soldering everything once and for all in the 3D printed plastic prototype! (Yay!)

I’ve been taking a lot of pictures today, here are some of them here:

This is the end of the trip, but of course not of the Aimo adventure! I’ll keep you informed of our advances and I’m sure we’ll have a completely functioning prototype to show you very soon!

Also, don’t forget to visit our Tumblr and our website for more pictures and information about Aimo!

Hello everyone! First of all, sorry for not posting in the last few days (I know you missed us), but we have been very busy!

So, since last Thursday what happened? On Friday it was supposed to be our last day to work on the prototype, but fortunately we have been able to work a little bit more on it!

Link, Lara, Sorina and myself (Sara) went to Seeed last Friday where we worked on several things. Lara worked mainly on the user interaction video (which is not finished yet, I’ll let you know as soon as it is!) and kept working on the LEDs for the prototype. Link and Sorina put the firmware inside the PCB (basically, for those like me who don’t understand much about engineer stuff, it is when we put the beautiful code that Link wrote inside the PCB and therefore Aimo, so that you can use your mobile app and interact with your Aimo. Does that make sense? I hope so). Link also kept on working on the app while Sorina managed to build 3 workable PCBs (YAY!). On my side, I was running around the whole day helping everyone.

Alexis and JB stayed at the hotel to work on the design of Aimo. JB also made some renders of deposit boxes in real life environments!

Then, I came back to the hotel, because we had an interesting appointment with Alexis and JB. Let me tell you more about that. So you remember the other night when we pitched in front of Chinese makers? Well, there was a girl in the audience that knew a guy, which wasn’t there. And it turns out that this guy, Carl, is a Canadian entrepreneur who has been living in China for a few years now and works in a maker space in the electronics market, the one we went to the other day. He heard about our product and wanted to talk to us about an eventual partnership because he is also working on a lock! His lock is for Chinese house doors but he thought about putting together, as another product, his lock with our electronics and software to make another lock! That was really interesting and we are keeping in touch with him to see what is going to happen! That’s the beauty of China, you never know who you’re going to meet and what new opportunities might come to you.

At the end of the day, we started the humanitarian hackathon as well! But before we were able to start, we had some adventures… We were supposed to meet everyone at 4:15 at a subway station, but with Alexis and JB we were late because of our meeting so we had to find the hackathon building by ourselves. Let me just tell you: that was not easy! It was supposed to take us 20 minutes and we ended up walking in the burning sun for 1 hour!!!!! But fortunately, we found it! If you want to know more about the humanitarian hackathon, which was proposed by the ICRC, I suggest you to read the post on the CHIC blog!

On Saturday, we spend the whole day at the hackathon and on Sunday, miracle, we had a day off!!!!! So most of us started by sleeping a little bit and then we did different activities such as visiting markets, visiting parks representing cities of the world, and just walking around! That was a good day!

And on Monday and Tuesday we had different visits (for which you can find the detail on the common blog as well).

Here are a few pictures of the activities from Saturday to yesterday:

I will update you soon on our last day of work on the prototype!

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.

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…)

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.

Alexis, 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!

Hello again ! Twice in one day, how lucky are you?

So today we also split up the team, in 2 groups. Sorina and Link went to Seeed Studio to work on the PCBs and the software, Alexis, JB and Lara stayed at the hotel to work and I went observing the Chinese environment this morning and came back at the hotel in the afternoon.

More specifically, Sorina worked on the PCBs and tested if all the components were working properly. She also tried to transfer a simple code into the PCB but unfortunately it failed. But that happens, right? And no worries, she’ll make it work for tomorrow, no worries! She still needs one component to completely finish the PCB but I forgot to tell you that Seeed Studio is moving its offices this week so we are working between both offices actually. About the components that I was telling you about, unfortunately since everything at Seeed was packed, we couldn’t access it.

Link continued working on the mobile app, especially on the feature that allows the users to share keys by email, which is almost fully operational now. Thumbs up! I told you before that the Internet connection was pretty bad there so it was difficult for Link to be as productive as he usually is in Switzerland, but you know, it’s part of the experience! And I have to say that thanks to him we have some pictures of what happened today at Seeds! So thanks!

They (Sorina and Link) also reported some interesting habits from Seeed Studio. For example, around noon all the lights are switched off and the employees start sleeping at their desks for about 30 minutes! (I always knew that a turbo nap was powerful, I practice them myself!). Also, later in the afternoon, some relaxing music is diffused through the whole office and the employees massage their own faces (apparently it helps for people who are working in front of a computer all day long, which I completely believe)!

At the hotel, Alexis finished the mechanical design for the first iteration of the functional mechanics, which is a great news! He also worked closely with JB, who finished the design for the public deposit boxes and worked with Alexis on the detail of the device. So they both worked to implement and improve the aesthetics of the design and packed everything so that we were able to send everything to the manufacturer! Alexis even started to work on the second iteration that should be possible to manufacture using common machine tools such as CNC or turret lathe, or using steel 3D printing!

Lara on her side worked on our website in order to make in shiny and beautiful! She also did some anticipated work for Sorina in templating the light interaction of Aimo, so basically it’s the information that is communicated through the LEDs. I have to admit that she took a little nap as well, but it was fully deserved after such hard work!

And finally, as you could read on the previous article, I went on a field operation this morning in order to observe the Chinese behavior related to our product. Then, I wrote the article and reviewed our slides for the pitch that we had tonight! Indeed, Link and I pitched in front of Chinese makers this evening, and it was a very interesting experience because not all of the audience was speaking English, so fortunately we have a Chinese student, Yumeng,  in our program that did an amazing job in translating all of our pitches to the audience! That was very impressive! We got some interesting questions, as the Chinese behaviors related to mailboxes are completely different from ours here!

So to sum up it was again a very interesting and busy day for us all in the Aimo team, and we are excited to see what comes next! Stay tuned!

I have been walking around Shenzhen (well mostly around the hotel) in order to observe the behavior of the Chinese people regarding mailboxes and other topics related to our project.

So the main things I’m looking for are: mailboxes, post offices, public deposit boxes in subway or train stations, as well as behaviors of people interacting with these objects.

In a shopping mall I saw some small free lockers, but useable only with a receipt of a shop within the center, using the code bar. But as you can see on the picture, the revenue stream here comes from the publicity.

I didn’t find any similar product to ours but obviously I haven’t looked everywhere so we can’t say that we’re completely safe. We also saw some other lockers in a 7eleven (the little shops in China) near a beach in Hong Kong. They didn’t work with a key but with a code and weren’t free this time. Other than that, we didn’t see any lockers in the subway or railway stations. We need to look farther in the subway stations but apparently in the railway stations you won’t find them. There are luggage rooms instead. But you have to remember that the railway stations in China are much bigger than in Switzerland, and you take the train only for long trips, you would compare the train stations of Switzerland more with subway stations in China.

Regarding how the mail system works in China, well first of all we have to split this in 2 categories: the parcels and the letters. For the parcels, Chinese people don’t use the Post but private delivery companies instead. In order to deliver the parcels, the delivery man will call the customer to agree on a delivery time so that they don’t miss each other. If they do miss each other anyway, the delivery guy takes the package back with him and the customer will have to pay extra fees to get his or her parcel. No Post involved here. Pretty inconvenient, right? Regarding the letters now, you need to know that you don’t get a mailbox by definition. If you want one, you have to rent one (and it’s not cheap!) in the building where you live, to the Post office or to the owner of the building. In this case, you will get your letters at home. If you don’t rent a personal mailbox, then you have the possibility to sign up at your local pPst office to rent a mailbox there or you can just get a phone call every time you receive a letter at the Post office so that you can go and get it. Pretty complicated as well, right?

You will often see in the streets random delivery guys or parcels lying around like this:

When I googled and went to see a Post office, it looked like that:

So just a few desks outside in the streets, some delivery guys driving a scooter with all the parcels on them (and they don’t wear a helmet, obviously) and the customers, well the people, coming by to get their mail. I was pretty surprise to see that in a city as modern as Shenzhen, the mail system seems so “old-fashioned” and not optimized.

I haven’t been able to see any mailboxes yet, as surprising as it sounds, because there are always guards at the entrances of the buildings along with big portals. But I’ve been told that I should try to go in anyway, so that’s what I’ll do tomorrow probably in order to be able to show you a few pictures!

In conclusion, we can say that China (well at least Shenzhen since it’s what I’ve been observing) would be a great market for us, we could really bring some improvements here. Imagine if we just put some Aimo deposit boxes in different neighborhoods, then the customers wouldn’t have to arrange an appointment with the delivery man to agree on a specific time and wouldn’t have to pay extra fees in case they miss the delivery. On the other side, the delivery guys wouldn’t have to be slowed by specific timings, they could just drop the parcels in the deposit boxes whenever and so be able to be more efficient during the day. We need to check the regulations regarding the personal mailboxes as well and the deposit boxes in common spaces, but I’m confident that China should be Aimo’s next destination!

First of all, today was Lara’s birthday so it was gonna be a good day anyway!!!

What a busy day! The team actually split up to do some different things in order to be more efficient.

Since we checked the components required for the PCBs last night and noticed that we were missing some of them, Sorina and JB went to the electronics market in Huaqiangbei this morning to bargain to get the missing components. I heard that they were pretty successful so that’s a good thing! Lara, Link and Alexis stayed at the hotel to worked this morning and I went with the other HEC students to a “field trip” in order to observe the Chinese market for our respective projects. So we went to a mall and we walked around in order to try to find similar objects to ours. We also tried to talk to some people but unfortunately most of the people there don’t speak English so you can imagine the difficulty to communicate. I was impressed to learn that most of the people in Shenzhen (I don’t know hoe it works in the rest of China) don’t have a mailbox. If they want one, they need to rent it or if they don’t want this option, they get a call from the post office when they get a letter and they need to go there to pick it up. Pretty complicated right! So I think that once we’re well established in Europe, China is definitely going to be our target market!

Let me just show you a picture of the menu of the restaurant where we ate today. As you can imagine, we didn’t understand anything, so we picked something random and luckily most of the dishes were quite good (although I couldn’t recognize what meat I ate…)!

In the afternoon we, the whole team, met a Seeed Studio to keep on working. JB worked the whole afternoon on the design of our future deposit boxes (they are really starting to look good!). Alexis worked and finished the mechanical design so we’re going to be able to send the files to the 3D printer!!! (although our first trials or printings were a real disaster I must say, let’s hope that we’ll have more luck in the future!). Lara almost finished our website and Link and I helped Sorina making the PCBs. I learned so many things today! I became the master of the PCBs and actually am pretty proud to say that we even helped all (almost) of the other teams in the making process of the PCBs. So first of all we put the solder paste on our “frame” in order to fix the components on the PCB (that takes way more time that it sounds) and then, we cooked them by putting them in a very big and long oven and then tadaaaaaaa our beautiful PCBs came out with all the components fixed on them! That was actually a great satisfaction (it took all afternoon to get there)!

And in the evening, after a kinda failed Uber trip back to our neighborhood we went to the restaurant to celebrate Lara’s birthday and finally got back to the hotel!

I’m excited to see what we’re going to achieve tomorrow as well! Stay tuned!

And here you can look at a few pictures of today’s work:

IMG_4239

Hello everyone!

We have arrived almost one week ago in China, already! We landed in Hong Kong last Tuesday night and have already done so much! It’s time for you to know what the Aimo team has been up to…

Let’s start with Hong-Kong. We were at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and you can see on the picture the view that we had from the main building! Pretty nice!

I’ll have to take some shortcuts here to explain you what we’ve been doing because otherwise you will never finish to read this article!

So the main thing that we did in HK was to PITCH, again and again! We have all been able to practice our pitching skills in front of different audiences: we met some young and dynamic start-up incubators at Brinc.io, some students at the university, some experimented investors at the Hong Kong Science and Technology Park, some accelerators at Makerhive, etc. So we got some really interesting feedbacks that helped us improve every time! So very challenging but very demanding as well (we went to bed at 4am on Thursday night to get ready for the pitch that we had on Friday morning)!

On the picture, you can see how full of energy we were for the first pitch! I’m not going to post one showing our faces when we left HK on Sunday…!

We also visited some companies such as Modern Terminals, Panalpina and HKSTP and of course we went to the Victoria Park to admire the view from the top, look at that! We walked back to the city center afterwards, I let you imagine the slope of the walk down (at least we did some work out!)

We did other thing as well in HK but I’ll let you go and check the main page of CHIC on which there are detailed articles about every day that we spend in HK!

So we arrived in Shenzhen yesterday afternoon. We are in a very nice hotel, which is kind of different from the university dorms that we had in HK. So we are all very happy!

And today, Monday, after a perfect breakfast at the hotel, we started to work on our devices at Seeed Studio. They are welcoming us in their offices so that we can try to build our functional prototype by the end of the week! So it is going to be a very busy week for us.

Today we mainly did a list of all the things that each of us need to do in order to have something by the end of the week!

Lara worked on the design of the website aimo.io today and coordinated everyone. She helped Sorina to get here because she was still in HK! Link started by cleaning up the code in order for it to be perfect for the following, he defined his firmware and software objectives and he worked on the external memory of Aimo’s PCB. Alexis worked on the mechanical design so that we were able to send the inner mailbox part of Aimo to the 3D printer at the end of the day! We are excited to see tomorrow hoe the printing has been going! Sorina travelled here from HK where she’s working in a start-up in parallel. She brought us the missing components and the PCBs! You can look at the picture to see how beautiful they are:

JB worked on the design of our potential future deposit box and I worked on the article mainly today, kept my log book up to date so that I don’t forget to share any important information with you and I prepared my program for the week as well.

That us working (even if we had some issues with the Internet connexion!!!):

And that’s us… well… visiting the labs with class!

During this sprint I implemented the design made by Lara Defayes, the media and interaction designer of the team. As you can see the UI design has rather well evolved.

Before and after the UI/UX sprint

Animations

 

I added some animations to render the interface more friendly and fun at the image of Aimo. The buttons and some informations of the main menu appear in an animated way once the view is loaded.
When the app is waiting for the user to do an action related to Aimo device, the text giving the instructions is pulsing until the action is performed.

Main menu

The app is waiting for the user to push Aimo’s button

The text fields were redefined for a better integration with the look and feel of the app

Range slider

A large piece of the implementation of the UI was devoted to the making of a range slider. A range slider is a slider with two markers in order to set an interval between two values. This UI component is not part of the items offered by Apple with the development tools. Some external libraries exist but their solutions aren’t enough flexible in term of visual customisation. This is the reason why I chose to create one from scratch to better match to our visual identity.

A range slider has been created from scratch

 

When the marker has no more space to move on one side, only the cursor shaped as a little triangle moves along it

The markers cannot overlap

One of the markers can be disabled

A special care has been taken in order to keep visible the value of the marker even when the user’s finger is on it. To avoid the finger obstruction the marker is automatically shifted up in order to avoid being hidden. Because of the finger obstruction some user tends to move their finger down after having tapped an item to better see and control what is happening. If that happen, the marker drops down to its initial position on the bar.

For comparaison some range sliders from some external libraries available on github

Drumroll…. Our Aimo connected device starts to take shape in terms of electronics as well. We designed the first testing board using Altium Designer and we sent it to fabrication at Seeedstudio in China.
We received it last week and we got very excited about the quality. Next week, we plan to solder all the components on it and test our firmware that was written for the prototype version.

Some features that our PCB contains:

• a powerful, but low power Atmega microcontroller
• buck-boost converters for powering the MCU and the rest of the components
• bluetooth
• LEDs for User Interface
• headers for connecting either a servo or a stepper motor
• AVR-ICSP for programming using arduino language
• push button and piezo sensors for waking up AIMO and verifying that the latch of the motor is fully opened

During the interviews performed by Sara, we received many requests to track the letters inside the mailbox and annouce them if there is mail inside. However, we already anticipated this requirement, such as our PCB contains a phototransistor-LED system  that has double role: check if the door is closed and count the number of letters.

Last but not least, we did some more detailed calculations on our power budget, and guess what? With the feature to keep the MCU in power down mode (consuming about 500 nA), we are able to power Aimo using a LiPo (7.2Wh) for 1 and a half year!! This is really amazing, because our users shall not stress about charging Aimo anymore.

We will keep you posted as soon as we solder and test our PCB!!!

Article by Sorina

Time is passing by so fast! Only one milestone left before we go to China! Let’s look at what has been done on the business side during the last month.

I focused on the competitor analysis and therefore the positioning of Aimo on the market and have also run the second round of face-to-face interviews with potential customers.

On the competitors’ side, we need to consider several categories of products.
First of all, we have the smart locks, that are destined for apartments or house doors. In this category, we find several competitors.
Then, we have the complete connected mailbox. There are less competitors in this category. These are either oriented towards the tracking of the mail or common/public mailboxes.
We also have the mailboxes’ smart accessories that aim mainly to monitor your mail. So it is more about knowing when you got mail or when someone opens your mailbox.
And finally, we have connected padlocks, that are used as traditional padlocks but with remote control through the smartphone.

With Aimo, we aim to differentiate ourselves by first of all lowering our costs and therefore our price considerably in comparison to the existing smart locks on the market. We also will differentiate ourselves on the brand image side. The house door locks need to have a serious look since they need to inspire strict confidence, but with our connected lock being implemented on mailboxes, we can add a friendly/fun side, and still be trustworthy and serious.

You can have a look of the schema below representing our competition landscape.

Regarding the interviews, as you can see on the picture above, I am always upgrading my value proposition canvas. Anyway, we found out that most people want to buy Aimo because of the key sharing feature and therefore the ability to use the mailbox as a locker. They like the fact that they can share goods without constraints, in a controlled manner and also with safety. They like that the mailbox is still their own, so it doesn’t become a common box or public good but they can share when they want and to who they want.

This awesome adventure is the opportunity for me to update my mobile app skills. A lot of new things have appeared and among them: Swift. The brand new language from Apple especially designed in the aim of replacing Objective-C. Swift brings a cleaner syntax but above all a functional paradigm. It took me some times to adopt it but now I feel more and more at ease with it.

Before coding anything, I wrote a specification document describing each views and features of the app. That helped me to split the application into several smaller parts. Each of them has been or will be coded in a sprint. Also, I defined what kinds of messages will be exchanged between the mobile app and Aimo. The protocol I chose for communication is Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). We didn’t really have the choice but anyway this is the best one. The wifi would have quickly drained the battery of the smartphone as well as Aimo’s one. On the other hand, the NFC could have been an interesting option but is not opened to developer on iOS and its range of a few centimeters only wasn’t enough for our needs.

I am also writing some pieces of the firmware of Aimo. Especially the communication part and its internal database. This side of the project is also very interesting for me. This is an excellent way to dust off my knowledge in C language and it is still challenging to write code for devices with memory constraints.

Source files of the iOS app and the firmware are versioned using git.

Here comes the time to design the communication around Aimo. But before we begin, why Aimo? What does this name even mean? Our name comes from a french saint called Aimo of Satigny who was known for his charitable kindness. As our mailbox offers a new way to share your goods with the people you love or the people around you, we found this was a sweet wink additionally to the nice and fleek way the word visually looks and phonetically sounds.

The first step for me was to find a Typeface that would fit our needs and vision. Aimo is an connected object that needs to be seen without taking too much attention. That’s how I pictured the font, discrete with a twist.

The typeface I chose is the Scandia Font by the Process Typefoundry. This is a geometric sans serif font with some lush curves at the angles. Elaborate but sober as Aimo will be!

The Aimo logo follows the same reflexion. With the I tilted to the A, it gives the twist I was talking about without being too much or too tinsel.

The next step was the UX Design, if you want to have a look at our design inspirations you can follow this link.
Until now I was designing apps and websites on Photoshop or Sketch and using Marvel to make interactive prototype. For the first time I am using the new app of the Adobe Creative Suite called User Experience. This software at last merges the two main aspects missing in other apps: being able to design and link directely inside the app the different templates to make a working and interactive prototype! For now I am very pleased with this new tool and I look forward to seeing how we the ux / web design world will evolve with this kind of software!

After this long period of silence, I’m glad to announce you that the new version of Aimo is ready and the 3D printing is on-going ! The previous one helped us a lot to realize our mistakes and then improve our design. On the agenda, nothing less than the reduction of the size of Aimo, a new knob along with a more stylish design, and a working mechanism. Of course, this is not the final design. Make something good is a long path, and you can reach this goal only by successive improvements.

For the material, we are thinking about steel (manufactured by Metal Injection Molding), so that we can make a really robust and handsome device. Perhaps we’ll add some hidden parts in ABS in order to lower the cost, reduce the weight and increase the scope of the shapes.

In addition to that, we started to work on the design of the hardware and we will soon show you some demonstrations of how well it’s working. Just a glance 😉

And please, if you like us or our project, subscribe to our newsletter!

See you next week !

We hope everyone had a great Easter!

We are happy to have survived the first milestone! For this step, which took place last Friday, we basically needed to present in front of the “jury” (the professors from the different universities) all the progresses that we’ve made during the last month. We were proud to show our hard work!

On the business side, we’ve decided for now to focus on the inhabitants of all kind as customers as they are the on with who we tested our hypotheses and we got a positive feedback. For the future, we are thinking about testing potential partnerships with universities and post officies to see if they would be interested in Aimo.

As you read last week, our industrial designer is progressing really well on the design of Aimo but of course there are questions remaining about the materials and the shape of the final objetct!

On the engineering side, I’m not a professional so I wouldn’t want to risk saying some mistakes but I think that I’m pretty safe saying that everyone and everthing is progressing really well. Regarding the mecanics, Alexis has worked a lot and we have 3D printed our components and it’s pretty promising! Regarding the software, Link is coding the app and with Sorina who worked on the electronics, they have been able to show us some working interactions. Getting closer to a prototype, yay!

Look at some pictures of our progresses towards a prototype:

To sum up, we are happy with our progresses and results even if, obviously, we still have a lot of work so stay tuned!

If you are interested in subscribing to our newsletter to get more news, click on this link!

How do I design a connected mailbox locker?

First of all, I need to understand perfectly the aim of the object that I want to design. This is really important!

In a second time, I collect different images that can inspire me, I observe the existing lockers to understand how they work.

Once that preliminary research is done, I try to see outside the box and look for inspiration that can come from a total other field. At that point I need to test different ways for opening a mailbox (is it something that I turn? That I push? Is it more like a normal handle door? …).

I can now make a decision and choose the best way that will perfectly fit for the required function. Now I can choose the best materials and shapes that follow this function. The materials and the shapes need to correspond perfectly to the situation (will the object be outdoor or indoor? Is it an object that will be used often?).

Also, I need to integrate the technical issues in my process and try to design an object that will be easy to produce and manufacture. Now I can make the right proportions and put the right curves and the right fillets in order to create a beautiful object in the context of use. I choose a nice finish and a nice coulour in the end.

Now you know more about the design process! Not that straight-forward, right?

Here are some images of my progresses!

Article by JB.

In parallel with mechanics, our engineering team is also working on the development of the firmware and electronics, as we want to have a working prototype by the end of March.

For prototyping, we used an Arduino development board. At the moment, we interfaced a Bluetooth module with the microcontroller using several example codes. Our software guy, Jonathan (but we call him Link inside the team, just so you know) started writing the iOS application for our product.

We wanted to order the Bluetooth module that is provided by Adafruit, but unfortunately the shipping would have cost 6 times the amount of the module. Therefore, we decided to buy it from Romania and bring it here in Lausanne by a bus carrying people between Geneva and Bucharest. The same way, we ordered a mailbox (which cost only 5 CHF) because we thought it would be nice to disassembly it and get an idea of the dimensions/space for our product.

As you can see, we are a very inventive team and we find quick solutions to solve our needs. This weekend, we plan to finish the prototyping with the rest of the components we ordered, this time from China (the stepper motor, the sensors for detecting if the door is closed or not and the force sensor for detecting if the button was pushed or not).

The next steps would be to start doing the PCB board that will be incorporated with the mechanics. In this direction, we will use Altium Designer, as both Sorina and Alexis are proficient with it. We can’t wait to see AIMO working!

Yes, that’s right, our first prototype is almost ready to be 3D printed ! Our (mechanical) engineers worked very hard to make the magic happen :

For now, this is just the prototype of the mechanics without the hardware, but we are eager to check if everything works fine because as you can see, this is not so obvious at first glance …

But now, it’s time to explain how this strange thing works!
Ultimately it is quite simple. There are two parts: one that will be inside the mailbox, and the other one outside the mailbox (yes I know, that’s already complicated, but try to stay focused…!).

Inside, you have the battery, which is easily removable, along with some electronics, which allow to identify you (and steal much information about your private life at the same time).

Outside, strictly speaking you have the lock. Basically, it is a rotary knob. You just have to press on it to wake up the device, and then rotate it to open the mailbox (obviously if you have been successfully identified…). In addition, there is also a mechanical lock to unlock the mailbox in case you run out of battery on your smartphone or if your perfectly working hardware breaks down.

That’s all from the mechanical point of view  !

The hardware will soon follow, don’t worry about it and stay tuned!

We are really progressing with our device Aimo and this is partly due to our (outstanding) organization, as you were able to see it in the last post. In addition to using several different applications, we also are clear on each member’s responsibilities and roles, which is very important. But the good thing in our team is that even though we have well-defined tasks, we are always available and ready to help each other in any activity.

In this post, I’m going to talk about my specific tasks and role in this project. So I’m the business person in our team, that means that my tasks are mainly related to business models and value propositions, as well as the relationship with the customers and the market. So when the engineers or designers have a crazy (but good, obviously) idea that in the end will not be viable, it is my job to bring them back to the ruthless truth of our world of consumption.

The nice thing about a new project is that you can still make all sorts of ridiculous assumptions before you realize that those will not happen. But it is good and necessary to broaden your mind at the beginning because sometimes some of the ridiculous ideas aren’t actually so bad. You need to think about who your customers are going to be. Are there different segments? And inside of each segment, can you observe other divisions? Once you’ve figured that out you need to ask yourself: so what will I bring to those customers? What kind of problem will I solve for them with my product? How can I make it to be actually useful to the customer? So that’s what I’ve been doing lately.

And to answer those kind of questions, what’s better than actually going outside and talk to the potential customers to verify all the hypotheses that you’ve previously made? Nothing. So that’s what I’m doing too right now. Try to interview as many customers as possible in order to make the best product and also being able to sell it afterwards (obviously). I’ve been able to observe a few trends already and I’ll keep you post-it for the final results!

In the meantime, here is the link to our survey: https://aimo.typeform.com/to/R9Vuq3
We would be grateful for your help!

The spirit of CHIC is not only about designing an innovative connected device, but also rushing to be able to do it right in a very short period of 6 weeks. We are very excited by the challenge and we have set up an efficient organization to match our demanding mission : Bring Aimo to life ! And as you will see, that’s a lot of different tools !

The backbone is Slack. This tool allows us to discuss, exchange ideas, share documents, plan our meetings (at the bar), or even conspiring against its partners ! Hence, we can stay focused, motivated, and consolidate a friendship. As you can see we are very talkative, with approximately 1500 messages a week !

But that’s not all, we also use Trello and Asana to keep track of our time schedule, recall us the deadlines and allocate the workload. Delays are now our worst nightmare :

Now, Dropbox, Google Drive, and Paper come in to complete the whole picture. They help use manage our resources, collaborate, and share our progress with our mentors.

And last but not least, to be connected with the real world, we have our own blog, have a look !

http://aimo-chic.tumblr.com/

Soon, an update on the progress of the project !

We have been selected to go to China and we are extra motivated! We had to change our connected object Aimo a little bit because our mentors helped us realize that we had some issues with our initial project. But it’s a good thing that we found that out at the beginning and not later, indeed as the architect Frank Gehry says: « don’t fall in love with your first idea », because it will be harder to change it afterwards. Our focus was on improving communication between neighbors and the life in neighborhoods.

We brainstormed together to broaden our set of ideas. And at the kick-off weekend (February 20th), we finally found one idea to focus on: A connected mailbox locker that allows people to open their mailbox door with their smartphone. The locker will be coupled with a screen that displays the name of the mailbox’s owner or any other notification. The smartphone will replace the mailbox key. Also, they will be able to share their virtual key with other people in case of need, there will be obviously an expiration time in this case for safety purposes. In this manner, people will be able to use their mailbox as a deposit box where neighbors can share good with them. In this way, we keep our main idea of sharing things with your neighbors and friends and at the same time we create something useful for the users of Aimo.

We are going to weekly post on this page our progresses and we can’t wait to get started with the real deal now! We believe in our project and you can see at the bottom of the page that we have the right team to successfully carry out this project.