An unexpected journey

By Luca Reut July 20, 2017 Discover Todoo project

Time to make some updates about our last two days in Shenzhen. On Tuesday, we started to visit the major electronic marketplaces of Shenzhen – Huaqiangbei. Imagine buildings all around you with minimum of five floors of dozens of stands for each of them. From 2 To usb keys to every component you need to create your own hardware, you will find everything (electronic) you want and there you can negotiate almost everything. Definitely, you should go there, even if you aren’t working on a device right now. It may be an inspirational place to find ideas about a future project.

During this 3 hours of visit, we split our team in two groups. Hélène, Lucie, Khalil & Anthony had the objective to find a new FPC connectors for the LCD screen (the one on our PCB was in the wrong way). Manon & Luca tried to find some watch bracelets with different textures. We got lucky because we found it quickly. We followed a guy to the 22th floor to his warehouse and he gave us 3 connectors, yeah! The bracelet team didn’t have as much chance: it took more time. After 2 hours going different directions suggested by sellers, we finally found a place with thousands of bracelets. The difficulty was finding out one that did not look like an apple watch design. And we did it! Actually, we found two different textures: Woven and silicone.

After this findings, we went to the HAX accelerator offices in the same district.  Anthony & Lucie did a great pitch (each member tried to do it). We got really interesting feedbacks from three HAX members. What we noticed is our ability to better justify the choices made for our watch. They understood why our watch is not an apple watch (more robust and cheaper) or the need to keep together the app and the watch (remember: complexity and organisation part on the app side and simplicity on the watch side).

To finish the day, we returned to x.factory to attend a presentation on “how we make a prototype” from Makerpapa design studio.

Wednesday was a free day to progress on our project. Hélène & Khalil worked together to develop further the mobile app. Hélène was working on the design while Khalil coded it.

The others were at Seeedstudio. Lucie & Anthony tried all day to initialize the screen with determination, they will succeed, we are sure. Manon worked on our functional prototype and the 3D design of it, to be printed the following day. Finally, Luca tried to contact an autism association. Thanks to Elle from SeeedStudio, we got an appointment the next day at 10:30 am with Shenzhen Autism Society. Everything go really fast here in Shenzhen! After that, he adapted the questionary and the testing script to eventually used them during the next day meeting.

At the end of day, we had a new pitch at SimplyWork, a coworking space in Nanshan district. 50-60 people were attending so we were excited to look how people will react to our device. After a little moment of stress, we got on stage and did our pitch. We think that they appreciated it, as several people came to us after the presentation to congratulate us about it.

Moreover, we didn’t have questions about the functionality of our watch. It means that our pitch becomes more and more clear. That’s why it is crucial to practice!