Dear CHIC Community, 
Since setting the team name as Chircle at the end of ideation week-end, we have been searching for a more suitable name for the team and our product. We wanted the name to better represent our vision for the project and unify around a brand identity. Apart from Chircle we tried using the names “Inoff, Timeo, Focus Booster” throughout our CHIC journey. Eventually, we converged onto the one that we presented on MS5 last thursday: Flowlin! It represents the state of flow which refers to a mental state of focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of an activity. In addition to the new name and branding evolving around the same ideas as our name, we presented the logo of our product.
The pricing strategy was one of the things we shared during the milestone. The current cost of the prototype taking all the materials, manufacturing and 3D printing into account was also shown. Even more importantly, the perceived value survey conducted by Sandra led to our current target price for Flowlin: 50 CHF! Moreover, Amandine presented her latest design for our object. It tackles the problem of fixation and portability in a very gentle way. A magnet which is integrated inside the casing is clipped to the top surface of the object and that enables the object stick to the computer or to any other surface. Also the object can stay on the desk and create light thanks to its round flat bottom surface.
On the software side we are working on connecting different pieces of the puzzle that we have built over the last year. There is the bluetooth communication that has to work both on the microcontroller and the computer side, the chrome extension that has to function on other browsers, and a main application in development that is going to connect everything. It is nice to see that all of the efforts that we made until now can build up to something!
It was very exciting to share the current state of the firmware development through two demos. One of the demos was capacitive touch sensor implementation on small PCBs and what we can control with touching. While the other one was demonstrating the way to toggle the car mode on the iPhone to turn off notifications! We presented in MS5 the new version of the PCB design, which is currently being manufactured in SeeedStudio. Some components from the first version are removed to reduce complexity while keeping functionality of this first version. Yet, some are added to increase value and functionality to the PCB. We are looking forward to receive it soon to assemble the components and to test if the PCB works as intended!
Good luck to all CHIC participants for final touches to their projects before China!!
Stay tuned!
Team Flowlin
P.S. Please don’t forget to have a look at our landing page: https://chi.camp/projects/chircle/
