Hibachi

Yesterday, our industrial designer and our electronics engineers moved to Seeedstudio for working on the Hibachi instead of visiting BGI – Beijing Genomics Institute. The goal was to adjust the 3d printing in order to fit perfectly with the PCB. Indeed, we came across practical issues that cannot be seen on ours screens such as the height of little soldering below the PCB that elevates it.

Today is our last day in Shenzhen as well as the last day in China with the CHIC project :(((
The goal of this last day was to have everything ready when we will be back in Switzerland for assembling our Hibachi. Our dream would be to get our functional prototype, but we encountered two main critical issues. First, we cannot find a suitable supplier and an optimal process for getting our aluminium plate. Second, we had to resolve some problems with the PCB and its bootloading. Nevertheless, it is a question of time. We are pretty serene to finish it!

To achieve our last day goal, our team moved quickly to Seeedstudio for resolving engineer problems with the PCB. Problems concerned the height of the PCB as well as the boot loading. After hours of hard works, our engineer found how to fix it.

The boot loading concerned the PCB assembly process. We had to assembly first the XXX , then upload the programs inside and finally assembly the rest of components. During the time that our engineers worked on the PCB with a Seeedstudio engineer, our electronic engineer worked on the firmware with a breadboard. She did some checks with our software engineer.

Our industrial designer build additional buttons with the local 3d printer and finalized the 3d printing to get ready with the PCB.

Last but not least, we had been interviewed by CCTV. Their purposes were to get the aim of CHIC as well as the student learning on it. They also interviewed CHIC staff and students to get their personal feelings.

At the end of the day, all CHIC teams moved to a restaurant to celebrate the end of the China trip. Some of us are naturally quite frustrating not to have finished our functional prototype. We encountered serial obstacles with the Chinese environment as well as with the Hibachi prototype.

Shenzhen is definitely the place to be for prototyping an hardware concept. It is a way cheaper and faster than in Switzerland. Despite the local people are working hard and fast, the organization is flexible and as to be taking into account.

Back in Switzerland, we have to do additional work for finishing our functional prototype. First, our actual 3d printing is made of a soft material that cannot support heat up to 20°C. It was cheaper and our goals were to make visual and concrete checks before printing with an adaptable material. The suitable material will be printed once we are back. Then, we have to find a suitable supplier to create our aluminium plate that we cannot find here. In additional, we have to load and check programs in the PCB. Finally, assembly all our works into the 3d printing.
We are serene with those processes.

Right now, we are going to celebrate our last night in Shenzhen with all CHIC members and I will leave my computer.

This is the end of the CHIC project, but probably not the end of Hibachi. Stay tuned, news will come in September!!!

Today, we had a lot of work to do. All team members moved to Seeedstudio. Our priority is to succeed in boot loading PCB, which we didn’t manage yesterday.

The battery arrived yesterday evening. We have to test it to ensure that its power is enough for our application. Engineers took the lead and other members helped them to achieve their tasks.

Our industrial designer looked for company that can produce our aluminium plate. It is difficult to find a supplier, they mainly do not have what we are looking for or decline our quotation due to a single unit.

Our electronic engineer started by handling issues concerning the pcb bootloading. After hours of hard work and some helps by CHIC engineers and by Seeedstudio workers, they finally found the solution!

Starting from zero again and soldering a new pcb… and it worked!

So now, we can upload the first programs in the PCB. The work is just starting!

Concerning the battery, the experiments were conducting with several team members relaying to take the measurement. The result is that two identical batteries in theory that in reality are quite different. The good news is that the best one should be OK for heating food.

Next step is plugging it to our breadboard to see how it interacts with our electronics.

We started our day by moving to HAX, a american renowned hardware accelerator.

This company accelerate startups with a high market potential. At Shenzhen, HAX is focused on hardware projects fitting to the Shenzhen lifestyle. This city offers small scale development to mass scale. Thanks to its hardware community, infrastructure and mindset. A week in Shenzhen is like a month anywhere else, said HAX. Hardware projects can iterate faster and cheaper.

At HAX, we had the opportunity to pitch our project Hibachi and received feedbacks from HAX teams.

They directly understood our product, our market and our positioning. Their comments and their questions were relevant and helpful. They straightaway identified our strength, our weakness as well as opportunities. We are satisfied that their comments were similar that how we have designed our product.

After HAX, we all moved to Huaqiangbei, one of the biggest electronics market in the world. Our industrial designer and our software engineer had already gone there for buying component and the 3d printing. They showed us the way to go. Yumeng, our software engineer and our new chinese interpreter, helped other teams to have right quotes from the 3d printer that had printed our first Hibachi.

Durning this moment, other teammates visited Huaqiangbei. First, this is an amazing and chaotic electronics place in almost ten floors. Every floor may represent a thematic, such as led/light or computer. In a floor, you will find a plenty of stands that sell almost the same range of products with probably some specialities. Price is not fixed and should to be negotiated, thanks to the intense competition.

Then, teammates split into two groups. One went to the residence for working with Internet, the other teammates went to Seeedstudio for working on serial key parts. First, every piece of our Hibachi fit into our 3d printing!! The battery is smaller than what we thought. We have more space than expected inside. Our engineer had tested our PCB. We encountered some issues.. such as the code cannot for the moment being uploaded on the PCB… We will fix it tomorrow!

Today, we split our team into three main groups.

The first one made observations and interviews with workers from Seeedstudio. Before the lunchtime, we moved to their kitchen to speak with potential customers. We received a lot of interesting feedback from them. For instance, most of the Tupperwares were owned by women, because they like to know what they are eating and they also paid attention of their body. Tupperwares were mainly built in glass. They perceive plastic as less hygienic. Thanks to Chenyue who could speak her native language with them!

The second group went back to the biggest electronic market to get our first 3D printing and find some components needed.

Our 3D printing look fabulous! Our designer is proud and satisfied of it. We might print other pieces from this supplier as well as other CHIC teams.

The third group went to Seeedstudio for working on our PCB. Our media interaction designer helped engineers to progress on their tasks. After long hours of working, our electronic engineer came to us showing us this amazing result!

Last but not least, at the end of the day, we moved all together to a maker space to pitch our concept.

This pitch was particular, because a part of the audience could not understand english. To respond to this situation, Yumeng had translated all sentences into Chinese as an interpret. She was perfect and everybody was impressed by her high performance during all the night!

This night was a great and unexpected experience for all of us. Having the opportunity to pitch in front of Chinese makers and receiving from them such great questions and feedback without language barrier was a privilege.

Tomorrow, we are looking forward to testing and to running our PCB. We will also assembly all main pieces together and sincerely hope that it will all fit into the Hibachi! Finally, we will also pitch our concept in front of HAX, a renowned accelerator.

This morning, our team split into three groups. One went to Huaqiangbei, one of the biggest electronics market in the world, to find some missing components such as the battery and some cables.They also took this opportunity to find another 3d printer, because ones at Seeedstudio were too small for the diameter of our Hibachi. Right now, a 3d impression is in progress and will be finished tomorrow afternoon. We can not wait to receive it!!

The second group stayed in the residence due to the lack of Wifi at Seeedstudio. This group is working on the mechanical design, the design and on the application. The mechanical design needs to be perfect to ensure that every components can fit on it according to the main design. Our industrial designer with our electronic engineer worked closely together on it.

We changed some buttons and adapted the design. Our media interaction design created new pictograms for the application. Our software engineers help her to integrate those creations into the application.

For my part, I went into a Mall to check the range of products. I found a lot of substitute products such as microwaves (from CNY 358 to 998), Tupperware (from CNY 35 to 169), rice cookers (from CNY 129 to 768). 1 CYN = 0.15 CHF.

I searched on the Internet information about our customers, especially focused on China. Serial hypothesis have emerged and have to be validated as soon as possible with interviews and observations. Tomorrow, I will speak with some workers during their lunchtime.

This afternoon, Jacob and I went to Seeedstudio for getting the rest of the components and for working. We had an unexpected power cut for two hours.. Every 3d printer as well as the assembly chain suddenly stopped. We suddenly had to manage this situation and had worked on what we could do. After this interruption, engineers could work again on their tasks.

After a long and unexpected working day, we received the rest of our components and we are ready to assembly our first PCB. We hope everything will be all right with our first 3d print.

We have our fingers crossed!

Hibachi team had arrived at Hong-Kong last week. It was intense! We pitched almost every day in front of different audiences: investors, companies, entrepreneurs, makers, students and other people.

Our first pitch in front of HKUST Students was disappointed. They did not get our concept saying that « in Hong-Kong, we are not used to bring food with us. We have everything on the street and for cheap. Some may not have a kitchen in their apartment .» This first feedback punched us in our face.

Hong-Kong has a huge density of 6’500 habitants per km2 (more than twice Lausanne!). We tried to adapt our value proposition as well as our business model to get an interest from local people. We are exploring back our idea of Hardware as a Service. Our next pitch was the afternoon in an IoT accelerator named Brinc! After having received feedback from CHIC staff, we had tried other slides and scripts during the next pitches. Our last pitch was in front of investors at HKSTP (Hong Kong Science and Technology Park) was great. We decided to refocus on our original problem statement and to explain it clearly as well as our features.

Between pitches, we also visited companies, such as Panalpina (the 5th logistic leader) or Modern Terminals (the second-largest container terminal operator in Hong-Kong). You should definitely check our common CHIC blog for more stories about this incredible first week!

Yesterday, we arrived at Shenzhen called as the Hardware Silicon Valley, where we will give birth to our first Hibachi!

Right now, we have just arrived at Seeedstudio.

We are working back on our self-heating lunchbox. Our industrial designer and our firmware engineer are working on the mechanical design in order to print our first prototype. Our electronic engineer is checking the components that we have just received and comparing with our BOM – Bill of materials. Our Media Interaction Design is creating pictograms for the app. Others are preparing an important pitch in front of our next audience: HAX!

Last but not least, our businessman came across a lot of tupperwares and microwaves in the Seeedstudio kitchen during the lunch break. It appears that almost all workers of this office are used to eat at their desk during the lunchtime. Useful comments from HKUST Students seem to be limited to their environment or lifestyle.

Customer interviews and observations are coming soon for exploring this new environment!

The last milestone is done. Expectations are high for what is going to happen in China!!

This is how hibachi will look like at the end:

There is nothing more gratifying that giving birth to an idea and watching it grow. And during the process of transformation, acknowledge the self development of the team that is working towards achieving that goal.

There is no such thing as successful products, there are successful companies.

We are thinking now to project and spread our identity as a group of people who believe in something and therefore those others who do it as well will be our early adopters through which the innovation diffusion is going to begin.

This is a graphical description of the ideas on innovation diffusion that Everett Rogers put across so wisely in his publications in 1962:

Our critical target is the group of early adopters.  It is not after that 13.5% of the penetration, that the real diffusion begins: the early majority and the late majority would only buy our product after there is “no fear of trying” and will prefer us against our competition not because of what we sell, but because of what we represent for them.

What we are going to sell is irrelevant, no matter how many features it will have: battery or no battery, connected or not connected.

Imagine how illogical is, for example, to buy a watch from a computer company!  Who does that? Why?

Well, ask the crazy ones who firstly tried the Apple Watch, who were willing to try something new and illogical and expend their money on it, because they subconsciously believed that they deserve it: they identified with the company.

Indeed, people buy products because of themselves, on how they make them feel. They don’t care about the product and the technology itself. The key to success in  technology push is to create new ways in which people can connect with themselves and feel better because of it.

We are now focusing on preparing our image, based on a reason to buy and not a product to sell.

As our lately well though pitches have stood for: We are bringing people harmony in their daily lives, to take control on their nutrition at any time and any moment: for those who embrace their health awareness, having a dietary restriction, doing intermittent fasting, eating only biologically grown products, counting calories, etc.

We want them to feel the liberation from the oblivious status quo of having to depend on places, schedules, and other people to be able to enjoy a pleasant meal. And what a better experience than that of eating what we carefully prepared at home, with our special touch 😉

For those who believe in us: hibachi is for you, not anyone else… it is just for the self-centered, elegant, and modern people…   as we the fathers of hibachi make this company to be.

Stay tuned!

As the semester reaches to its end, the Hibachi is finally taking shape. After though some trouble with the experiment, it’s finally solved! (Until the next problem)

In contrary to our first idea of designing a PID to control the temperature, we decided to implement a bang bang controler. This controller is turning on and off power of the heating pad to  keep the temperature in an interval around the target.

And the result is…

… a success 🙂

Tommorow is the last Milestone, and we are prepared to show you what the Hibachi team can do. So get ready!

Let’s talk software and firmware, or how to make the link between them!

As annonced during our last presentation, we chosed to use Bluetooth Low Energy or Bluetooth Smarth to enable the communication protocol between the application and the software. It’s low energy consumption, acceptable range, and the fact that it is supported by Androïd and IOs make it the best solution we found.

This said, we were left to implement an effective communication flow to convey the information from the user to the application to the Hibachi. And here is the result!

Tonight is our weekly meeting and there is still a lot of things to discuss. Go Hibachi!

Last week, we were excited to present our progression to the CHIC Jury and to the rest of the audience. In only 15 minutes, we have to present one month of hard work. Going to the essential in respecting every key element is not an easy job.

Best team ever!

The CHIC Jury was surprised about our progression compared to the previous milestone. However, as a challenging prototype, we have encountered delays on some specific tasks such as in the mechanical design.

As you may slightly notice on the upper picture, we have iterated our product design:

We are still improving our design. Leo is working hard to offer the best user experience ever taking into account all constrains.

At the end of this milestone, we received great and useful feedback and are still working on building the best lunchbox ever!

Stay tuned!

The second milestone presentation is this Friday and Hibachi team is getting ready for this important day.

Weekly meeting at ecal with the Hibachi team

The last few details have been tackled and we now look forward to presenting and sharing our progress with you!

Since we started CHIC, my team and I all agreed on one common thing: Heaböx is not the name we have dreamt about to represent our lunchbox. So after brainstorming a lot to find the perfect brand, we came with this new idea:

Hibachi

The name hibachi was originated in ancient Japan from the 1860’s. Etymologically comes from hi which mean fire and hachi which means bowl, it’s also called “fire bowl”. It was used as a heating device holding burning charcoal.

The hibachi was once a common sight in Japan before the 40’s but it became a rarity. However, they remain in use in some traditional settings, such as tea ceremony, older stores, and outdoor festivals.

We really liked the meaning and the story about this beautiful object, it fits perfectly to our product and gave us a good basis to build our identity.

Unfortunately we came quite late with this new name, an essential point to design the logo. But this not the first challenge we had to face since the beginning of this adventure and it’s with motivation that I started to iterate on the logotype. The first step was to search the appropriate typeface. I put my choice on the Source Sans Pro that I found efficient, clear and harmonious. I willingly let a lot of space between letters and used lower case to have something really light and fresh. All of these elements express a reflection of style and delicacy: it shows the way, in which people who care, tend to see themselves: healthy, light and without stress.

But now, what graphical representations could we add to give the perfect identity? Quite fast came the idea of the bowl (from “the bowl of fire”). It surrounds many points of our lunchbox like transport, food, and this container is mainly use to drink soup or tea, two meals that are comforting and generally synonym of health. With all these factors, time was to iteration, iteration and iteration, as you can see:

After a lot of trials, we are close to find the final design. We just need to adjust some little details and the identity will be born!

One of our most important components is arrived!

With the Silicone Rubber heater, we are now able to test our heating system. To check quickly the heating behaviour of the heater, we pasted it on an aluminium plate and measured the temperature of the plate. Then, we made the heating of 0.5L water in a small aluminium cake pan covered by a plastic pocket folder.

The heating efficiency about 50%. So to improve that energy conversion, our next step is to print the casing of the heating system and the insulation material for the Al plate.

Stay tuned for the coveted 3D printing !

Last week was a really excited and intense week. We had our first milestone and so presented our work to the jury, to the professors and to the other teams. It was a great opportunity to receive advised feedback regarding all different aspects of our concept.

During this milestone, we shared our sketches and our first rendering 🙂 :

It is a hard work to find the right shape that fits with all our respective constrains and the user experience. Safety, power consumption and heat transfer are our main risks/challenges that we have to strongly take into consideration.

After a deserved Easter break, we are ready to progress and to raise those challenges!

Stay tuned!

Last weeks, after having mapped our assumptions regarding our early adopters customers, we have decided to verify our hypothesis by meeting some of them face-to-face and by doing online surveys.

Those interactions have helped us to deeply understand the way they live, what they say, do, feel or see. According to their lifestyle, some of them are definitely more sensitive to our concept.

By speaking to our potential early adopters, we have not only validated most of our assumptions, but also discovered new facts and underestimated others!

Today was a working day for the Heaböx team. Most of us went to the maker space in the EPFL/ECAL lab at some point during the day, and even though we mostly worked on our own part, we were glad to be able to discuss it and have feedback from the other team members. Design, breadboarding, heating systems, bluetooth… are only some examples of the different points that were approched.

The day is now finished, but we will be back tomorow for the weekly meeting to discuss about the first Milstone. Only one week left before this important check-point. So let’s get prepared!

In a first stage, we have decided to decrease our uncertainty as fast as possible by making small and quick bets, instead of investing time and efforts into scenarios’ assumptions. Engineers especially have to deal with a lot of uncertainties. So they have to make very simple models to set limits to the real system.

Last week, Chenyue – our materials engineer – made theoretical calculations to estimate the heat needed for 1L water heating. She established the requirements for the selection of heating elements that could be suitable to our heating system. Then, she has started fast and easy experiments with an old metallic pan filled with different water quantity.

Her main goal was to have an estimation of the energy supplied for a given quantity of water and determine the heating efficiency of such simple system.  Her results confirmed that a heating element with a power of 80W would be sufficient to provide enough energy to heat 0.5L water from 22°C to 67°C within 1h heating time.

Regarding CHIC deliverables, our team is unfortunately slightly delayed. This holdup is due to one of our main challenges that disrupt all of us; the interdependence heating constraints that concerns all domains of our team. For instance, the feasibility of the heating transfers, the desirability for a daily usage and the viability regarding the material’s cost.

We have decided to brainstorm ideas outside of the campus, at a Japanese restaurant. It was also the great opportunity to talk about external subjects and to enhance the togetherness.

Despite the fact we have not yet found the right solution that covers all constraint that night, we have not only clarified it regarding each domain but have also come up with a lot of crazy and usual ideas.

Still, keep calm and carry on!

As a first step, we need to structure and to coordinate our team in order to be as efficient as possible all along the conception. We have therefore clarified responsibilities of each member, team rules, softwares and applications that we will use. We have also established a weekly get-together meeting for sharing key information such as what we have accomplished or which obstacles we have encountered during our previous week.

After those formal tasks, we have started to brainstorm and to iterate sketches. The Value Proposition Canvas designed by A.Osterwalder and Y.Pigneur was a great point for creating a shared language and to have a better teamwork.

We have also last but not least talk about common problems and constrains that solutions have to be founded quickly. Regarding those problems, our knowledge sharing allied with expert members in those domains would rapidly solve it. Hopefully soon…

Keep calm and carry on!

After having been selected by the jury of CHIC by presenting our surrealistic concept, this is time to make it real…!

Heabox is a connected portable lunchbox that brings your food to suitable temperature for consumption. Our lunchbox would allow to carry a meal and bring it to a comfortable temperature for eating, using energy from a battery. An App would serve as an interface for set up personalized features of the box such as heating scheduling or heating power.

Let’s Go!

By this timeline oriented blog, you will weekly follow our challenge started from an idea to a first minimum viable product. We will also share with you our crazy world, our deep desperation and our huge happiness!