Production Update #4 - mini manufacturing update - a slight delay
over 7 years ago – Mon, Apr 03, 2017 at 03:01:51 PM

Hi gang,

Some mildly frustrating news. We received the first production batch of felt from our fabric suppliers and it's not quite the right colour orange, (pic below). We have re-ordered another batch to get this right and are awaiting the new material to arrive but I'm afraid this process has forced us to push back production a couple of weeks. 

New dates for shipping are:

Our pre-production run (for Fast Track Betas) is scheduled for mid-April. Backers will start to receive these late April. 

Mass-production is scheduled for mid-May. Backers will start to receive these late May.

Apologies for this and thanks for your continued patience and understanding!

We'll be back with more news in the next week or two.

T&TBB

p.s. here is the guilty fabric - our original reference is in the centre surrounded by various different dyeing attempts.

 

Production Update #3 - mega manufacturing update - getting closer!
over 7 years ago – Sat, Mar 25, 2017 at 09:17:53 AM

 

Greetings backers!

It's Tom here with one of our last few updates before we ship. Exciting stuff! Thank you all for waiting so patiently. We are all working so hard to make Suzy the best she can be. And we are...

...still on schedule :)

Here's the short version:

• Our pre-production run (for Fast Track Betas) is happening next week. Backers will start to receive these late March/early April.
• Mass-production is still on target for late April/early May. Backers will start to receive these mid-May.
• We're sending out the survey soon - fill in your address or you won't get your Suzy :|

And here's the long version:

The anatomy of an Internet-connected consumer electronics product. (TL: DR) 

 

Hardware is hard. Making an Internet-connected consumer electronics device requires a kind of perverse, tenacious, masochistic alchemy. It’s the orchestration and integration of brand purpose, design thinking, manufacturing know-how, engineering chops, canny logistics and tech ninjutsu. It’s verging on the impossible. And we love it! 

We are nearly there with Suzy. The physical product is pretty much ready to rock. We are back and forth to Shenzhen in China working with the multiple factories and partners helping us make Suzy be the best she can be. Shenzhen is a place to behold - if you are interested in the story of this incredible city's journey from a fishing village 30 years ago to the "Silicon Valley of Hardware" watch this film from Wired.

 

 I’ll take you through all the steps and progress we’ve made below - lot’s of pics :) 

We are still heads down and working every hour on: 

• The firmware (the embedded software that lives on the device itself and runs the product - Suzy’s brain) 
• The smartphone apps (both iOS and Android - device settings, customisation and audio baby monitor - Suzy’s remote control) 
• Communications (WiFi, Bluetooth, security and encryption - Suzy’s safety and privacy in your family home)

Colour, Material and Finishes

You can call us pretentious and soppy (we are pretentious and soppy) - but we spent a long time thinking about the feelings we wanted you guys to experience through Suzy. The colours, the materials, the textures. The tone of the product, the fun, the behaviour and personality. When you care as much as we do about getting these details just right - it’s a ton of work.  

Suzy’s Hat. 

It looked so simple. But it turned out to be very complex. Firstly the way we injection moulded it is pretty special. Usually, injection moulded stuff has to be slightly angled (draft) so it can be removed from the mould. We needed Suzy’s hat to be dead straight - angled sides (cone head!) just would not do. So we put more extreme draft angles on just the inside of the hat and created the mould in two parts. 

 

The compromise was the mould gave us a split line along the centre of the hat. This needs to be individually polished out on each hat and then lacquered for a smooth, shiny finish. Not only that but each hat needs a little widget bonded to the inside at the top so it will attach nicely to the main body of Suzy. Each of these 3 steps happens at a different workshop so all the hats need to be transported around several times before the final assembly factory. 

 

Also Suzy’s hat needed to appear a nice solid opaque orange when her lights were off. And emit a nice warm orangey glow when the white LEDs were illuminated. We are using PC (Polycarbonate) for it’s quality feel and glass-like properties. But PC is 100% transparent in its natural form so we had to add an opaque agent to the mix to give us the semi-transparent quality we were after. It took us a while experimenting with different quantities of colour pigment and opacity to get this just right, both when Suzy is off and her lights are on. 

 

To add to the complexity, the colour chips we were moulding to review the colour and opacity were a different thickness to the actual hat so we had to test the colour in the actual hat tool at a different factory. Plus, the colour is slightly less saturated at first when the plastic is still hot, fresh from the injection moulding process. We got there eventually and Suzy’s hat is a beautiful thing. 

Suzy’s Felt Base

It’s taken us a long time to get happy with the colour, material and texture for this. The colour is still being finalised.

 

 

Also the process of bonding it to the plastic base wasn’t simple. And neither was the hem or invisible join where the fabric meets itself on the side. The fabric also needed to be robust enough to die cut Suzy’s eyes and mouth. A fine black gauze sits behind her face to highlight Suzy’s eyes and provide protection for the microphone positioned behind her mouth. Also Suzy’s speaker emits sound through holes behind this felt and so the fabric had to be aurally porous. (That’s a term I just made up.) 

 

Mechanical Engineering Chops and Tech Ninjutsu 

Inside Suzy is really frickin’ complicated. She has all the lights and the electronics to drive them, a pneumatic plunger mechanism to provide resistance when you push down her hat to switch her on. 

 

The hat is also connected to a motor and gearbox to allow it to rise and descend independently by remote control from the app. She also needs room for a speaker, the speaker chamber and a reflector plate to bounce the sound 360 degrees out of her base. Also squeezed in there is the main PCB (printed circuit board) that holds all the electronic components, modules, memory and chips that allow Suzy to operate. 

Here's where we make Suzy's electronic parts.

 

Lights 

Yes lights. Lots of lights. And all on a super slick flexible PCB in a custom Orange colour just for Suzy.

 

Power 

We’ve created a bespoke BleepBleeps blue power pack with international plug adapters - plus a super nice black and white stripey micro-USB cable. Even the cable is special as it has to have an extra long head. 

 

Mmmm silicone rubbery bits 

Yeah nice. We’ve got this super sweet silicone tab for the BleepBleeps note logo on the side of Suzy. 

 

And Suzy’s feet are silicone rubber too - this is the tool that moulds them.

 

Assembly 

All those hundreds of bits and bobs, the hat, the felt base, the motor, the gearbox, the tiny plastic parts, the LEDs, the speaker, the PCB, and the silicone parts are meticulously put together by hand. Each Suzy is tested for quality control and placed lovingly in her cosy foam bed alongside her power pack inside her packaging. (More on packaging in another update soon - it's looking really really nice.)

 

Testing

Suzy's lights are tested for colour temperature and luminosity in this awesome big round thing. 

 

And here's some testing racks where we will put Suzy through her paces.

 

That's it for now! I'll be back very soon (every week or two) with more updates as we get closer and closer to shipping Suzy.

Thanks so much for your patience and support! 

Tom and Team BleepBleeps

Production Update #2
over 7 years ago – Mon, Jan 09, 2017 at 09:37:52 AM

Happy New Year!

Things are progressing nicely with Suzy Snooze manufacturing. A bit slower than we’d like - but we are getting there!

Short version: 

• Suzy Snooze mass production will be in April
• We hope to ship all Kickstarter orders in April and May 
• Fast Track Betas will be shipped in March

Long version:

Your family’s safety and security is the number one priority for us. We’ve seen a number of IoT parenting devices fall short on the security front and we want to be world-class in this area. This is very important to us, and we are sure it’s important to you guys too - seeing as we are transmitting audio from your children’s bedrooms. We’ve been taking the extra time to make sure Suzy is a robust device and adheres to the latest and most appropriate security protocols and encryption methods available to us right now. Team BleepBleeps are working non-stop on this stuff, some of us were even working on Christmas Day and Boxing Day! 

However, this extra work has meant it’s taken us a little longer to get our firmware up and running on our production PCBs. The challenge is: we can’t place the order for the full production batch of components until we are sure our firmware works as planned (securely and encrypted) and we don’t need to change any of those components. Some of these components have long lead times of 2 months and so we’ve had no choice but to push the production back a bit. This means we are now due to manufacture in April but it's likely to be May before Suzy actually reaches you. Our pre-production run will happen in March and we will ship the Fast Track Beta orders then. Thanks so much for your patience and support!

Other bits and bobs...

Packaging hotting up:

Surprise! BleepBleeps blue power adapters and stripy Micro USB power cable:

App pairing screens looking nice:

We’ll be back soon with our next update!

Take care,

Tom and Team BleepBleeps

Production Update #1 + check out The Loop
almost 8 years ago – Tue, Oct 11, 2016 at 11:13:18 AM

Hey... Hello... Hi!

We've been double busy :)

First up, you'll be pleased to know we are bang on schedule for our estimated delivery in March (and December for Fast Track Betas). Full production update below. You can follow our Instagram Stories for regular video updates on production and general bleepy BleepBleeps bleepiness.

 

London Design Festival

We had a lovely time hanging out at the #LDF MAP Shop alongside our fellow MAP collaborators Kano, Hackaball, Beeline, Brizi and Ding. It was a great behind-the-scenes look at crowdfunded collaboration! Here's a nice article from Core77.

 

 

Shipping surveys + BleepBleeps Gear

We're still finalising the shipping survey and we'll send this (through Backerkit) in one of the future updates. You'll be able to finalise your address, add-on any extra Suzys or Sammys and also bag some BleepBleeps gear!

  

Audio sounding good

We've finalised the speaker design now and we've given an audio rig to Erol Alkan so he can fine-tune Suzy's sleepy music to get the best performance from our speaker set up. Check out the interview with Erol on the BleepBleeps Blog >>>

 

LEDs looking sweet

We've finalised the LED layout and are still working on the optimal light sequences for the soothing sequence, nighttime and morning modes.

 

iOS app is sorted - Android coming along...

iOS is pretty much there with just a few integration bits and bobs to finish up. We are now working on porting to Android over the next month or so.

 

Packaging is pukka...

Thanks for all those backers that helped us decide on the packaging - it looks awwwwwsome.

 

Shout out to our friends: Ding - on Kickstarter now!

Ding is a simple, beautiful, smart doorbell that’s perfect for your modern home. It’s got the seal of approval from John Lewis & the Design Council. We love that it’s beautiful, and perfect for silencing your doorbell, when you’ve finally got the kids to sleep. 

 

That's it for now! + subscribe to The Loop

Don't forget you can get the latest designy news in our regular round up: The Loop. 

 

Laters!

Tom & TBB

Thanks to you... we made it! Now, here's the plan...
about 8 years ago – Mon, Aug 01, 2016 at 07:20:32 PM

Dear backers,

Suzy Snooze is now officially in production!

 

Thanks to you guys Suzy will soon become a reality. Team BleepBleeps are all heads down making this happen. Kickstarter has been taking payments from all your cards over the past couple of weeks and they will soon transfer the funds to us. We will then follow up with you guys to take your address details and sort out any post-campaign niggles with pledge levels etc. We're using a service called Backerkit to make sure this goes as smoothly. It costs us a bit of cash but we'd rather you guys had the best experience possible. We'll send the link to the Backerkit survey soon.

The plan

We've started the journey to create a world-class, consumer-grade product with the highest production values. We want to share that journey with you (without overwhelming you!) We'll be posting regular production updates every month. We hope you enjoy following along as much as we do creating Suzy and sharing with you. In the meantime, in case you missed it, here's the design story so far...

 

More beautiful, more useful, more often...

For more BleepBleeps action you can follow our more frequent updates, discussion and musings on Facebook and Twitter. But the real action happens on Instagram:

 

Oh and also, our blog officially rocks

Parenting hacks, family tech and the best in design. Check it out!

 

Thanks all - speak soon!

Tom & Team BleepBleeps