Pin One

Background

By end of March 2016 Pins Collective completed a successful Kickstarter campaign for a concept that late came to be called Pin One. This concept is like the usual pin that you put on a jacket or backpack, but with a digital screen that can display animations and be updated on the fly from a phone.  At this stage Pins Collective had a demo board with the LCD screen and CNC:ed look/volume models. The had a development and manufacturing partner with a Swedish office and manufacturing facilities in China.

I joined the company as CTO shortly after the Kickstarter to help lead the project from concept to production. I was also responsible for leading the Pins Collective app development which I've divided into its own project - Pins Collective App.

The Work

The work of going from the initial concept to production took 20 months in total. As this is quiet a large body of work to cover I will delimit myself to the major parts of the project.

Engineering Sample

Starting of from the concept we started with defining a human readable requirements in-house at Pins Collective. I then took part in translating these loose requirements into a hard requirement specification in collaboration with the mechanical, electrical and firmware engineers. We then created a initial Bill of Materials and a engineering sample.

During this process we ran into a couple of challenges. The most acute being significant clipping during animations due to the lack of a buffer in the display in combination with a too low data rate from our MCU to the display. This almost forced us to switch to a different MCU but we managed to solve the problem by feeding data directly from the flash memory to the display.

Firmware

For the firmware we created flowcharts for all interactions and states of the pin (example below). These where a useful way for us to design and convey the interaction design to the embedded developer.  

Industrial & Mechanical Design

The look/volume models developed for the Kickstarter had two major problems: 1) The attachment solution for the needle was not reliable and 2) the screen had a flat area at the bottom of the screen that was not taken into consideration during the shell design.

We solved these problems in-house and the iterated the mechanical design along with Flexworks engineers to arrive at the final design.

Customers Samples

Once the mechanical design, firmware and electronics where completed we assembled a small series of customer samples to be used in field testing and for approvals (FCC, CE, RC etc).

The Outcome

Mass production started in November 2017. During this batch 2500 pins where produced and since then an additional 2500 pcs have been produced.

As the first of it's kind Pin One is a expressive wearable that have caught the imagination of thousands of users and creative around the world. With living in app community and a variety of use cases we believe that this playful products will have a value for it's users for many years.

My Contributions

During the time the in-house team at Pins Collective consisted of me and Olof Sjöstedt (CEO). The project spanned from concept to production and shipping and I was deeply involved in every part of the process.

In the role of CTO I was responsible for everything related to the product. Me and Olof shared the task of managing the project, making sure all parts was moving ahead and had the information they needed. I also did the interaction design for both the hardware and the app, updated the industrial design to it's final form and took key decisions about the electrical and mechanical design. 

Acknowledgements

Olof Sjöstedt - CEO and founder of Pins Collective
Flexworks - Manufacturer, electrical engineering and firmware