Bill of Materials and Open Questions
Friday, October 5th 2007 | Ismael Ghalimi
At Monolab, the company organizing the Office 2.0 Conference, we like to eat our own dog food and put our money where our mouth is. For this reason, the first two editions of the conference were organized using Office 2.0 tools only (more on our setup there). We will do the same for the third edition, but we would like to raise the bar a bit too. Quite a bit in fact, so much so that we have decided to build the Redux Model 1 using the very same tools. That should make for an interesting challenge and a good learning experience, which we will keep documenting on this blog.
The first tool we have adopted is the excellent Zoho Sheet, which we used to compile a first Bill of Materials. It’s very preliminary at this point, but we’ll keep updating it, allowing anyone to track our progress in real time. We need to make a disclaimer though: some information regarding certain components is protected under NDA and won’t be published on this document.
Another application we will use is Jive Software’s Clearspace, which will power our community website for developers and users of the device. Apple is using the same for all its products (including the iPhone), and we figured that if it’s good enough for them, it should be good enough for us as well. We expect the website to go live sometime next week or the week after.
While working on these projects, we came up with some questions open for discussion.
Could we merge the backplane and LED PCB into one PCB?
Yes! According to the good folks at SiMa Systems, the LED PCB can house our components as well, helping reduce the device’s thickness by about 3mm and bringing the number of custom PCBs we will have to design and manufacture down from 2 to 1.
Do we need a vibrator?
Most cellphones incorporate a vibrator to support user notification while being turned to silent mode. Because our device won’t fit into your pocket, the need for a vibrator used in such a scenario is not clear. Nevertheless, it could be used to provide some haptic feedback when users click on the touch screen or the back touch sensor. This would increase power consumption and might quickly turn into an annoyance, so we need more user feedback before making a final call.
Do we need an On/Off button?
Apple’s iPhone has four buttons: Home, On/Off, Silent, and Volume Control. In previous articles, we concluded that we only needed a Home button and an On/Off button, mainly because our device is not a phone, therefore does not require quick user controls for silent mode and volume. But after more discussions, we came to the conclusion that we might not need the On/Off button either. On the iPhone, you can turn the device’s screen on by clicking either the Home button or the On/Off button, therefore this task could be accomplished with just the Home button. For turning the screen off, you click the On/Off button, but this task could be accomplished by clicking the Home button, then sliding a virtual control on the screen, much like you do on the iPhone for unlocking the device or turning it off completely. Granted, this would turn a one step process into a two step process, but because our device is not a phone, you do not need to turn its screen on and off as often as you do with a phone. Conclusion: one single Home button is all we need, thereby reducing the number of parts we have to use and the number of holes we have to drill into the enclosure.
Feedback welcome!
Entry filed under: Office 2.0
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Or you could hold the Home button down for a couple of seconds to tell it to switch off. My Dell Axim’s On/Off button has 2 functions (4 if you consider illumination). Quick press is On/Off. Press and hold toggles the display backlight.
Have you had time to consider the accessibility issues? I know that you are building for a limited audience, but I would hope that eventually this sort of device would have a much broader audience.
Cheers
-Bob
Regarding the vibrator, since it won’t fit into the pocket, people would probably keep it very close to them while not using it, not even for reading. So maybe just having a flashing light to signal incoming mail, or other similar activities could be more useful then a vibrator.
If the device is in someone’s bag, neither light nor a vibrator would help them get notification, unless you use a loudspeaker, which I think you said you won’t. So that leaves you with just a light signal. You can also use software to broadcast audio messages to a Bluetooth earphone/cell phone.
A vibrator is cool for games, otherwise I don’t see a use for it, as Doron stated it.
Bob,
Thanks for the feedback.
I think we’ll go for a button-free device. See tomorrow’s post.
-Ismael
Doron, Antoine,
I think you’re right, we don’t need the vibrator.
I’m not sure about audio in/out and loudspeaker and microphone.
Having them is handy, but not having them would make the design a lot cleaner…
Give me a couple of days to figure this one out.
-Ismael
I’m a consulting mechanical engineer with an interest in all things Web 2.0, as I build a geographically distributed engineering team that provides exceptional value to often geographically dispersed customers. So IT|Redux and the approach to developing the Redux Model 1 are especially interesting to me.
Spreadsheets are far from ideal for maintaining Bills of Materials. Data duplication will cause endless problems and you’ll waste days — if not weeks — maintaining them as complexity grows, and you’ll still never be confident in their accuracy. Been there, done that. If ever a problem cried out for a relational database solution, it’s Bill of Material (BOM) and Approved Vendor List (AVL) maintenance.
I currently use an inexpensive offline application, Parts & Vendors (P&V), that my team and customers can access via SSL VPN. But there are at least two solutions that would satisfy most Web 2.0 definitions: aligni.com & arenasolutions.com.
If you Google P&V, aligni is likely to come up as an ad. It positions itself as an online alternative to P&V. Unfortunately, it does not have P&V’s exceptional ease of use (P&V is focused on the product development team, and I’ve never seen a more efficient or powerful interface from this point of view) or its capabilities. I’m sure aligni’s capabilities will increase rapidly, but the interface is pretty god-awful and I don’t see much promise for the near future.
Aligni has a range of price plans and a thirty day trial. The terms of service are a little scary. Upon cancellation, they may delete any data permanently. You can cancel your account, of course (hopefully not too easily, with the potential for data loss), but so may “Aligni Incorporated… terminate the contract at any time and with immediate effect for good or important reason.” One of those reasons is that the “invoice amount due cannot be charged to the credit card account provided.” That’s a little scary: lose all of your data permanently because you didn’t keep sufficient funds in the account linked to your debit card.
The other alternative is Arena PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) from arenasolutions.com. This is a professional application with excellent capabilities and a very nice interface. The cost is also significant enough that it isn’t for hobbyists, but it isn’t expensive. A single user account is $1200/year. You may have an unlimited number of named accounts, but only as many may be active as you have accounts (so if people rotated in and out of your project, you could activate and deactivate their logins as required). I believe there is a less expensive Workgroup edition, but they will try hard to upsell you to at least the Professional edition. There is also an Enterprise edition.
A very nice feature is that you may have unlimited partner logins for vendors, customers, and others. They may access the database but won’t have data creation privileges. This provides 95% of what you need for outsourcing and quoting. If another user has their own paid Arena account, they could be granted write access at no expense to you.
I came very close to investing in Arena Solutions, but decided the more-expensive, less-web-2.0 hosted Agile Advantage application is better suited to my needs. Arena is perfect for an OEM working with multiple suppliers and partners. Agile is better suited for someone like me, a partner working with multiple OEMs. But I can’t yet afford to invest in Agile.
Let me know if I can do anything to help or provide any advice (or opinion). Good luck.
Sincerely,
-Rob Campbell
Rob,
Thank you so much for sharing such a wealth of experience.
Much appreciated.
-Ismael
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