Lesson 2 : “Small is beautiful”
Making a product smart implies a lot of technical challenges, both from hardware and software perspective.
Among all constraints, getting a “small” and “hidden” device is often a requirement to ensure that your end-user benefits from the best “user experience” to facilitate his “user acceptance“.
We often immediately think about wearables when size and small factor matter. Nevertheless, we believe that it applies to almost all products. End-user will have a better use case appropriation if technologies are hidden. Most humans do not dream about machines (except maybe Geeks and Transhumanist!) and will always prefer human-like interfaces. As a consequence, it shall be part of R&D program to find a way to make hardware invisible.
Making hardware invisible calls for several challenges:
- Size
- Weight
- Thermal dissipation
- Noise
- Vibration
- Battery management
While we can easily find a dozen of evaluation boards (Raspberry PI Zero being one very trendy right now) and/or prototyping hardware cards, it is much more difficult to find industrial small form factor embedded hardware that can be inserted into your product.
That’s the reason why we have been working since 2015 on a very small secured low-power and efficient “nano computing center” to enable invisible product transformation.