July Update
over 7 years ago – Thu, Aug 10, 2017 at 07:56:08 PM

Hey Backers!

August is upon us! With a new month is a new update. On top of our usual progress update, we’ll be giving you a deep dive into manufacturing as a whole – the steps involved, and where we’ll be in a few short months.

Before we dive in, I need your help: we need feedback on our updates. Are they too long? Too short? Are we discussing what you want to hear? Or is there something missing that you’re curious about? Do you even read them? Please let us know in the update comments by following the link at the bottom of this update!  

Several of you have reached out regarding address changes. By now you should have received a link in your email from BackerKit to a survey, where you can fill in your shipping information and purchase additional units. At any point from now until we ship, you’ll be able to change your shipping information at the same link. 

If you have any trouble with this, we’ve got an awesome support team at BackerKit that you can reach here!

The last month’s priority has been negotiating terms with the factories we’ve tentatively chosen. This started with nailing down specifications in June, and has been followed by design iteration V1 on the factory’s side, some high-level optimization to cut down the number of parts, and finally estimating a quote. We’ve been counseled to take our time during this process, since the terms we agree on dictate our relationship with them over the following years. That relationship, in turn, can make or break a company - choosing the right factory is a HUGE decision that we’re not taking lightly.

Meanwhile, that’s given us time to focus on some other priorities: hiring, software, and academic studies and more!

In the next few weeks we’ll be adding two new members to the Mindset team! They will be helping us with electronics and digital marketing, and bring some amazing experience to the team. It’s too early for pictures (unfortunately), so stay tuned to social to learn about our new members!

On software we’ve been making some amazing progress. Our focus since the company began has primarily been measuring concentration – building algorithms that take a chunk of EEG data, and predict the level of concentration the data represents. After so many months, we’re very happy with how far it’s come. That means it’s time for step two: scaling our algorithm from a few brains to thousands. We’re working on an architecture that will combine what it knows about “general concentration” in everyone’s brain, while at the same time adapting to each user’s unique differences. We’re not ready yet to talk about this, but stay tuned – it’s exciting.

Of course, all the best software needs good data! As we mentioned in Update 10, we’ve been working with the Montreal Neurological Institute to plan a large-scale study collecting EEG data under supervised clinical conditions. This will provide us with clean, high-quality, well-validated data to train our algorithms on. After lots of planning, we’re excited that the experiments will be starting this month!

While in Montreal we’ve been working on a lot of brand-related development. We’re going to be pushing this out, along with our brand-new website very soon. It’s looking really nice!

As a sneak peak, here’s Mindset’s new logo!

We’re really happy with how it turned out. We’ll be publicly sharing the rest of our brand work shortly, but wanted you all to be the first to see our latest progress!

Get ready – this section’s a big one.  

Last update we talked about delays in manufacturing – the most common sources of problems that typically slow companies down post-Kickstarter. As a part-2, we wanted to share a deeper dive into what we’ve been thinking about behind-the-scenes to make this all happen: the manufacturing process.

Going from idea to mass manufacturing is typically broken down into 6 steps. What follows is a walkthrough of each step: what it means, how long it takes, and what we’ve done to prepare for it.

Step 1 – Proof of concept

The hardware process, like most, starts with an idea. Step 1 is turning that idea into a proof of concept.

For us that took roughly a year, and 11 iterations. Our first unit looked something like this:

 And our final iteration looked like this:

The goal in this phase is not to work on aesthetics, construction, supply chain, or any of the final product stuff – it’s purely to get it to do what it’s supposed to do. For us, that meant reading brainwaves, and measuring concentration.

Iteration 1 focused on getting sensors on our head to read data. By iteration 4, we were happy with our ability to measure brainwaves from headphones. By iteration 7, we had figured out most of the problems of fitting sensors in headphones, we could detect phenomena like eye blinks, and we were starting to measure concentration accurately. By iteration 11, the sensors, chipsets, and algorithms were solid, and we were ready for the Kickstarter.

These prototypes are typically called the “works-like” versions – they do what you expect, but are ugly as sin. In parallel, we worked on the “looks-like” versions – industrial design shells that look like you want, but don’t incorporate the electronics. The end of step 1 is where the vast majority of projects are when they go on Kickstarter – a functional works-like, and a beautiful looks-like.

Step 2 – Engineering prototype

This is where the fun begins – turning the proof of concept into the engineering prototype. The goal is to combine the “works-like” and “looks-like” prototypes into a single unit.

First, you come up with the first engineering design, which includes part lists, electronics components, tolerances, and assembly plans. Then you go through Design for Manufacturing (DFM) and Design for Assembly (DFA), during which you tweak the design to make sure that your product won’t cost thousands of dollars to make. Finally, you hand-assemble a small number of units (1-5) that use the same parts, assembled the same way, as the final units will. These are called engineering prototypes.

Turning a proof of concept into an engineering prototype is where most of the problems happen. Understandably so: not all designs are manufacturable. The quality of the industrial design, and the skill of the mechanical engineers, dramatically affect the length of this process – anywhere from 1 month to 12.

We’ve been anticipating this process for a year now. In particular, there are three things we did during the proof of concept stage to mitigate the difficulty of this process.

          1. Work with a great industrial design team

A bad industrial designer draws pretty pictures of products that can never exist. A good industrial designer thinks about the product at every stage: the look, the feel, the use, and importantly the manufacturing.

Our industrial design team was phenomenal. With experience in designing and building real products, and deep engineering knowledge, they thought about the manufacturing of the design while creating it. That difference meant that from step 1, we knew our looks-like could be manufactured without too many major design changes.

          2. Test the manufacturing early

By hardware iteration 8, we started focusing our attention on the design of the headphones, in addition to the braintech. Even though at the time they weren’t comfortable, didn’t look pretty, and were more difficult to make, it was important that we experiment with this process early, to screen for major flaws.

These iterations helped us discover a lot of the unanticipated design bugs early on. The flexible top band, the fabric ear sensors, and many other critical changes were a result of these tests. We also consulted manufacturing experts on each part of the headphone, verifying that at scale the components could be made and assembled within budget. In this way, despite having not gone through the formal DFM and DFA process, we were confident that our design would translate to the factory smoothly.

          3. Work with a Tier-1 ODM, not a CM

Most factories follow the Contract Manufacturer (CM) model. Basically, you provide a design, and they make the part. The burden of designing your parts well, and the whole DFM/DFA process, falls on you. Instead, we went with an Original Design Manufacturer (ODM). They take responsibility for the DFM/DFA process, for creating the tooling, for most of the testing, and much more. In this way, we leverage the expertise the ODM has in building great headphones, instead of redesigning the wheel ourselves. In essence: we focus on brain tech, they focus on headphones.

But there’s a problem: not all ODMs are good ODMs, and the good ODMs are selective. In order to get to the tier-1 factories, you need to convince them that your product is worth it – selling the vision, explaining the design, and projecting an expected number of sales. And therein lies the magic of Kickstarter: your pre-orders became the leverage we used to convince the tier-1 factories to work with us.

The result of this process is that our ODM will be helping us with the engineering prototype. Once the quote is complete (as described above), this will be the next step. We’re projecting to get our first engineering prototypes by the end of September.

Step 3 – Engineering Validation Testing (EVT)

The EVT process focuses on validating that the engineering prototypes achieve the design requirements. 

For us, these requirements include everything we promised on kickstarter, focusing on the high level requirements (headphone comfort, audio quality, electrode contact, signal quality, Bluetooth connection).

This process takes 1-2 months, depending on the complexity of the changes we need to make. We expect to test roughly 50 units across this span. During this time we’ll also be looking at problems like flashing the firmware, battery certification, RF levels, and other global standards to which we need to conform.

After all is said and done, we’ll be comfortable creating the final tooling (which is a very expensive, very irreversible process!), and moving on to the next stage.

Step 4 – Design Validation Testing (DVT)

DVT focuses on validating the tooling that you produced during EVT, to ensure that the tolerances, materials, assembly, and production-grade tooling adhere to the requirements.

In addition to the high level requirements above, we will be testing low level requirements: aux plug rigidity, corrosion wear, waterproofness, mechanical fatigue life, etc. In total we have over 100 tests we’ll be performing to ensure that the production quality of the final headphones is rocksolid.

This process requires testing roughly 100-200 units. And by testing, we mean ruining. We’ll be throwing them off ladders, breaking them in half, plugging in the USB-C until it cracks, and tons of other fun jobs. This should take roughly 1 month, assuming no major design rewrites surface.

The end goal of this is to make the final tweaks to the tooling such that at scale (1000+ units), the process maintains the same quality standard on every unit. That leads us to the final step.

Step 5 – Production Validation Testing (PVT)

PVT validates the production process, in order to ensure that when we make thousands of units, no major problems surface. By this point, there should be no more changes to the design.

We’ll be producing roughly 500 units, which are considered final, usable versions. Indeed, unless something goes wrong, we’ll be shipping all of these to our first backers.

PVT helps set in place the Quality Assurance (QA) and Quality Control (QC) standards that become the benchmark during the rest of the production process. We’ll be deciding how the parts will be bench-tested, what batch sizing we’ll be using, and optimizing our production process in the factory’s assembly pipeline. In essence, PVT is the final checklist before we push the button to ship the units. If EVT and DVT went well, PVT should not take more than 1 month.

In parallel, we’ll be ensuring that the distribution network we have set up is ready for the increase in volume. All of this leads up to the moment of truth.

Step 6 – Mass Production

Mass production is when we give the green light, product our 5000+ units, and ship them to our backers. Congrats!

Different people give different answers regarding how long the fulfilment process takes – our best estimate is 1-2 months. This is mostly due to the logistical complexity of getting 5000 units shipped internationally to dozens of countries, a process we’ll be recruiting help for.

All in all, there are a lot of steps between now and delivering Mindset to your door. We’re really excited about the process, and confident that the steps we’ve taken until now put us in a good position to deliver a high-quality product that you’ll all love.

As always, make sure to follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, to get all the latest updates and productivity tricks we’ve dug up. And as always, please share any thoughts, questions, comments, or ideas you have on social or on Kickstarter in the comments!

Until next month,

- The Mindset Team

June Update - manufacturing and timeline
over 7 years ago – Fri, Jul 07, 2017 at 09:59:50 PM

Hey Backers!

June’s come and gone, and with it lots of work! Time for another update on the progress we’ve made, and what the next steps are for us. We’ll keep this one shorter than the previous mile-long essay!

The last month has been focused primarily on getting our manufacturer onboard and up to date on the research, development, and requirements related to Mindset. At this point we’ve narrowed the list to a few key partners, with whom we shared our 70+ page specification document and discussed in detail the requirements for each step of the mechanical, electrical, and audio development.

The next step in this process is for the manufacturers to take the requirements and design we’ve shared, and come up with a quote. It will take a few weeks for the factories to analyze the constraints we’ve provided, and produce an estimate of the production cost. This cost changes from factory to factory based on their in-house capabilities, the tolerance requirements, and a host of other factors. All of these parameters will factor in to who we finally decide to go with.

Following negotiations, the factory will work with us to optimize the design for manufacturability. This process is known as Design For Manufacturing (DFM) and Design For Assembly (DFA). This will lead up to the end of September, when we aim to have our alpha units produced.

While the factory goes through the quote analysis and negotiation process, our team has settled back in Montreal, Canada. This gives us time to catch up on some research and business-centric work that’s difficult to handle while in China – we’ll be here for roughly a month. We’re working out of the WeWork offices downtown – if any of you are nearby, we’d love to meet up!

A few of you had asked about timeline updates – we figured an update was in order.

As we know from previous Kickstarter projects, delays are a frequent issue. During our campaign, we mentioned that the connections we have with HAX, Onkyo, and the subsequent introductions to Tier-1 factories would help mitigate delays. We wanted to go into a few more details on this plan.

As it stands, we’re still on schedule to produce our alpha units in September, as we had planned. This leads to the validation tests over the following months, to begin shipping in December through early 2018.

Prior to our campaign, and again while in China, we spent a lot of time talking to other Kickstarter creators, trying to foresee what problems typically arise, and how we can mitigate them. We wanted to share this information with you, to give you an eye into the manufacturing process.

Overall, there are 3 main reasons projects get delayed:

     1.  Major problems during DFM/DFA 

Converting a design to a scalable supply chain is complicated, and depends strongly on the design itself, and the engineer’s capabilities. This is the main reason we’re so excited to have intros to Tier-1 factories – they have expertise in going through DFM/DFA, and will be helping us a lot along the way. These factories design and manufacture millions of headphones every year, and will be leveraging that experience to tweak our design early and avoid critical problems later on.

     2.  Major problems during beta testing

The beta tests are when we will see our test units going through the range of real-world stress tests, where tiny imperfections start popping up. A good DFM/DFA process mitigates a lot of these problems. In particular, the factories that we’re prospecting have specifically dealt in the past with metals, fabrics, digital electronics, active noise cancelling, and Bluetooth – the most unique parts of our design. Having seen all these issues in the hundreds of other designs they’ve made puts us ahead of the game in mitigating these problems early.

     3.  Stacking of frequent minor problems

Major problems delay projects several months, but many minor problems delay by weeks. Certifications taking too long, audio tests that come back negative, plastic color problems, there’s endless room for silly issues. For companies not present in China, communication back and forth with the factory to fix several small issues can stack up, leading to overall delays on the order of months. By stationing the team full time in China, days of emailing back and forth get reduced to a 20-minute discussion, cutting this time dramatically.

So far, we’re still on track to have alpha units in September, with the rest of the production process and tests following thereafter. For each of the potential issues above, we’re taking active steps to prevent problems before they arise. We wanted to share with you these insights into the process with you, to give context about the process. It’s hard to know what’s going on when you aren’t with us on the factory floor, so hopefully these explanations help!

It turns out that I lied about the short update – my bad! To finish off, here are a few pictures from our latest trip to China!  

 If you like the photos, check out our Instagram for constant updates on our progress!

 As always, share your comments, questions, thoughts and interests in the comments, or on our Facebook and Twitter pages!

Take care,

- The Mindset Team

Update
over 7 years ago – Tue, Jun 06, 2017 at 10:31:13 PM

Hey Backers!

It’s been roughly a month since our last update. In that time, a lot has been going on over here in China! This post is going to be much longer than usual, so strap in!

The #1 priority for us in China during this trip has been meeting with factories. As some of you may know from previous kickstarters you’ve backed, this is without fail the most important part of the development process. Our discussions with these factories pre-kickstarter focused on high-level needs and wants – with the kickstarter backing, the conversations now are much more focused on product development strategies.

We’ve been lucky enough to get introductions to some incredible factories through HAX (who have expertise in Chinese manufacturing) and though Onkyo (who have expertise in headphone design and production). We’ve spent several days vetting, meeting with, and following up with several tier-1 factories – the ones that make Beats, Bose, Panasonic, Sony, and all the other name brands I’m sure you recognize.

These meetings focus on the specific design details unique to Mindset – expertise in low-noise analog electronics, high durability fabrics, and noise cancelling in particular. At the same time, we’re scripting out a game plan for the certification processes we’ll need to ship internationally, and the myriad of tests that we’ll be putting our alpha units through prior to mass production. So far we’re very impressed by what we’ve seen.

We have several more meetings lined up for next week, amidst much external consultation to make sure we make the right choices. As we’re still in negotiations, we unfortunately can’t share any names or images. We expect this process to be finalized by the end of the month, on schedule with our initial timeline.

Meanwhile, we’ve been working hard in-house to continue the tech development. Here’s the current state of affairs:

On the mechanical end, we’ve been focusing on dimensioning the headphones, using the current state of anthropometry research (the study of body shapes). Using MRI data from head scans, we created a mathematical model that allows us to measure the quality of the “fit” of our headphone design on different head shapes. From there, we’ve subtly been tuning parameters (band curvatures, armband lengths, flexibility properties, etc) in order to ensure a universally comfortable fit both on the headband, and the ear cups. This will eventually motivate structural decisions of the stiffness and assembly of each component.

On electrical, we’ve done a lot of research on the noise sources in the analog part of the current board design. This has led to thorough improvements of the active electrode board, which has greatly improved our signal to noise ratio. Compared to our previous version, our electrodes are now 4x less susceptible to impedance-related noise from poor electrode contacts. This is a much more dramatic decrease than we expected. We’re working now on finalizing the noise specifications that we’ll be giving to the factory, which will become the gold standard we compare against for all future tests.

On software, we’ve been working on improving our cross-person accuracy: training a model to predict the concentration of a user, uniquely using data from a different user. This is the gold-standard in classification – and as such, is an extremely ambitious goal to aim for – but so far we’ve been quite impressed by the results. We’ll be sharing more information on that in the future, so stay tuned.

The next month should see a conclusion in factory negotiations, as well as a finalization of our specifications document (current at 45 pages!) This will put us on a good road towards getting alpha units in-hand by September, as planned.

We’re very excited to announce that we’ll be working with the Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI) on two research projects coming up soon!

The MNI is one of the world leaders in neuroimaging and psychiatric research. Through McGill university, we’re working to two researchers at the MNI on using EEG to measure mind wandering, one of the many metrics that globally constitute “concentration”.

The first study will take place in a driving simulator, where we’ll be using Mindset to predict the user’s attention while driving. The second is workplace-oriented, where we’ll measure mind wandering in participants engaging in real-world psychrometric tests of attention. Both experiments will provide us with medically-validated data on which to train Mindset’s algorithms, as well as an opportunity to interact with the world leaders in our space. We’re excited to be working together on this incredible project!

Many of you have been asking for more interaction with the team, so we decided to utilize our Instagram account! There you’ll get a chance to see our progress in real time, and be part of the experience of building a product and experiencing the culture in China.

Click the button above to follow us, so we you can share in our adventures! 

As always, feel free to share your comments, suggestions, and any other thoughts you have on social media. We’re looking to engage a conversation on Mindset, biofeedback, and the state of productivity, and your input is incredibly valuable!

As always,

- The Mindset Team

Back in China!
over 7 years ago – Tue, May 02, 2017 at 09:22:54 PM

Hey Backers!

With three week come and gone since the campaign finished, we’re back in Shenzhen. Looking forward to steamed buns and manufacturing!

With that, we wanted to give you a look at what we’ve been up to during the campaign, as well as what the next few months are going to look like. This will be a long update, so get ready!

The Mindset team is growing! Over 100 interviews later (literally!) we’ve brought together the best of the best to help bring Mindset to life. Finally, we're all together in China!

Anuj (far right) will be taking over electronics – from signal processing boards to Bluetooth modules and beyond. Anuj will be working closely with Atlants Embedded and Onkyo to build Mindset’s top-notch circuitry.

Nelson (right) will be leading the data science development – building up the machine learning algorithms we use to measure concentration. Nelson will be working closely with our neuroscience research team (to be announced!) to take our EEG algorithms to the next level.

Welcome to the team! We’re all excited to be back in China diving into the development – it’s an exciting time!

Now that we're back in China, we’ll be diving in to development. We’ve outlined our priorities for the first 2 months below, leading up towards our alpha units.

On electronics, we’ve completely redesigned both the digital and analog chipsets while the kickstarter was ongoing. We just put in an order for a test PCB run of our active electrodes, and we'll be going through a few iterations in the first weeks. The Bluetooth firmware redesign is near complete as well, which should mean seamless audio/eeg streaming by mid-May.

On electrodes, we’ll be spending some time going through the mechanism that connects the electrodes to the headband. Our goal is to add an additional degree of freedom to the mechanism, to decrease the contact force while maintaining the same flexibility to changes in head shape. In parallel, we’ll be applying what we learned from our materials experts in Montreal to our current electrode design.

Mechanically, we’re going to resume planning with Onkyo and our factories, aiming to nail down a preliminary design freeze by mid-summer. This will let us formalize the sizing of components, which will strongly affect the audio quality, battery life, weight, and such. After this will be tooling, and our test-batch runs.

Finally, on software we’re continuing to focus all our attention on our processing pipeline – embedded logic, Bluetooth protocols, and algorithms. This way, we’ll have a more rigid structure ready for when we turn to focus more on application UI/UX.

All this leads us until late June, when some interesting work we’re parallelizing in Montreal will have come to fruition – stay tuned!

We’re officially working with Backerkit – a crowdfunding fulfilment platform that will help us with credit card payments, shipping addresses, and other aspects of the fulfilment process. We’ll be sending out a survey in the next few weeks that will help us collect information for product delivery, as well as questions about priorities, features, and other Mindset-related things. Keep your eyes posted!

And as always, if you know anyone interested in getting a pair of Mindset, please help us spread the word by forwarding them to our Indiegogo campaign: http://bit.ly/2oTh2VV

We’ll be keeping up the conversation on social media, the best place to find interesting productivity tips and pictures of our progress!

Like our Facebook page @MindsetHeadphones and follow us on Twitter @MindsetOfTheDay, and be sure to tag us in anything you find interesting!

As always, feel free to share any comments, questions, or feedback in the comments section of this post. We love to hear from you all - your comments are the only way for us to get your thoughts on Mindset!

Until next time, we'll be busy prototyping, designing, and otherwise bringing this to life!

- The Mindset Team

Our project was featured on First Backer Newsletter and we’d like to invite you to join its growing community of Kickstarter backers - You'll receive fresh Kickstarter amazing early bird offers and awesome freebies delivered right to your inbox. Click here to subscribe.  

SUCCESS!
over 7 years ago – Fri, Apr 07, 2017 at 12:27:01 AM

Hey Backers! 

First of all… CONGRATULATIONS! Because of your help, the campaign has been fully funded, hit all 5 stretch goals, and put us in a great place to deliver you an incredible product. We’re incredibly thankful for the support you’ve put in us, and we’re now ready to move forward with a strong manufacturing push.

We wanted to touch base and let you know what the next couple weeks are going to look like, both for us and for you.

 With the campaign complete, Kickstarter will be charging your credit cards for the purchases. If for any reason the transactions don’t go through, we will be reaching out in order to resolve any issues.

We’ll be working with a company called BackerKit in order to simplify this process. They will provide a platform where you’ll be able to edit your shipping information, credit card details, or upgrade your pledge to receive additional headphones. In a month, we’ll also be sending out a survey to confirm these details, as well as get your feedback on our product!

In parallel, we’ve launched a follow-up campaign on Indiegogo InDemand. If anyone you know missed the kickstarter deadline, they can preorder a pair of Mindset Headphones at this link.

We’re looking to keep the attention level high, and spread the word about Mindset. As our backers, you guys are our best advocates – we’re looking to you to spread the word, and give us your feedback on what interesting you hear, whether they be about Mindset, about EEG, or about productivity in general.

That leads us to…

We want to continue the conversations we had in the comments, and there’s no better place than social media. Like our facebook page and follow us on twitter, where we’ll keep you updated on the latest in Mindset, braintech, productivity, and more.

And of course, we want to hear about what you find interesting! Tag us @MindsetHeadphones on facebook and @Mindsetoftheday on twitter on any interesting posts, and we’ll make sure to check them out.

While the kickstarter’s been going on, we’ve been busy working behind the scenes

With the team fully assembled (including 2 new hires – stay tuned for pictures!) we’re all set to get working on development. We’ve got some exciting news to share, so look for a more thorough update next week in which we’ll run your through our progress and our game plan.  

For now, in 2 weeks the whole team will be heading back to China, jumping right back into manufacturing. With our partners at the HAX accelerator, at Onkyo, and our manufacturers, we’ll be spending the following 2 months finalizing the headphone design. Our first focus will be on batch-manufacturing electrodes and integrating the electronics data collection pipeline – more info will follow!

For now we’ll leave you with a simple thank you. When we started Mindset over a year ago, we never could have envisioned what it’s turned into. The support we’ve received over the course of the kickstarter has blown us away – Mindset has become a product that we’re proud to say will one day change people’s lives.

And we’re convinced this is only the beginning.

Sincerely,

- The Mindset Team