Switches, a Button Pusher, and a Light

Jon has been hard at work testing a button pusher and a light – both off the shelf – and developing a switch design. He’s confirmed that the button pusher is water resistant by keeping it submerged under 2m of water for a few days. The switch (shown below) is a simple springy piece of metal that will be attached to the surface of the PCB (printed circuit board).

The switch.

Jon has been working on the dimensions of the switch, as well as its placement on the PCB relative to the edge. He set up a dummy board within a 100mm-long case with nine holes in it for the button pushers. Adjacent to the holes and along the dummy board, Jon played with various placements for the switch.

Mockup to test placement of the switches.

A few switches on the dummy board.

Jon was able also to test the combined action of the button pusher and the switch.

Through all the testing, Jon is confident about the dimensions and placement of the switch.

He also has been playing with a light from Lucky Light.

The light draws very little power and diffuses the LEDs evenly.

Jon is here holding the light behind the display.

Peterson Watch Co. Hires New Mechanical Engineer

I’m excited to announce that Jon Fraser has signed on as mechanical engineer. Jon holds a masters degree in mechanical engineering specializing in electrical-mechanical systems. He has worked in aerospace, medical devices, and internet-connected hardware devices (IoT). Most recently, Jon was the lead mechanical, electrical, and firmware engineer developing and manufacturing a cellular-connected credit card terminal, which has sold 10,000 units to date. Jon is a passionate builder of hardware tech with a particular interest in minimum feature set products that deliver high value.

Jon forgot his razor when he embarked on his 10-month trip in a van.

Before joining Peterson Watch Co, Jon spent 10 months traveling the country with his wife and dog in their self-built conversion van. While traveling and being completely off-grid for extended periods of time during the COVID lockdown, Jon watched his wife Talia, an elite cross-fitter and former student of mine, navigate how to do HIIT workouts in some of the most remote corners of America with limited equipment. After witnessing her smartphone app timer fall short time and time again, it became clear that there was a need for a better HIIT-focused tracking solution targeting performance athletes. When Talia introduced Jon to Nick and the early prototype of the watch, it was immediately clear to Jon that he could help fill this obvious gap in the market.

The World of Hardware

“Welcome to the world of hardware,” Don commented wryly.

We were sitting at the black counter at a Starbucks in Williamsburg, looking out the window, both over-caffeinated. Our laptops were surrounded by various watch components, cables, my Zero Gecko EFM32 board that I use to load code onto my clunky watch prototype, and the prototype itself.

Don, our electrical engineer and embedded software programmer, has been working since September on writing the watch’s code in discrete modules and uploading them into Google Drive for me to download onto my device and test. We have one module each for the stopwatch function, the “rounds” workout, and the time interval workout. Once each module is finally perfected, Don will combine them all into a whole and run the code through an optimizer to clean up the code and make it more efficient, and then we’ll have our prototypes ready to hand out to people for testing.

Don and I share a document to track issues and fixes for each module. It includes checklists that track all the button behaviors for all the states. For example, what should the lower left-hand button do during a paused rest interval in the timed-interval module? And what should happen when you press and hold the “pause” button during the warm-up of the “rounds” module? As I test the modules I check each item when it does what it’s supposed to do, or insert a comment when it doesn’t.

We track issues using a button behaviors checklist for each state in each module.

We’re now at a point where the issues are increasingly minor, and the fixes are exponentially easier and faster. But we uncover new issues or decide on new approaches each time; for instance, I seem to remember a neglected button behavior or even a state and add it to the list each round of testing. And the other day, I tapped the “home” button several times in rapid succession (I forget why), and discovered that that ends the workout and takes me the list of results.

We’ve also gotten pretty far into the weeds for the past few months. Here’s something Don wrote in the Google Doc:

”Priority of push” - I’m assuming back (i.e. restart the current workout segment) shouldn’t be able to work when you’re less than 3 seconds remaining in a segment because the countdown would annoyingly just spill over and restart your next segment when it’s a second or whatever arbitrary value in... 

At the Starbucks, I remarked, “Man, who’da thunk we’d been going into that level of, like, arcane? And the whole pressing-the-home-button-really-fast thing?”

Welcome to the world of hardware.

In Praise of Watches that Get the Job Done

The New York Times recently ran a piece about how Apple’s watch can do so many amazing things (“…track the distance you run, measure the noise you hear on the street, record your heartbeat…”) but is expensive and has to be replaced periodically because of planned obsolescence. Entitled, “Apple’s Watch Is Smarter, but My Casio Keeps Getting the Job Done,” the article extols the virtues of Casio’s F-91W watch – a cheap, resilient, accurate watch whose battery, according to Casio, doesn’t have to be replaced more that once every seven years. “In this era of rampant planned obsolescence, the Casio watch remains a remarkable outlier: a once-advanced device that has been available for a quarter-century and still does exactly what it was designed to do.”

The New York Times

I see articles like this on a fairly regular basis. There’s a small and, I think, growing backlash against what the Apple watch represents: constant connectivity, more distraction, extravagance, planned obsolescence. This is the niche I’m going for with the Okobo – specifically, in the world of sport and training.

Chermayeff Signs On

As you can see, Nick Chermayeff is very happy to be a PWC investor. You, too, can be this happy.

We got a new investor! I met Nick Chermayeff through Travis Metz, one of my investors and long-time advisors the summer of 2018. Nick’s son wanted help with his rowing training, and I set up a program for him and encouraged him to row in a single.

Nick is a Principal of Barrow Street Advisors and its affiliate Barrow Street Capital, which he co-founded in 1997. He serves as co-Portfolio Manager of the Barrow Value Opportunity Fund and the Barrow Long/Short Opportunity Fund. But more important than that, Nick is a tremendous father and an incredibly engaging, warm, and funny guy. I’m excited to have him on our team!