Pioneer

“They broke the mould when they made Kraftwerk”. An English saying that indicates that - in this case a music band - is super special, unique under the sun. Kraftwerk pioneered electronic music, and although everybody makes it nowadays, there can be only one pioneer!

We live in exciting times because technology allows us to be pioneers on an unprecedented scale. Apple pioneered the first real smartphone. A phone with a nice big touch screen and no keyboard at all, integrating internet and phone functionality seamlessly. Now it’s time for the first real smart home. Crownstone, the first system that reacts to your personal presence, is uniquely positioned to be that pioneer as well. And so are you!

Moulds for the Plugs

If you were actually scared that we broke some physical moulds, we definitely did not!! AMS worked extremely hard in the last weeks to build these miracles of engineering, beautiful! If you ever wondered about how you create the plastic that a plug is made off, the following pictures you will like a lot!

Packaging

There are many, many things to think of when building a smart product. In the next newsletter we will go in detail about what can be expected in the app. But apart from developing the smartphone software, the software in the cloud, the firmware on the Crownstone, and designing the electronics, the plastics, and the metal, there are myriad of other things to do! From certification, having a webshop, adding a forum, moving to another place, creating an investor kit, setting up partnerships, to mundane things like “how should the packaging look like”? To give you a sneak preview, this is what we came up with!

An impression of the packaging for the Crownstone plugs:

Pretty neat, isn’t it!? Currently our schedule is such that we estimate that we can ship the plugs in the week of the 10th of October. One of our biggest hurdles has been to bring down the costs for the electronics to acceptable levels while still having outstanding quality. One example, in many USB adapters you will see a capacitor that is not classified as an X2. Even though it might be a metallized film capacitor with self-healing properties it might have undesired failure modes (see e.g. this pdf for techies about caps in the TGV trains). Anyway, thank you all for being patient with us! Like you see, we are almost there! We will slightly increase the communication in the coming weeks to keep you up to date when exactly you can expect the Crownstones (and we will make sure we have an up-to-date address).