MacroFab Engineering Podcast #53
MacroFab Engineering Podcast #53
Matt and Jeff of KINETIC join the podcast to discuss scaling up manufacturing of their IoT wearable.
Figure 1: Aditya Bansal and Mijael Damian of Kinetics dropped by to visit MacroFab!
Figure 2: Kinetic’s “The Device”
Figure 3: Aditya Bansal setting up the testing area for preliminary testing of Kinetic’s production run.
Parker is an Electrical Engineer with backgrounds in Embedded System Design and Digital Signal Processing. He got his start in 2005 by hacking Nintendo consoles into portable gaming units. The following year he designed and produced an Atari 2600 video mod to allow the Atari to display a crisp, RF fuzz free picture on newer TVs. Over a thousand Atari video mods where produced by Parker from 2006 to 2011 and the mod is still made by other enthusiasts in the Atari community.
In 2006, Parker enrolled at The University of Texas at Austin as a Petroleum Engineer. After realizing electronics was his passion he switched majors in 2007 to Electrical and Computer Engineering. Following his previous background in making the Atari 2600 video mod, Parker decided to take more board layout classes and circuit design classes. Other areas of study include robotics, microcontroller theory and design, FPGA development with VHDL and Verilog, and image and signal processing with DSPs. In 2010, Parker won a Ti sponsored Launchpad programming and design contest that was held by the IEEE CS chapter at the University. Parker graduated with a BS in Electrical and Computer Engineering in the Spring of 2012.
In the Summer of 2012, Parker was hired on as an Electrical Engineer at Dynamic Perception to design and prototype new electronic products. Here, Parker learned about full product development cycles and honed his board layout skills. Seeing the difficulties in managing operations and FCC/CE compliance testing, Parker thought there had to be a better way for small electronic companies to get their product out in customer's hands.
Parker also runs the blog, longhornengineer.com, where he posts his personal projects, technical guides, and appnotes about board layout design and components.
Stephen Kraig began his electronics career by building musical oriented circuits in 2003. Stephen is an avid guitar player and, in his down time, manufactures audio electronics including guitar amplifiers, pedals, and pro audio gear. Stephen graduated with a BS in Electrical Engineering from Texas A&M University.
Special thanks to whixr over at Tymkrs for the intro and outro!
Hello, everyone. Welcome to the macro fab engineering podcast. We are your guests, Aditya Bansal and
Mihail Damian,
and we're your hosts Parker Dawn
and Steven Craig. This is episode number 53. Which is a special episode because this is our one year anniversary of the Mac Feb engineering Podcast.
I'm surprised we made it past episode 20
gratulations. Guys,
now it's crazy to have been doing this for a year now. It's just it's, I don't know, especially doing it once a week without stopping.
We haven't missed a single week yet
didn't miss any week nothing like, like, Christmas or holidays or nothing.
Now we actually recorded Thanksgiving, like, at our fab. Yeah. Oh, wow,
we've done we've done every week. Gotta gotta gotta keep pumping. Alright, so our guests this week are from Kinetic. It's a company developing wearable devices to reduce workplace injuries of industrial workers. So the idea here is the co founder and CTO of kinetic. That's the Chief Technology operator of kinetic and Mihail is the head of data analysis and supply chain. So you guys want to tell us a little bit about kinetic? And what you guys do there?
Yeah, sure. Kinetic, we're about two and a half years old. Now. At kinetic, our main goal is to reduce the workplace injuries, right? For the people who are moving boxes, like millions of guys, cross globe, lifting boxes, moving boxes, and especially with the advancement of E commerce. There's like a lot more boxes to be moved, I guess. So what happens is these guys with so much manual work, this lot of back injuries, shoulder injuries, and all these muscular skeletal injuries which keep on happening. So our main goal, our company's main goal is to reduce these workplace injuries. And the way we are reducing it in two ways. So one thing which what we have done as if you've seen we have built a small wearable device, which looks like a small pager from like, 20 years back,
oh, man, it's been 20 years for pagers.
And this like small device which sits on your waist on a worker's waist, and what it does is, it looks at their motion, like how they are lift doing the task. And if they are doing the task in an unsafe manner, like having high risk posture, by how this posture, for example, they're bending that back instead of squatting down to lift something from the floor or twisting instead of pivoting. So then what happens is device detects those things. And the, as I mentioned, the main goal is to reduce the injuries. Yeah, the one way we do that is we give the immediate feedback to a worker as like a small vibration, like our phones, give us small feedback just to give tell them, You know what, man, you had a bad posture next time, just remember your training, use better posture. And the second thing which we do is all the devices, all the data which we collect, it can be reviewed by safety supervisors or managers or whoever wants to look at it. And the meaning is like, then it's not like always a worker can correct your posture, many times the job design as well. The way the job is designed, the workplace is designed, or the tools are bought. They can't have safe posture. So management needs to know like what the right tools to buy, how to modify the job design. So that basically the safe motion, right for everyone to have good posture. Yeah. So that's, that's our company's goal. And that's how do ways we are planning to we are trying to reduce the workplace injuries.
Oh, that's really cool. I actually didn't even think about that. Second one. Were actually setting up the environment correctly having the right tools. Yeah. Or, you know, making sure like, the benches or or conveyor is the right.
Yep, yep. Well, yeah. And
what's cool about that is, it's it's not necessarily that you're, say, spying on what somebody is, is doing, you're gathering data to show that things may not be set right for them to do their job properly. Exactly. That's really cool. I hadn't thought about
that. I believe we have a machinist, right? Where the cable that he was using was a little bit too low for him. And by simply just getting a different table, he was able to reduce the amount of high risks lifts that he do know, tremendously, you know, just just by looking at that, which no one would have looked had we not started analyzing that kind of data.
It's like one of our customers who said, right, like, if we can measure it, we can fix it. The problem is quantifying all this problems, right. So which is good, like that's exactly what we're doing. We're making a noise here is your turn to fix it.
So yeah, that's that's funny, because you can you can throw as many signs up on the wall saying lift with your legs or whatever but but now you actually know if someone's doing that.
We're recording in an old government building, and those signs are everywhere.
Oh, stay vigilant.
If you see something, say something
that's everywhere in New York. Yes.
If you wouldn't do Yeah, yeah.
Well, okay, so that that actually leads into the next question. Where's the company located at?
It's based out of Manhattan, New York City. We are right in Midtown. Very cool.
So convenient.
What subway station are y'all off of?
Well, the thing is, since since we're right in Midtown, you have you know, you have the keeping up every single subway line you want? Yes, but
I think it's the orange line. Orange, orange,
yellow, red, green, blue. All of them pass through Midtown zone. You can live anywhere. And
I've been blocked from Penn Station. So like, Oh, okay. I
know what exactly, yeah, very cool. And you said you've been there two years?
About? Yeah, more than two and a half years? Yes. Okay.
Very cool. So, you said the device kind of clips onto the belt? Yeah. Is that the the entirety of what someone would have to wear in order to start gathering data? Oh, exactly. Yeah, yeah. That's it. That's great. And I guess it has like a little charging dock or something that it goes
on as a charging dock. So it's basically you've seen come for the inventory scanners and others, there is no micro USB port, you have pins, and you just dock it and that's it, it's gonna charge. We use the same thing. So like, our devices are basically industry grade devices. So there is no opening, no open open port. They are completely waterproof.
And just what IP rating is the enclosure
for the number one like IP 62 or 63 or something?
It can handle, you know, sweat, it
can handle it can it can handle sweat, it can handle splash and a little bit of rain. Not like it cannot be submerged in water, which I hope no one is doing it. Yeah.
Good and pool.
Your postures terrible. breastroke. So I guess, is it your plan to kind of have it such that? I guess employees come in in the morning, they grab their PPE and this device.
Exactly, exactly. That's the plan. So cool. So is there software that goes along with this? Yeah, so basically, so the there is, in the device itself, there is a bunch of software, which like doing all the machine learning, decision making signal processing and all those things. For the customers, there is a front end dashboard. There is a web dashboard, which they can access where they can access all the data in real time as it's happening. And yeah,
so I've got a little question is, because it gives feedback to the worker right away if they don't lift right, get a little no buzz. But does it connect up to a network? Or is it when it gets docked at the end of the day and uploads its data? So do you mean tenuously connected? You mean giving feedback to the worker? No, no, like, like if it like the supervisor in the day when
it's at the end of the day? Okay. Yeah.
So that means means your battery life is actually probably pretty good. Since you don't you're not connected to the Wi Fi.
So yes, and no. That it's good in the sense like, I mean, yes, without not having Wi Fi during the day, it saves us battery. But our battery itself is only 15 hours.
That's the That's two shifts. Yeah, let's hope
that's longer than Yeah.
The reason I'm saying it's kind of like it's good or bad birth, because the way we designed a product, you know, it's the habit, right? I remember like few years back when my phone was discharging, it was useless for two days. Most of most of the time my phone was discharged. But when it lasted only one day, every night, I'm putting it on charge. And every day I had full charge. So it's the thing that we wanted to put this thing in the habit that you know, everyday, you have to put it on charge not once a week, not every third day, not every second day. That was a habit. Yeah, make sure it doesn't get discharged. Exactly. So our main goal is like 15 hours battery life is accounting for like one long shift, like 1011 hours are too small to small shifts. And just at the end of the day, put it on the dock. Yeah.
So how does a user attach themselves to it? Do they have one that is fixed for them? Or can they somehow at the beginning of their shift, just pick anyone? And then clip it on? And then how was it? How was it tied to the person?
So the way it's tied? So says as you mentioned that two things one thing is so for each device has a small display, which shows the name of a worker. So using the web dashboard managers can assign, okay, these are the devices, these are the workers, the names appear on the devices, they can pick their name. The other thing which, which is very interesting for a lot of companies is not looking at individual worker, but looking at job category as a whole. Like all the drivers on this route or all the forklift operators or all this loaders, what happens there so that the device, the workers knows that any device they can pick with says loader, it doesn't matter which their device, it just because the whole job category is going to be aggregated at
everyone at that job will be doing the same kind of work. Exactly. That's idea. Okay, cool.
Well, I think I think we kind of get an idea of of what the product is. Let's hear a little bit more about you guys. Let's let's hear some simpler about your background.
Sure. So it all began
where it all began. So for a DD I believe it began in India, right. I was born and brought. Yeah, so basically, I did my electrical and I did my PhD in electrical and computer engineering from Purdue. Go Boilers. And then now, so and then I was working for I was working for IBM, IBM Research in New York. And then after working there for five, six years, I was getting bored. Like, it's Vogue was interesting, but it's not consumer electronics. It was mostly enterprise stuff. So that's the time I started a small company called veterans. So let me just quickly talk talk about it like this very cool product, like two minutes, sir. Have you ever tried reading while running on a treadmill? It's yeah, it's rough. Yeah, it's rough. Right? So what we did was because your head is wobbling, and you can't focus your eyes, right? sighs So so so we'll build a small device, which is basically a square inch in size, which you can clip it to your shirt or a headband, and that device and run with the device, and use a tablet. So as you're running as a head is moving in 3d space, the text on the display is going to move exactly in sync with your eyes. Oh, wow. That's so what happens is, as you're running, the runner is going to feel like the text is still on, they can read comfortably. But like but the text is moving exactly in sync as it's moving. Oh, that's super, that's gonna freak out
the people who are standing next to the treadmill, they like what's what's going on? Like? It's moving? How can you read it like, but the person who is running they can read it. So cool. And like I had a crowdfunding campaign. And which went bust Because apparently, people love the idea, but they like to listen to music, or, you know, watch TVs or many people are running and reading. So it's not a big fan. But
a lot of people are not running and reading because they can't.
For hardware business, it's not that easy, like unless you have a lot of people who are willing to buy it. Sure. And that's the time I met my co founder Haytham so he had a background in Biomedical Engineering and he was director of Incubation Center. So we were just chatting generally talking about it. And then we got into TechStars accelerator. And then that's the time we formulated the whole whole company like this is what we want to do. And we both of us had like stable jobs. And we're like, okay, you know, what, if five people five big companies sign up to do pilots, we're gonna lose our day jobs. And that's it more than five signed up and we left we quit our day jobs and started this company Hey,
cheers to that.
Cheers your wives too because both of our wives they were working so they're like they gave us one year in a one in one year you have to get at least one paycheck otherwise
they're both very smart
you know it's the same thing I heard that my I another startup I work that just make sure that you marry someone who's in finance or insurance and you're okay, you can just follow your dreams.
Man, I marry a girl who has his MBA in finance but she was like you know what, I don't want to work I just you will get I'm just gonna take any
Oh, me? Oh, yeah.
Oh, my background was a mechanical engineer. I mean, my my sports school pride is not it's not relevant because you know, my football team basketball team, anything team is really bad. New York Columbia University and you know, sports is really really, really not not not something that we're proud of, but you know, go fencing or something. So out of college, I joined a startup called Kimi and what they do is you know, they have a they you can you're able to store your your hausky or your apartment key on the cloud. And if you get locked out you You can go to their kiosks in seven elevens are Beth Beth and beyonds and print the key right then? So you're kind of never locked out?
Oh, that's awesome. Yeah. Especially in
New York City, you know, we have locksmith that charge like 300 $400 for a lockout, it's just unreal. So that's where I was doing a lot of data analysis, a lot of operation, a little bit of supply chain. And, and that's, that's how he, you know, I linked into, into kinetic and that's exactly what I'm doing, you know, some data analysis making sure that the data is actionable, which is, you know, one of the most important things you know, it's great to give numbers and everything but if it's not something that you can work on, and you know, it's something that you can relate to, it's really difficult. And working with Microsoft now, which is great. No, it's my second. This is my second time in Houston.
It's great. We're here last week. Yes, yes,
I was here last week. Santa can steak it's I just realized the Super Bowl is Sunday.
Good. You're leaving because we absolutely mayhem.
Oh, it's gonna be a zoo. Doubt. Yeah, downtown is already just completely destroyed. You
guys have tickets? Oh, no, no,
no. Staying home. And I probably won't even watch it.
Why do you guys are in the dressing room for anybody? So what's the deal with everyone here just wearing like Falcons gear? Is that something? Is that? Because it's the area or you just hate the Patriots? Well, you
know, the thing is like you're talking to two electrical engineers about sports. I mean,
I follow college sports well, but I don't I don't really care too much about pro sports.
To be honest, I wouldn't have the first clue.
Well, but But anyway, yeah, no, that's what I do. And it's been great working microphones so far. Cool. Yeah, looking forward to it.
Well, um, when I tell you what, let's say let's get into some of the nerdy stuff. Let's talk about hardware like so, the guts, the guts of this thing. I mean, obviously, we're not going to reveal any secrets or anything like that. I believe we're lawyers
prevent us from doing
as much sign the NDA on the screen.
Find a piece of paper just
mail to PO Box. 368 Houston, Texas. 777777.
So actually, how'd you guys? I mean, who did the actual hardware design on the actually, you know, what, what's the name of the product? What's it called?
Man? US stepping on enough man. Names. We've been like, you won't believe we've we've thought about the name so many times. And eventually, if you like the calling it device variable unit, all of us hate it. But we can't come to a single name
I got so what is the file name? The word in your EDA tool? So where file name? Yeah, the file name?
Like like the like? Yeah. The name of the schematic file or the PCB file?
The original name was You Are you a RT? You don't want something to go off? You are? No but no, man we just calling it device or variable unit?
Yeah, well, unit
doesn't have a pet name or?
Well, you are. You're Yeah. Okay. So I guess we'll call it device. Yeah. So, so device detail. Did you do the hardware design on device? The
initial hardware design? The hardware design? Yeah, I did. I did most of the pretty much all of the electrical engineering design in the beginning. Okay. And Haytham did the mechanical engineering piece of it. Cool, like designing the enclosures and other stuff.
So so I'm assuming it has some kind of i It works on some kind of like gyroscope or accelerometer or something like that. Okay. So just depending on what signals it's reading in, there's some algorithm that it the exact thing, okay, cool.
That's what it does. So it does a pretty good process. I can just read a little bit details about the hardware this No, no worries about it. Okay, so we have so these Intel Edison module, which is basically a dual core Atom processor, a gigabyte of RAM, four gigabytes of flash.
That's no device.
This isn't a stamp size, man.
That's pretty beefy. really beefy,
you're talking to people that like, like, I use an eight bit AVR that's got two kilobits. If
it's like a computer, which you bought in the year 2000 or 2001.
Yeah, so the battery life of 15 hours is actually way more impressive now.
Exactly. At 6am Getting 15 hours, can you Wow.
That's pretty good. Right? Awesome. So basically,
the reason we have it there and I mean, that's, that's something which I can always reveal is basically its ease of development, right? I mean, if you're building your own with SOC microcontroller, there's a lot of issues there. I mean, you have to like code properly. And like we are doing signal processing, machine learning bunch of stuff. And we have a pretty lean team. And so the software engineer, the machine learning guy, they want to use Python go, I use C, C++ shell. And so we wanted so much so many technologies, we are working together. And we decided, okay, you know, what, embedded Linux is a good choice because everything can be there. So it is embedded Linux, and yeah, so he's uses elixir go Lang, C, C++, everything. So the and the reason is ease of development, right? And it has, of course, motion sensors. That's what it does. And we need a good processor to do, as I mentioned, so if if this device don't need, they don't need continuous connectivity. So they have to do all the signal processing and crunching on the device itself right so that's why we needed a little bit beefy processor at least 150 200 megahertz processor to do all this come I
was just about to ask how fast it runs. That's it's half gigahertz processor. Wow. For a wearable like that, that's pretty Beefy. Beefy. Yeah,
I'll put it this way. Or the The Pinball Controller I design runs at 80 megahertz. And that thing gobbles power
you have it all the way to the max using every clock
so yeah, that's actually insane that a wearable like that can have that much oomph under the hood. Right yeah. Speaking in the hood it's got an injection molded enclosure too. Yeah, yeah. It's actually really like what goes into designing something like that? Because I've designed like 3d printed stuff but nothing but has to get made in terms of like 1000s Yeah like for
me to talk talk about that
wow, well
look like he just had like a flashback actually have
one there are a lot of iterations you know we're really lucky to have an amazing team you know our mechanical or mean mechanical engineer Steve, we love you guys we love you we love Him He is amazing and I'll just give you like a quick like a quick story behind it. So you know guys we have a we have a dock right where we charge our devices and and we have the wearable where we put the wearable into the dock and the best part about it was that you know like Steve came up with a really clever like super super simple way of making sure that the device stays in place because before when we put it in the dock it would vibrate it actually jump off and we would have no idea like how to fix this is Steve amazing design just makes a small change on the on the actual on the on the charging well on the welder holds the the wearable, and magically just stays every single time. So that just gives you an idea of how clever subtle and just amazing of a designer this guy's like
amazing guy with background from Motorola. You can imagine he's good with designing industrial grade product. Yeah, no
this Yeah, the thing that that is funny when you said pager. You were not joking. This just looks like a slightly more modern pager. Yep.
It's even got a sensor it work. It's actually it's not like a pager where it clip pagers it was from I remember they just clip on your belt. Yeah, this thing's got a locking mechanism
it has a lock is not going anywhere.
So it's actually great because one thing I noticed about pagers is that like we bent down a lot they will just pop off your belt for nothing clamps onto your belt and it's not gonna follow you forever Yeah, it
was made that that design is just not gonna move Yeah, just
like today I'm on my you know, we're leaving we're going into the airport at Newark Airport. And you know, I put my stuff on the bin and I put the you know, our device on the bin and then you know, a device gets you know, pushed aside and gets reviewed. And the leader ruin my device looks at me and she goes she looks at it takes a second look and she's like pager I didn't even correct it. It's like yep, you
guys are from his back and
actually, another thing is the OLED display. Yeah, it's beautiful. It's real.
So I actually have one in my hands right now and it's crisp and clear. And it says say stay safe for the back of it just like you could almost just write propaganda
for Facebook messages or something
Wow. That is a it's it's it's got like some kind of cam mechanism there. That is locked it in place. That is that is super nifty. And the thing that thing that there's no like buttons or anything on it, you just clip it in place and
that is one thing but you can press it ah versus you Good. But this device the way we have designed it, you cannot turn it off.
You can always running, it's always
running it. I mean, of course the battery is discharged, then you stand off. But if it's
ask if you solve the problem of running out about some other stuff.
Yeah, they're just not tagged the basically you cannot turn it off. Because that's not the use model, right? I mean, don't expect someone to use it or turn it off.
Yeah, it's like, um, it's gonna be slightly political, maybe. But like officers that were cameras, and they're like, We want to be able to turn them off. I'm like, why not the point.
So So I guess with this button, you can scroll through the menus. It gives you the time. And then it said, at least this model says what 16 Today this is that 16 times since the
height of slips you have done so. Oh, hi. So 16 high rise ball maneuvers.
Very cool. That is That is awesome. So challenges with the project. Did it go super smooth? Were there?
There? Were? No if anything, if anything I've heard hardware is like a double diamond. You know, it's like it's redic there's always something new? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.
I think in my experience, I've seen like, I used to hear this thing from other startups that software is a challenge. And then hardware becomes challenging and software becomes challenge. And this tool in our case here oscillates between initially like software was a challenge because our hardware was breakout boards from SparkFun and Adafruit this big, like little like, I think six inch by a kind of four inch kind of big thing, which is put everything together and trying to make software work. Once software started working, we started building this hardware. And that was the cam mechanism, which you see here. Yeah, it was really painful.
Yeah. How many iterations of that? Case enclosure Did y'all go through? When I didn't? How did y'all go through that?
Just during the past few months? Probably like three or four? Yeah,
did y'all 3d print them? Or? Cuz ideas,
too. So we did like 3d printing about some long time back now actually. Even with 3d printing, we started to use what is this? Stratasys? Right. Well, what is this was like a resin printer. Yeah, some like really, really good printer, I forgot the name of it. We were using those printers like some really good high resolution printers. And then what? last few months, what we do is just laser cut or just basically prototype like yeah, it's just just milled down. Basically, we can't like machine is because the thing is like the way we have to test the strength, you can't have 3d 3d print. Exactly. You
can't have the layers breaking the strength. So you would actually take a block of, I guess, abs and down and then Milla down is that I guess it's not a good analog for injection molding then? No,
I mean, it could be but then again, we also would also ask for I mean, maybe, maybe
I'm like, that'd be kind of interesting. No, if that's actually a really good analog cuz I know 3d printing, not at all. No.
Yeah, that's why it was a major challenge. Because, you know, the people who are gonna use it, they are like, sometimes they really they're gonna first thing they don't own it, the companies on it, it's for their safety, but still man like some people we have seen like they've muscular like they're really massive and muscular and they are like using a device like as if there's a toy they hold it properly. So we had to do a bunch of testing on this to make sure it's gonna drop down Yeah,
and we talked about those guys pretty regularly like, you know, if you get it you give a guy a screwdriver or let's say you give 10 Guys a screwdriver and you tell them all to put a screw in a hole. There's there's guaranteed to be a guy in the group who just just crammed it just destroys it. That guy he's a gorilla
gorilla proof basic Yeah, right.
Back when I was working with some some oil and gas stuff, we called them Bubba's if you can if you can make a product that can survive like a 300 pound Baba out in the field. Good product.
This one does this one does.
A lot of testing. Yeah. About the testing. Actually, what topic were we currently on? I want to make sure before I go off another tangent cuz that's all of them. Testing we're kind of testing don't have to do for this product. That was because the safety advice Yeah. So is there any extra like because normal product has to go through FCC CE depending on the product accounts go through you Well, yeah,
CSA, etc. All the European one but it's the same thing is is there any
extra stuff and what other senses industrial product, what other kind of stuff we had to do that a normal consumer product wouldn't have to go through.
I think some of the really, really fun level testing, which we have done is basically the mechanical testing of the whole enclosure. We have done like, four feet, eight foot dropped us on concrete, and each and every corner on each and every side. In our office, we have we have a shared space, the shared space, we have like one row of like eight desks. And then we have a big black drum. Because we had to do the barrel testing like the drum. We put in a barrel and roll it down for like half an hour, 45 minutes at certain speed. So we got like, all the specs from whatever IP 6263 or whatever, and went through all of them. And went a little bit rigorous and just trying to figure out when we actually break it. So when to four feet, eight foot 12 foot drop. We did huge amount of humidity test we did. So before we actually go to the the the official testing agency, we wanted to make sure everything is fine with this. Yep. So basically we did temperature test for zero degrees Fahrenheit because some of our customers are in like places like Alaska. So zero degrees Fahrenheit was basically my my my kitchen freezer between chicken fish grinded down to the like the lowest temperature and did all those things.
Work at that low temperature. Does the OLED display work at a low temperature?
Only vlogged OLED couldn't handle the high temperature 170 degrees Fahrenheit at 170 degrees Fahrenheit. This white OLED it became blue. I would be
I'd feel sorry for the workers that have to look boxes.
It's just Houston in the summer.
That bad.
We were looking online, like what's the highest temperature in us like in Arizona or someplace? 139 31 degrees Fahrenheit. Okay, we're gonna make it like 160 degrees Fahrenheit, let's operate for the full shift. Yeah, and the only turn blue.
That's the that's the only negative. So that's only negatives. Oh, great. It turned blue.
Right, you can see that was a feature too.
So I actually did, I did some testing for an old job that was similar to that we actually rented a chamber called a halt chamber, which which rapidly goes between two temperatures that you choose, well, it hammers it with a whatever vibration you choose. So effectively, what you're trying to do is just destroy the device. So you destroy it. Then you fix what broke. And then you go again until you find the next thing. And you just keep doing it. And funnily enough, we had an LCD, oh, no, I'm sorry, an LED display on there. And I had that thing going for four hours. It went from boiling to negative 30. And it was it was going in that it was going between those two temperatures in 20 minutes. Wow. While it was vibrating at 10 G's. And I could not get the screen to break for four hours and the operator of the machine was like, Dude, your device is fine.
Made that that screen?
No, I can't remember off the top of my head. That was six years ago. Yeah, I mean, the screen the screen turned all kinds of funky colors. But I could still read it. And it was a touchscreen to still work. Wow. Yeah, it was it was hot glue. Did
you just squirt.
But I mean with with that much heat and vibration? I mean, components were just popping off the board and it still works, you know, some passengers on the ground. I'd be like, well, it's still working. Alright, you don't need that bypass cap. Yeah. Okay, so I'm, I'm kind of assuming OSHA's potentially eyeballing this. Is there some?
Yeah. So we basically. So OSHA doesn't have any regulation for the lifting biomechanics. They have a lot of things which you guys know already. But so but so there is one government body called NIOSH, National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, or hazard something. So we have partnered with them. So we have some government funding to work with them. And they are based out of Cincinnati and they are basically testing a product and how it works well with their they have like, really sophisticated like motion capture lab. Like, I don't know, like 1015 cameras, and they will capture from every angle. Like when someone is actually doing a particular job. They were testing a device against it, which is pretty
cool. Yeah, that's awesome. Awesome. Yeah. Very cool. So like, what if, what if our listeners want to check out more about it? Where might they go? Read some about this,
they can go to a ver kinetic.com W E, AR like variable When kinetic.com
Where kinetic.com Very cool, awesome. Well, shoot you guys have anything. Anything you want to want to add in here? No, I
got a question. Gotcha. Um, you know, your company is based in New York city wide, y'all decided to pick a Houston company to build.
Just so so I'll be super honest with you guys. Alright. So it doesn't it wasn't because it was a Houston based company. So, you know, location didn't matter what would matter most to us, it's you know, commitment, you know, quality of work and how dependable you guys seemed at the moment. And so far, we've been, you guys have been macrophyte has been extremely, you know, helpful. You know, they've offered to help us with absolutely everything. So, you know, we, we send quotes, and we send, you know, everything that we needed to multiple companies all around the US, you know, from, from Massachusetts to, to New Jersey. And believe it or not, geography was kind of like a filter in the beginning because we wanted to be have a place where, you know, we can be there within an hour or two in terms of driving or you know, like a train or anything, because, you know, building something, especially when it comes to hardware, it can be a bit flaky, you can you could have an error, you know, in assembly or, you know, just you don't know what's going to happen. So you have to be there to make sure that everything goes right. But, you know, once we looked at your website, macro fabs website, and realize how committed you guys were to the experience, and you know, how much care you put into how we build our product. It made us It made us feel more comfortable about you know, building, the building our wearable unit and charging, which are so you know, everything we have and everything we believe in macro five, so, so that's why so it doesn't matter if it's in Houston or California or Seattle or even Chicago at this at whether or not we're happy to work with macro. Very cool.
Thank you. Yeah. I got another question is What are y'all the most proud of at kinetic? Zero, both gonna have probably different things. Yeah,
I let a DJ go first.
What are you most proud of? What are
you most proud of, of what you've accomplished at Connecticut for the past two and a half years?
My cell phone as a team? Both? Okay. I mean, now. I mean, it may sound a little cheesy at the risk of sounding cheesy. And what I would say is, we've been super lucky with working with folks and like the kind of team which we have had. And no man, this is like, we have some of the early employees, they are like really good. And that what I'm very proud of like, the kind of people we had, like we can, we can throw anything at them man, like Mikhail like he can be data analysis and supply chain. But he's basically head of everything. You throw anything at them. And all of us were like that, like all of us, like, one day, you're screwing. You're basically tightening some screws and a charging dock and next year writing of software. So it's basically our team. We are a very lean team. But we are very, very, like super good i attitude of the team. Like we are not very defined roles. And that's something which I'm very, very proud of as a founder, like we actually gathered pretty good folks. And I think that's when we can build anything the product can change. But I'm very proud of the company which we have built, which we're building.
So I shouldn't have let a DJ go first because he stole mine.
That's what I was I was trying to hide my life. So it wasn't like I wasn't laughing that what they were saying. He Yeah, he made his face
every grace, I'll say it in a different way. Perhaps you know, I'm proud of you. I mean, I'm proud of the product. I'm proud of the company but I'm more proud about being able to work with such accomplished people that know their field. You know, you have okay tell so I'll throw out names you know, you have you have a deed Yeah. Which you know, if you have a problem about you know, anything with a device, you go to a DJ and it's so absolutely amazing. Yep. You know, Haytham who's just really good at explaining things and understanding things. You have a Saleem, who is, you know, a math whiz and you know, every time you have a math question or a programming question, then he he has this this patience that just allows you to be comfortable with asking questions and may may seem dumb to you, but you know, it's you're super comfortable. You have a matt who Matt is just like, I mean, sometimes I think Matt's a robot, because Matt just does things and then he doesn't like so rapidly and so well. And, you know, I'm super happy to work with him. And you know, we just had a two new team members, Evan, who was amazing Using and building the assembly docks and the documentation and everything else. And, Vincent, if you're listening to this, we're really happy to have someone like you on the team as well. But no, it's really, it's really amazing to have such a good team such as dependable team, because, you know, I've been in other companies and, and, and it's hard to depend on somebody, but it's here, it seems so easy to depend on somebody
just give you a quick note about our our culture here. So me and my co my co founder, he is originally British, and he loves mob x. So we are basically we are co founders in a company. So it's Haytham myself, and we have two sock puppets. So anytime a new guy joins our company, one thing is they have to go through the sock cupboards. And we have a portrait of a tiger. So they have to have their portrait of a tiger. Any any new guy who joins they have to have this portrait of the Tiger right next to their laptops, or
is it the ceiling is so high that it's a
little bit of a ceiling? It's the ceiling
so I've been avoiding having the tiger in my space, but you're gonna keep the tiger. That's a co founder.
So yeah, so we have very fun culture, right. Oh,
it sounds like a great place to work. Yep, yeah. Great. Cool.
All right, so I'm gonna mess up now on Zoom one. Anyone else have anything else that else else else else? Yeah.
Well, just thank you very much for having us guys.
And hey, thanks for being part of the one year anniversary.
One year I still can't believe you haven't skipped a week. Yeah, so he said he wanted to
record every Thursday
on Friday. So and we have no plans and stuff and not yet at least that's for sure.
So you are gonna edit the whole like Muppet thing right?
out the volume.
edit that part out. And that will be like, like, that's the podcast. Yeah. So do y'all want to sign us out?
Yeah. Yep. All right. DJ, go for it. It's all yours.
Buddy. Bottom of the sheet.
Alright. Alright, fellas, so that was the macro fab engineering podcasts. We were your guest Aditya. And McCarl. Yes.
Even Craig later everyone, take it easy. Take care mode.
Good sticker.
Matt and Jeff of KINETIC join the podcast to discuss scaling up manufacturing of their IoT wearable.