Reinventing The Wheel

Where we last left off, Bruno, Fortified’s Henry Ford, was on the factory floor setting up a production line and working toward the Golden Sample Bike Light. The Golden Sample, as you may recall, is the gold standard of which
50,000+ Aviator and Afterburner bike lights will be built.

Bruno’s job is to take a complex prototype and build a manufacturing line to make 50,000 of them. And the quality must be such that these bike lights last forever. The 300 lumen LEDs are driven by a PCB and the brains of the PCB are an integrated circuit (IC). It’s the chip that controls the LED and tells you if the battery is low. During production, each IC is programmed in a fraction of a second.

Here’s the brick wall: the code for the IC works perfectly in the prototype, but it didn’t work on the factory floor. And the guy who wrote the IC code was 12 time zones away. Bruno doesn’t code, but after a few days of frustration and setbacks, Bruno broke through and the video below shows sweet victory.

Bruno also dialed in the tooling and the powder coating for a perfect, durable finish.

But we’re still 99% of the way there. We need to refine the haptic feedback of:
1. The on/off button so it clicks perfect
2. The locking battery mechanism so it closes smoother

Brian, our MIT MechE is working on this as we speak.

We estimate shipping to be in mid-September.

 

Slava + Team Fortified

Comments

comments