Eyez™ by ZionEyez HD Video Recording Glasses for Facebook by ZionEyez Team » Zeyez Engineering Update

Zeyez Engineering Update

Update #19 · Apr 10, 2012 · 141 comments

Technical update:

Zeyez is very excited to announce that it continues to grow its engineering team. Zeyez now has top quality engineers working full-time on Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, and Software & Firmware development of the glasses. We are all working together to finalize the design of the Zeyez circuit board, ensuring that we have all the electrical features we need in the smallest physical size possible.

So far we are happy with how the design is shaping up. We’ve been able to eliminate a lot of bulk in the earpiece areas and hinge areas, which contributes to a sleek, discrete pair of glasses.

ME next steps:

Finalizing the hinge. We must ensure that the electrical cabling running through the hinges does not bind or break as it bends through the earpiece. We’ve designed a hinge that should perform well, we are preparing to test this hinge design to ensure that it can handle 100,000 folding and unfoldings of the earpieces without breaking any wires inside)
Review molding strategy for power wiring. We’ve devised three unique methods for transferring electrical power from our battery in the left earpiece to our circuit board and camera in the right earpiece. We’ll be reviewing these methods with our potential manufacturers in China to develop a production process for running this power bus through a thin sunglass frame.

EE next steps:

Finalize camera module selection. We’re currently evaluating camera modules, with the goal of final selection within the next 4 weeks.
Finalize CPU selection. We’re currently evaluating 2-3 promising CPUs for the on-board Zeyez circuit board. Some processors offer more power at the expense of a larger, less sleek circuit board. Other designs are a little slower, but also smaller and less power hungry.
Antenna placement and evaluation. We need to verify that our antenna gives us the wireless streaming performance that we need, despite being a very small antenna. We’re evaluating a few different antennas in a few different locations within the right earpiece. Our goal is to maximize streaming performance over BlueTooth4.0, while minimizing the SAR (specific radiation absorption) exposed to the wearer of Zeyez glasses, we still have a lot of testing to do here.

SW FW next steps:

Our SW/FW team is currently working closely with the EE team to implement streaming to our Zeyez system over Bluetooth 4.0, using Android and iOS platforms.

Currently, the development tools available for Windows Phone don’t appear to allow us to implement our app on their platform.

We are also building the look and feel of the Zeyez App (designing the controls that will allow you to record, review, and livestream with Zeyez through the App).

Schedule update:

We have an additional 8-12 weeks of designing and testing we need to conduct before our design will be ready to give to our manufacturers for mass production. At this point, we need to make a very large investment with our manufacturing partner to build and buy the tools and equipment we need for mass production, as well as pay for the electrical parts (batteries, cameras, flash memory) for our first production run. This is a significant cost (over US 1M), so we need to make sure we have the design 100% right before this important point in the project.

After we’ve kicked off our first mass production run, it will take our manufacturer an additional 12-16 weeks to get their assembly lines built, tuned-in, and up to speed. During this time, we will be assembling small batches of Zeyez eyewear to test out the assembly lines as they come together. We are planning on building these pre-production glasses for our Kickstarter fans, ensuring that you get your Zeyez eyewear as soon as possible and well before mass-market availability. 24-30 weeks from now, our manufacturer should be able to ship us the first mass produced batch of Zeyez eyewear ready for sale. We can’t wait to get there, we’re working as fast as we can to build our team and get these glasses out to the world as soon possible.