Prototyping- The Key to Defining You Product

Introduction

A key part of testing your idea, before you commit all your resources to your groundbreaking idea, is #prototyping. Prototyping refers to a very broad array of tools and implied skills that are used to create a functional representation of the final product or service. Prototyping varies dramatically by industry and technology. Software, by far, has the lowest “entry barrier” to creating something for the customer to evaluate. Hardware prototyping can be a bit more expensive but well within your financial reach. Some tech, like nuclear reactors, are best left to the large and well-funded companies due to the risk and immense capital and talent required.

What does a prototype do? Well, for one thing it can put the intended functionality into a package that the customer can watch or use in their application. You need to be careful about how the prototype is presented to potential customers and how the appearance of the device could raise concerns about how serious you are about the completing the product to the high quality standards needed for commercial acceptance.

Today (2021) there are many, many types of prototyping tools available for hardware, software, and all things in-between. You need to be aware of these as your prototype is crucial to gaining an insight into the customer’s needs.

The Main Idea

I have heard many people, books, professors, and practitioners claim that you must build a prototype to test your idea. You can try to fake it with promises but you will be outed as a lightweight sooner or later if you cannot deliver. So, lets get a functional prototype done so you can learn much more about your proposed solution and how it must interact with the user.

Concept 2. Build a functional prototype

Some of the most insightful and useful ideas about prototyping comes from the concept engineering field- specifically the #IDEO company (www.ideo.com). Design thinking (#designthinking) is a very deliberate process to work interactively with the customer to elicit key ideas about form and function. Design Thinking is now standard part of many college level courses.

Many types of software prototyping tools exist. You might be concerned that your idea/solution will involve a smartphone app but you don’t know how to code, or like me, its been a while… But we have new product development systems that enable you to re-create the smartphone interface and build in the functionality without writing any code. You may need a bit of help posting or getting data from a database or other resource. But, in my teaching, I showed many students how to create a functional smart phone prototype using a product called #JustinMind (www.justinmind.com). Likewise, there are low or no code solutions to building Facebook apps. Again, you may need a bit of guidance but not a software development team. Do what I did- find a nephew that recently got a degree in software engineering and get some adult supervision (special shout-out to my nephew Adrian).

Hardware prototyping has gotten much easier. I created the first AirAdvice #IAQ prototype appliance using stuff I got from Radio Shack (RIP) and with a software development/data acquisition environment called LabView™ (National Instruments). I had used Labview for years, off and on, and was kind of an advanced beginner. Assuming you have some idea about systems architecture, you can probably find all kinds of modules that you can string together to achieve the result you need. Your goal is to show the functionality, not reduce everything to an application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) on the first try. But even ASICs are built with high level functional blocks today.

Whoops- your idea needs a product you cannot afford or cannot find

To crib from Montey Python- the appropriate strategy maybe to "Run Away!". But you may encouter the same problems that I and many others have had to solve- there is a missing piece of functionality that does not exist or is beyond your reach. At AirAdvice, we knew that measuring particulates in the air was critical, very expensive, usually requiring an expensive device called a #nephelometer (lasers + optics = $$$). Nephelometers measure light scattering- what happens when light impinges on an airborne particle. So In 1999, I was stuck and had no solution to a small $10 particle measuring device. The $3500 instruments were simply not going to work. Had it not been for some experiences I gained at Motorola, I probably would not have found a solution.

What is the solution? It is not a “what” but a “how”. I met a very engaging strategic marketing person at Motorola who told me about #TRIZ (this was circa 1994). This was a theory of innovation created by a Russian scientist for identifying the underlying functionality requirements, not a “module that measures particles in the air”. At this time, I was somewhat aware of the advances in high powered LEDs and wondered if I could find an LED based particle detector. Nope. TRIZ informed me that I needed to look at the functional level to find what I needed and that meant looking outside the expensive instrumentation area. This is key- I had spent 10 years at Keithley Instruments and this had clearly clouded my judgement. I spent way too much time trying to find an instrumentation solution.

My wife, the best innovator in the family, told me that her vacuum cleaner had an LED (I think I knew this) that changed colors when she vacuumed a particularly dusty area (dogs, kids etc). I pulled the manual on the vacuum cleaner and sure enough, a Japanese made dust sensor was inside. I ran through the supply channels and was able to by this component. We hooked up a 5V supply, used my National Instruments data acquisition cards to collect data and presto, we could easily see the dust sensor responding very quickly to anything that might send dust into the air. What we did not know at the time was that this dust sensor had a very large temperature coefficient. In layman’s terms- the value of the output would change rapidly as the air or the module got warmer- not good. But, this sensor was good enough to demonstrate the functionality to many people and was well within our price range. I did demos at these great get togethers in Portland (OR) put on by the entrepreneur community. While the actual setup was pretty ugly, everyone was glued to my laptop showing the “dust measurement”. We later found a much more robust sensor that led to a joint venture and several new patents. More on that later.

Finding Solutions is Challenging

I used to tell my students how challenging it is to find very specific information using Google ™ Search. I often referred to my frustration with Google Search as whacking the Internet with mallet and see what it coughed up. Yes, I knew how to use all the advanced search tools, but Google has eschewed anything that smells like semantic search or the so-called “semantic web”.

What you probably already know about Google Search is that it will often not bring up what you are looking for. Whatever you do, don’t ever do a live image search using Google in front your students or the public. You are just about guaranteed to show images from one of California’s less savory media industries predominately located in the San Fernando Valley. Your search terms are critical in finding what you want in the first few pages. But the wrong search terms will consistently bring you nothing of value.

So to outsmart Google’s ranked priority algorithm, you’ll need to use some semantically similar words. For us, the word “particle” brought up everything imaginable with the most frequently hit websites showing up first. Dust was a good synonym while “dust mite poop” was not[1]. But you may also need to search in different languages for more esoteric or less common components. In our case, no American companies made dust sensors. So, I switched my search language to Japanese ( I had worked in Japan for quite a while), and began search for “dust sensors” in the native language. You don’t need to speak Japanese to do this- you only need to use Google Translate ™ to find the appropriate phrase. You can then do the reverse translation (Japanese -> English) to get the English explanation.

This lead me immediately to wonderful company called Shinyei. Shinyei did not market their “dust sensor” in the US but after I contacted them and explained what we were trying to do, they promptly mailed me a couple of units to test. This solved our particulate problem as the sensor was incredible repeatable and unaffected by temperature, and met our needs perfectly. To this day, I have the utmost respect for Shinyei and their excellent management and technical team.

But this is not a one-off explanation. In my current company, Tailwater Systems, we spent a LONG time trying to find ways to remove chloride from water. We could not find anything, initially, when searching for “chloride” and “water” in the same phrase, the same problem from 20 years earlier. Google Search just turned up page after page of “the only way to remove chloride is through reverse osmosis or ion exchange”. You guessed it- these were the large water treatment companies that had purchased their way through the Google adwords maze to insure their website appeared on page 1 or god-forbid, page 2 of the search results. Not helpful.

While searching for the solution , I decided to shift over to Google Scholar ™, and search the peer reviewed literature and patents. Since I did not know “what” exactly I was looking for, it became quite challenging and frustrating. However, I began to repeatedly see references to reinforced concrete. I dismissed this initially as not being the right media (water). Finally, I dove into the literature a bit, used Wikipedia quite often to try and understand some of the weird material science terms, and found this very unusual material that was being tested.

As a side note- Miami is currently digging through the tragic collapse of a condominium tower. The collapse was possibly brought on by corrosion (salt water = chloride) of the internal rebar (iron reinforcing rods) buried in the concrete pillars.

Once I found the technical name of the material, I began my search again and quickly found some very basic research papers that showed that this same material could be used to desalinate water. Within weeks, I contacted the supplier, worked through their business development people (outstanding), got samples, and validated the results from these 2010 technical papers in my garage (no, not a joke).

I easily made a prototype with the sample material by studying how fishing lures and costume jewelry were made. Basically- we made PVC beads with the material, baked them in a small oven I got from Costco. And, they worked. Not pretty to look at but the functionality was there. That project is ongoing as of this writing so I can’t say much more about it in this venue.

Summary

Once you think you have the right idea, you should build a prototype. How you show this to a customer takes some planning. The Design Thinking process from IDEO can be very helpful in guiding you through this. There may be a need, here and there, for some firmware, scripting, or skills but keep these as small as possible. Leverage friends for their expertise, not their money. Money is the easy part as I will show you in later pages.

[1] Dust mite “poop” is an extremely potent allergen and found in bedding, rugs, fabrics etc.