Gadgetory

hey guys I'm adrianne jeffries i'm here with dave ondal who is the co-founder of central standard time very cool e-ink watch the CST one hi Dave thanks for coming to talk with us today yeah thank you um so tell me where did the where did the idea for this for this watch come from well I've been a been working on it for shut up I've been working on the csto one for about a year now and I've been I worked a lot with e ink on a lot of the other work that I do I work at a design consulting firm called the I do and so I came across their technology which is this thin flexible yank display that's segmented and I was always drawn to it because because it's segmented you can it's super robust super low power and it's flexible what does that mean segment segment instead of pixel based so we designed a series of segments so kind of like a seven segment display would hold if you look at old digital watches they have the 7-segment it looks like a figure eight we made our own version of something like that for this but that allows us to render the numbers a lot better and so if you design the segments properly then you can have this really thin really flexible super low power display and we always thought that there could be a really cool product out there that then used something like this on in kind of a fashion type object so so when was that when you were first thinking of me I was like do you remember how training for January in 2009 we worked on a project with bug labs and we came up with a concept to have a thin flexible display on the side of their their bug let their bug base unit and we designed a segmented font for that and my buddy nix and Betty my partner Jerry O'Leary the other co-founder we all worked together and we develop develop the spot for that and I always wanted to use that font so we that kind of was the genesis of this where it was in the back of my mind since 2009 and then when the i found this microcontroller from epson that had everything i needed in it for a watch that also had an e-ink driver I saw that press release and I kind of thought all right well it's time to start working on this now and what made you like think watch like you know watches aren't like in 2009 especially like people aren't thinking what is like a cool thing I think people were kind of thinking and watches we're gonna you know kind of fade away yeah um the way that we got to watch was the the font needed to be in order for the font to work it needed to be fairly large so in the one we created was alphanumeric and so I wanted to have so it need to be about this big in order for the the font to work with the display and I was just thinking through different things that we could use for this for and I thought it would be really cool to do a word clock so when it was off your wrists and and on the table it would say you know like 1230 and letters and then when you put on your wrist then it would change so that was where it came from and then as we got into the constraints of the of the project we found that it would be better to just focus on the time and just think about the minim like the most minimal expression of the watch right I think it works and so you put it on Kickstarter yesterday yesterday and how much money have you raised on Kickstarter say just over 130,000 in ours would that be we launched at five o'clock yesterday so and it's now 109 okay so that's pretty incredible yeah what made you decide to put the project on Kickstarter um well we we've got minimum manufacturing volumes I always I designed it and worked on it because I wanted to see it made and we've got minimum volumes that we have to hit so the best way that we found to do it with where we're at is to to launch it on Kickstarter and get backers and did you expect it to what did you expect well honey I mean I hoped that it would that it would get funded soon but I didn't expect it to be as quick as it is now um so the big innovations here there's like a micro cell battery that's very thing can you talk about that alone yeah it's a the company is called 'the energy and they make a product called micro energy cell and what's really great about it is that a lot of conventional batteries will after a few years are not going to be very good anymore and they won't hold a charge and that would be bad for this because it's not replaceable so you're watching it would be dead but the synergy will last at least 15 years maybe even more and it's it's a much more robust reliable battery under flexing than than thin lithium polymer batteries right so we've we've actually built a rig where we had this flexing for a thousand over a thousand times more than this all the way to flat in it and it was still doing fine this rig tell me about this rig this is back in Chicago good what is that the rig actually just goes like this well that's not only was itself but in the we glue a battery to a piece of stainless steel a thinner piece and it just rolls it and then on rolls it rolls it unrolls it just and then I'll do that for a certain amount of time and then I'll test the battery see if the battery still performing huh and you actually built that thing right yeah what is your shop look like in Chicago it's a so my work I work at I do and though I work in the Chicago the office of I do yeah we've got a nice workshop and a little electronics lab that I just took a serve a servo off the shelf and connected to an arduino board and built a little rigged or actually I didn't sorry a colleague of mine Gary he's working with us built the rig for us and did the arduino things I gotta give him credit for that that's cool um so originally you said this was developed for bug labs and you guys are still working at I do yes what are they supportive of you having the side project yes ideas a very supportive they want to see people following their passions and they want to keep people happy and if you if you're a designer you're always coming up with with ideas and if you weren't able to follow them then it would be a frustrating yeah and they probably all want some of these watches yeah there are a lot of backers an idea already uh-huh and mine turned black I think does that mean it's sorry mine turned black I think or was that the way yeah it flashes when it updates the time right so when you're looking at it looks like it's just static but and then you're kind of surprised every time it changes to the to the next minute so if you want to demonstrate it to somebody for the first time you you might have to wait 60 seconds hmm but it's definitely very cool looking um so there's a patent pending on this device yes we've we filed a design patent in a provisional patent for flexible a watch of this nature mm-hmm and I've heard a couple people say it kind of reminds them of slap bracelet yeah you guys hit them before yeah I mean that's a that's something that it's it is very similar width thickness as a slap bracelet but we didn't want to go for something that was kind of novelty like that what's right more of a nicer object than that awesome well it looks great and super simple minimal product that is it's definitely getting a lot of attention and excitement here at CES and so thanks from so much for coming on to talk about it okay and one thing that I wanted a bunch of people in the Kickstarter said that nobody nobody actually shows the thinness of it so I wanted to do that take this time on the camera so it is thin yes that's the thickness of the watch itself so all right great thanks so much okay thank you