BERI Blog

Star Prototyping

2012-03-12T05:22:15Z

We hit the jackpot with our visit to Star Prototyping last week. They are a full-service prototyping shop with quality standards totally up to western standards. Ned and Blair are finalizing the SolidWorks files for several of our plastic parts. We'll fire those off and go back to visit them later in the week. Photos and more description here.

PCB factory visit

2012-03-12T05:16:55Z

Ever wonder how those green printed circuit boards are made? Me too. I had seen videos on the web, but there's nothing like seeing the whole operation up close and personal. And when you visit a Chinese factory you can't beat the up close part -- no barricades to stand behind, no minders to make sure we don't see certain parts. Just wander all over unfettered with cameras blazing. The photos and more description is posted here.

Hua Qiang Bei electronics market

2012-03-12T04:13:29Z

Last week we made a trip to the Hua Qiang Bei electroncis market. It's about 10 city blocks chock full of every electronic gizmo you could ever want -- IF you could find it. The place takes some detemination to ferret out the gems. I put up photos etc on my personal blog.

Year of the Dragon -- making stuff in China

2012-03-04T23:32:20Z

On Friday we had a real treat -- a presentation by Scott Miller, president of Dragon Innovation. Scott and his team cut their teeth manufacturing the Roomba robot vacuum cleaner in China. Now with Dragon they are helping companies like us to navigate the mine field of doing business here. It was a 2-hr presentation with more information than I could keep up with in my notes, but here are some highlights:

First and foremost -- pick the right factory. And stay out of the supply chain. That is, the right factory will be able to source the components and sub-assemblies way better than we can.

Is the product a good fit for China? Not all are. A few of Scott's decision points: COGS (cost of goods sold) sensitive (BERI = yes), lots of manual labor (BERI = yes), volume > 5,000 units (BERI = gulp!!!), does the manufacturing technology exist (BERI = yes), and a bunch of others. Scott gave us a little quiz at the end to see how well we were paying attention.

The Cost-Schedule-Quality triangle. You can't have all three.

Bill of materials. Deconstruct the BOM with as fine a granularity as possible. Use the 80/20 (Pareto) rule.

Various ways to avoid loss of IP. For example, use an encrypted bootloader for the microcontroller code.

The payment terms will be unpleasant for an expensive product like ours. 40-70% payment at materials authorization (MA). That could be millions of dollars six months before we see any bikes.

BERI goes to China!

2012-03-04T07:48:34Z

Boulder ElectroRide was selected to participate in a hardware accelerator program called HAXLR8R in Shenzhen, China. We'll be here for a little over 3 months learning the ins and outs of doing business in China as well as other business mentoring.

We're here with ten other hardware startups at more or less the same stage as us. In mid June we'll decamp China and head to San Francisco for the "Demo Day" in front of potential investors. If all goes well this process will jump start our development process.

I'm keeping a blog our personal experiences here if you're interested in life as a short-term newbie expat in China.

A Good Reason to Ride an E-moto

2011-05-09T23:34:49Z

These guys know how to sell bikes

2011-03-25T18:17:24Z

If this doesn't work, what will?

M3 under her own power

2010-12-28T17:19:40Z

Blair came in yesterday and asked "are you ready to go?" Unbeknownst to me, he had spent all day Sunday knocking off the remaining items on the mechanical to-do list. It took us the rest of the afternoon with the solder flux heavy in the air, but by 4 pm we'd had the last connection made and M3 was ready. With some trepidation on both our parts, Blair threw the toggle switch and the the rear wheel spun merrily in the air. Now it was time to drop her off the stand and let her rip. Here she is leaving the shop for the first time under her own power.

My first impression was that the bike was stunningly silent. Our Zero is relatively quiet but still has a lot of chain noise. M3 glides along like a ghost. The second impression is that Blair dialed in the handling perfectly. We still have some fit-and-finish items to knock off, as well as getting the controller dialed in -- but the first ride was a big boost for all of us. The bike was rolled back to her stand when darkness fell and it was off to the Boulder Brewery for celebratory beer and burgers. We'll post more reports as we get more miles on it.

The best Plug-In America PSA yet

2010-12-20T16:24:27Z

Our cells are coming!

2010-12-03T18:27:21Z

After a long wait, the boat with our 16 amp-hour cells has finally arrived in Seattle (from China, of course...) and they are in transit to Colorado. If you are in the market for cells, I can highly recommend Dave Kois and Current EV Tech.

Can someone tell me why the US has, for all practical purposes, totally abandonded the lithium ion cell market? I've never been inside a cell factory, but it doesn't strike me as the kind of thing where China has a strategic advantage (e.g. not labor intensive, not an environmental disaster, etc). I can envision the day where China wants to strangle competition for the EV market and chokes off the supply of cells to the rest of the world. They've certainly demonstrated their proficiency in that sort of bare-knuckles competition in the rare earth metals market.