I am always surprised how fast time goes by when one is having fun lol.. I didn’t mean to go this long without an update, so I will bring everyone up to speed.
My team and I have been focused on the military AADs (Static Line and Manned Free Fall) fine tuning the hardware and firing algorithms, and I am pleased with how each AAD is turning out. I am trying to be mindful of the workload, as I do not want to burn my team out, so the evolvement has been slower but steady.
Now that my confidence in the military AADs is high, I will be turning my attention to the Sport AAD hardware and firing algorithms. It was my initial intention that the military and sport hardware would be the same, but the features that the military is asking for require hardware and software that is not of value to the sport market, and in an effort to keep the cost of the sport AAD down and reduce power consumption, dedicated sport AAD hardware is needed.
Fortunately, the changes are mostly elimination of components, such as the BLE, and changing out the 32MB Micro SD-card with smaller but less power hunger onboard memory, so the revision design effort will not be bad. It just takes time to make the changes and have them reviewed, update based on the results of the review, resubmit for design review, yada yada.. Very important process, but can take some time.
I also have been making some changes to little things from a “fit and finish/feel/perception” perspective. So far the changes have increased quality feel and performance while reducing the cost. Details are important to me and I am glad we are taking our time to get it right.
After taking with many jumpers of varying backgrounds, it is very apparent that the skydiving industry is not ready to embrace some of the things that I wanted to carry over from the automotive industry, mainly the remote monitoring of the AAD self test results. Infrastructure challenges aside, jumpers are just not ready for that, so I am shelving that feature for the sport AAD. One positive side to doing that is I can eliminate the BLE circuitry and code; however there will still be a Micro USB connector in the interface.
As if all that is not enough, I am also looking at different business models in an effort to identify which ones make the most business sense as we come closer to going to market. There are a lot of moving parts and the right strategic partner can increase the success dramatically. I keep telling myself “if this was easy everyone would be doing it” lol..