2014 – Present

Turn Touch

Turn Touch is a beautiful remote control carved out of solid wood. This project involves software, hardware, materials, and manufacturing. An epic undertaking culminating in a Kickstarter campaign in March 2017 that resulted in nearly a thousand remotes sold to 645 backers.

Smart devices are intended to simplify your life, however the act of controlling them can actually be fairly complicated. Interacting with a home full of smart lights and smart devices often involves pulling out your phone or buying a voice assistant and verbalizing repetitive commands. Turn Touch solves this problem by providing an unobtrusive way to control all the smart devices and apps in your home. Four buttons mapped to all sort of functionality is a faster and more seamless experience of living in the future.

The idea for Turn Touch came to me in 2013, while driving the 101 near Mountain View. I had been wanting a way to control music and video on my iMac while also controlling my Hue lights. There wasn't any tool on the market that had the functionality and the style I wanted, so I decided to build it myself.

Not only would this be a four button remote capable of interacting with all things WiFi, but it would be carved out of solid wood. It would fit into my home in the same way a piece of furniture makes a room more inviting. A natural looking wireless gadget that wouldn't detract from the warmth of a living room.

But to build it I had to learn all of the tools that are part of building hardware. There's a lot involved in building this remote: designing a circuit board and choosing a wireless chip, writing reliable and upgradeable firmware, 3D printing prototypes, injection molding for manufacturing, CAD and CAM for machining varieties of hardwood, and laser cutting mother of pearl for an inlay. I wanted to build a piece that would be museum quality yet something anyone could afford.

This was a solo project where I was responsible for designing, prototyping, and manufacturing each component. It was a laborious process. Not only did I have to make a handful of prototypes but I also needed to design each component to be manufacturable in quantities up to 10,000. That meant creating an assembly process where everything seamlessly came together and clicked into place so ultimately I could handoff the work without compromising quality.

Above is an example of two stages of the design process for reliably machining the wood. On the left is a vise clamp with a single wood blank held tightly, oriented with the help of a level. While the first method of machining had the benefit of using off-the-shelf components so that no custom fixture had to be built, it had enormous drawbacks. To start, the manual nature of positioning and registering the wood blank creates a large margin for error. It also requires tabs to hold the model in place while it's being machined. These tabs then need to be manually sanded off, which is laborious and often inaccurate as the contour shape needs to be maintained.

On the right is the evolution of the machining fixture. The thinking that goes into building this fixture involves finding solutions to each of the older fixture’s problems. There are numerous benefits of this fixture. To start, it can machine dozens of remotes at once. It is also far more accurate as it only requires a surfaced wood board to be placed and held down in one spot, as opposed to the manual and often inaccurate positioning of the vise clamp. It also disposes of the tabs through the use of vacuum holes that hold down the remote while it is processed through two sided machining.

A key concern in building these manufacturing tools was my desire to make it easily replicable. Therefore the entire process only uses off-the-shelf tools and components and can be reassembled in less than a day on site at the factory. It keeps costs low while opening up the freedom to perform the factory work anywhere.

Graduating from machining one remote to thirty at a time took a few steps. An iterative and evolving process that involved a fair amount of trial-and-error resulted in the production ready manufacturing process you see above.

There's a flourish on the bottom of every remote. It's mother of pearl inlayed directly into the wood. This delightful and tasteful addition also serves as the only visible branding on the remote.

The process used to inlay the mother of pearl shell involves a laser cutter and an alignment fixture, reliably producing perfect engravings and cutouts.

Soldering is at the heart of electronics design. Learning how to solder with hot air and reflow techniques, coupled with board stencils and steady hands, was crucial to designing a better board. Part of the process is knowing the constraints and discovering the limitations that allow for a miniature design to fit comfortably into a miniature package.

Part of the manufacturing process involved optimization techniques. Pictured below are changes made in revisions that reduce the amount of material used in an additive process and decrease the amount of material removed in a subtractive process. Increase the size of the wood to perform less work while on the CNC machine and decrease the size and coverage of the black plastic button holders to reduce cost.

All of the wood is pattern matched. This means that individual pieces are cut from the same board and are then ensured to be assembled together in the same configuration before they were machined. This creates a beautiful pattern on the buttons and the case which must be accounted for during the machining process.

Making a museum quality product means making hundreds of prototypes in the pursuit of perfection. Turn Touch involved many messy prototypes, each of which pushed the envelope of what was achievable and what was known to work. Building up enough of these little victories, even on a prototype that was not usable as a final piece, gradually created a process with a high yield and low margin of error.

Through open-source hardware projects like Turn Touch, I’m working to lower the barrier to entry when it comes to creating and manufacturing complex hardware devices. Sure, it’s not what you might call a “traditional business plan”. But I strongly believe that by helping other people use the same tools I use, our community of makers gets larger and more inventive.