ByteSnap Design, an electronics design consultancy, has provided both electronics design and software expertise for award-winning smart home security device Cocoon.
Cocoon is a technology company transforming the home security market by designing beautiful products that help people feel safe. It won silver at the 2014 London Design awards and recently secured a £2 million investment from Aviva Ventures and Breed Reply Investments.
Features of the innovative smart home security system include device side encryption and unique SUBSOUND™ technology to sense activity throughout a home. It even detects intruders through closed doors.
Cocoon enlisted ByteSnap Design as experts in both electronics design and software on embedded platforms. Following an extensive investigation into the various system on chips (SoC) on the market, Cocoon’s in-house specialists chose NXP/Freescale iMX6 for its availability and technical support. ByteSnap was brought in to develop the electronics and Linux board support package (BSP) laying the foundation for Cocoon’s security application.
The design had to meet demanding video, Wi-Fi and audio performance targets at a commercial price point and was mechanically tightly constrained and atheistically pleasing without sacrificing performance. What made this product particularly difficult was the shape, being circular and packing significant hardware onto the PCBs requires careful consideration. Management of MCAD to ECAD data was critical in the success of the design and having engineers who appreciate not just their own core skills but have broad appreciation of all product aspects helped in the development.
“We are very pleased with ByteSnap Design,” said Dan Conlon, who leads on Product Management at Cocoon. “Their expertise helped us bring our product to market in a short time frame, and we have no doubts about using them again.”
