Following the success of its Kickstarter campaign, Onion continues to sell Oboo to the consumer technology market by now partnering with IndieGoGo

Boston, Massachusetts, July 2018 – Onion Corporation, a global provider of highly integrated wireless microprocessor modules, development kits, and innovative IoT consumer products, announced that it will continue its crowdfund campaign of the Oboo Smart Clock through the IndieGoGo InDemand program.

The Oboo Smart Clock takes advantage of Onion’s powerful Omega2S IoT Module as its core computing element. With integrated Wi-Fi, the Omega2S enables the smart clock to be always connected, resulting in automatically adjusted time, up to date information like local temperature and weather reports, music to wake up to, and connection to other devices, such as your smart phone and digital assistants like Amazon Alexa.

The Oboo is now being offered for sale through the IndieGoGo InDemand program. The Smart Clock was initially introduced in November of 2017 through a successful 30 day Kickstarter campaign. This enabled Onion to raise the necessary funds, gain initial market acceptance, and receive valuable feedback from over 2000 backers. Since November, Onion engineers have been busy designing, prototyping, testing, and preparing the Oboo for volume production.

The creation of the Oboo has been executed on an impressive development schedule. “It’s a testament to a talented design team and the easy to use Omega2 Linux-WiFi module” stated Zheng Han, CEO and co-founder of Onion Corporation. “We focused our energy on where we could innovate and add value, while leveraging other existing technologies without reinventing the wheel,” Han said. “This lead us to complete the product development in nearly 3 months with a small engineering staff.”

The development timeline was impressive indeed. Here’s a look at the overall schedule:

• August 2017 – First concept
• September 2017 – First prototype
• November 2017 – Design for manufacturing
• December 2017 – Engineering samples ready, refining software
• January 2018 – Engineering validation testing
• February 2018 – Production prototypes ready
• March 2018 – Production validation testing
• April 2018 – Small scale production
• May 2018 – Mass manufacturing optimization
• June 2018 – Indiegogo preorder starts
• August 2018 – Indiegogo Manufacturing
• September 2018 – Indiegogo shipping begins

Key Features of the Oboo Smart Clock

The Oboo comes with a host of advanced features that makes it unique in the product world today.

• Large Time Display, always correct to GMT standards, with 12-hour or 24-hour format options
• Unlimited number of alarm settings, definable by day of week or calendar date, plus a timer
• Advanced user interface including capacitive touch buttons and hand waving gesture control for functions like “snooze” control and changing information views
• Integrated LCD screen for reporting of local or global information, with selectable “cards” such as Local Weather, traffic, daily calendar agenda, music selection, etc.
• Integrated high quality speakers
• Auto-dimming of screen brightness and night light
• Two Smartphone charging ports
• Communication with smart phones via the Oboo App and digital home assistants such as Alexa
• Bluetooth 4.2 connectivity for Audio streaming from your smartphone to Oboo speakers
• Integrated rechargeable battery for portability and maintaining operation during power outage

Oboo Development Details

The Oboo Smart Clock represents a great product example of the Internet of Things (IoT). As more and more of our everyday lives becomes connected, IoT is becoming mainstream, and more and more companies are being driven to incorporate advanced technology features into traditional functions. That’s exactly what the Onion team did, by starting with the original concept of a bedside alarm clock, and adding technology to make it more useful, accurate, and relevant to today’s society.

The design team needed to tackle four main technology areas: Hardware, Software, Mechanical, and Connectivity.

For the hardware, the team chose the Omega2S as the core processing module. With integrated memory, storage, and WiFi, the Omega2S would handle the base functions, while offloading a number of peripheral functions to a coprocessor and a Bluetooth module. Onion’s hardware engineers leveraged their experiences from the design of over a dozen expansion and development boards to create and build all of the printed circuit boards that go into the Oboo.

The software effort was the largest and most critical for the Oboo development. With the concept of the software “cards” to display internet data like weather and traffic, plus functions like the need to synchronize with the internet standard for time of day, the writing and testing of the all of the necessary code was a major portion of the overall project effort. The Onion software team used a combination of Javascript and C code for the bulk of the overall software architecture used to make Oboo a feature-rich reality.

The mechanical design is one area where the Onion team decided to utilize expertise outside of the company. Both external appearance and high quality audio performance were very important to the product goals of the Oboo, and so Onion decided to leverage industry experts to get a sleek, state of the art look and feel and sound amplification and reverberation that it knew would impress and delight its customers.

And for the Connectivity portion of the product development, this was another area that was a natural for the Onion team. With vast experience from having integrated Wi-Fi in all of Onion’s products, the Oboo requirements for the technologies needed to connect to internet streaming music, data services, and smart phone interaction for network setup was easily implemented with the power of the embedded Omega2S processing module.

  

Oboo Availability

The Oboo Smart Clock is currently shipping in initial quantities to backers from the Kickstarter campaign. For the new IndieGoGo promotion, advanced orders are being accepted now for delivery starting in September 2018.

About Onion

Onion Corporation is an innovator in IoT products and technology, and has a charter to inspire the invention of IoT products to everyone: makers, students, and commercial product developers. With its tiny, affordable, and modular Omega2 platform, Onion has made IoT development quick, easy, and fun. Now with the introduction of the Oboo Smart Clock, Onion is poised to bring new consumer electronic products to market quickly and with advanced technical features and affordable price points.

More Information

The IndieGogo website for the Oboo Smart Clock can be found at https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/oboo-the-1st-gesture-controlled-smart-alarm-clock-design#/

Addition information about Onion Corporation and the Omega IoT computer, can be found at https://onion.io