About

Our process has been developed to provide a roadmap to get any hardware or software project from concept through production. No matter the size of your company or stage of development, working with Ovyl provides logical and rational phases to get to the finish line.

Phase 1: Strategy
To develop your strategy, we first evaluate if your product is feasible, viable, and desirable. We dive into the who, what, where, why, and when. Once these questions are answered, a broad range of research can be conducted, from friends and family to formal interviews.

Phase 2: Design
Our approach to concept design is to expand our thinking as wide as possible. It isn’t just pencil sketches and blank sheets of paper. It starts with our entire team, enabling us to integrate industrial design, mechanical and electrical engineering, software, and hardware from the very beginning.

Phase 3: Development
Rapid prototypes are often made throughout this phase to confirm what we see on our screens feels good in our hands and looks good in real life.

Phase 4: Engineering
This is all about making the impossible real. Whether it’s a paper clip, a 1,000-part assembly, or embedded firmware, we tackle engineering challenges with a structured team approach.

Phase 5: Manufacturing
During this phase we shift focus from design and development activities to manufacturing activities. We typically move into a support role where we’re doing documentation, coordinating with the contract manufacturer, or acting as your sourcing agent.

If you’re looking for help creating an incredible product, we’d love to speak with you and see if we can be of service. We’ve applied our process to hundreds of products for other product companies, and we’d love to be of service to yours.

 

Project Portfolio

IoT Smart Roof System

TURN UP THE HEAT
Homes in cold environments can experience damage from snowfall and ice accumulation on rooftops. To counter that, some homes have heating elements to melt snow and ice. These elements run during the entire cold season, costing a fortune in energy consumption.

ENERGY SAVING SENSOR
We developed a novel rooftop sensor with our client that can detect the level of frozen accumulation on a roof and turn heat elements on and off to keep the accumulation within safe limits.

SIMPLE, DURABLE, BEAUTIFUL
The system is made to be quick and easy to install by an electrician, and to cleverly seal out moisture and dust. Made from a durable UV resistant plastic, the housings share a similar design language that ties the system together visually. Ovyl developed this product from concept through production including design, engineering, prototyping, sourcing and manufacturing.

Niva Heart Monitor

STOPPING HEART FAILURE BEFORE IT STOPS US
Congestive heart failure is the number one cause of hospital admission in the United States. A patient’s risk for this type of heart failure can often be assessed using their medical history and physical symptoms. However, it is extremely difficult to detect certain causes directly, such as volume overload.

NON-INVASIVE HEART MONITORING
Imagine if you couldn’t read an active pulse or measure someone’s blood pressure – that would undermine a clinician’s ability to quickly assess a patient’s health.

Our client developed a remarkably intelligent way to monitor and measure extracellular fluid volume, a previously obscured data point that could be as essential as other vital signs. This technology can monitor hemodynamics (the dynamics of blood flow) to identify volume overload of fluid, which can potentially catch congestive heart failure before it’s fatal.

A COLLABORATIVE EFFORT
Ovyl co-developed NIVA with our client’s existing team to fill in their gaps with our expertise in industrial design, mechanical engineering, and design for manufacturing. Working together enabled the team to commercialize the technology they invented in the lab to save lives in the field.

WeighUp IoT Smart Scale

DOWN THE DRAIN
Bars are at risk to lose 20% or more of their inventory without knowing exactly where the inventory went — for bar owners, it might as well be down the drain. Our client created a software to solve this problem, but they needed a smart scale that could perform with the software.

IOT SMART SCALE
The scale that our engineers developed measures the weight of liquor bottles between each pour and analyzes the data. Our scale then compares that data against sales and staff scheduling information to track — and ultimately prevent — inventory loss.

ADAPTABLE & RELIABLE
The scale uses a single bar-type load sensor for measurements, which allowed us to keep the overall product diameter small enough to blend among bar decor.

We chose a wired connection that could daisy chain many scales together to eliminate the need for batteries and to avoid interfacing with 100s of Bluetooth signals.

The recessed bottom design with multiple cable slots allows the installer to adjust cable length and exit angle, making for a wide variety of patterns and layouts. We chose to use the 3.5mm jack, which is traditionally used for audio. Its affordable, waterproof connectors rotate freely so users can configure the devices in any orientation they choose.

Beauty by Me – Beauty Tech

BEAUTY BY ANYONE
There are several barriers to choosing makeup. It’s expensive, colors and tones are hard to match, and needs change nearly every day. The Blee team had a unique solution — but they needed a design that would be as attractive as it was functional. Ovyl developed an elegant and playful aesthetic for the device, cartridges, and bottles that you can imagine among the shelves of makeup in a department store, and built a looks-like prototype for their team to use for development and fundraising.

HIGH-END DESIGN IN AND OUT
We’ve yet to show it to someone who didn’t like it, which speaks to the product’s appeal to a mass consumer base. There are multiple aesthetic options, which were designed in collaboration with Blee, and we worked closely with their team to choose and finalize a direction.

But the details aren’t just skin deep. We designed a push-pull cartridge system that is easy and intuitive to use, without spilling any of the pigment inside. We also created a one-of-a-kind dispensing head with the latest technology, and developed a no-mess mixing technique.

In the end, we produced a beautiful, functional, product at a great price that perfectly matched the aesthetic and functionality that Blee sought to achieve.

Eyeris IoT Retail Display

ACCESSIBLE, QUALITY LENSES
EYERIS developed a remarkably comfortable gel contact lens, and they wanted to bring their innovative product to market in a unique way. We were asked to develop a smart in-store display that could automatically re-stock gel contact lenses.

WIRELESS INVENTORY MANAGEMENT
Many businesses covet one day being able to do fully automated wireless inventory. We were able to develop a fully custom-built system for EYERIS that uses RFID antennae to discern when a unit of gel contacts had been removed, and paired it with a cellar system that could send that data to the cloud for reordering.

DESIGN DETAILS
The Eyeris system was designed to track contact lens cases using RFID. Each case has a unique RFID tag located inside of it, and within the display case is an RFID reader. Once RFID tag readings are collected the information is backhauled to a web server using a Cat-M1 Cellular module. A custom printed circuit board was developed that houses both the RFID reader and the cellular module. To create the display itself, we knew we had to rely on fairly high volume manufacturing processes for the contact’s container, and medium volume methods for the display. We designed an elegant injection molded pods for the gel lenses and their dispensers, and a mostly thermoformed display housing to hold it all together.

PUTTING IT TOGETHER
In the end EYERIS’s vision was enabled by a system that they could roll out to offices across the country. In the future, we expect EYERIS will continue to transform the industry by making lenses available closer and closer to the consumer.

Beam for iPad

CHARGING WHEN YOU NEED IT
Beam makes cases that protect and provide backup power for mobile devices in hospital environments. These cases have special attention given to overlooked issues like how to easily charge multiple devices or how to routinely clean them.

Fully Enclosed iPad Case

Ovyl developed Beam’s fully enclosed iPad case to match the rest of their lineup. It’s charger base-compatible, and made from an easy-to-clean and highly impact resistance polycarbonate shell with a rubber inner liner to absorb even more shock in the event of a drop. The shallow dimple pattern adds a touch of uniqueness and texture that feels good in the hand, but doesn’t collect foreign material like dirt or dust, making them the perfect companion for hospital staff on the move.