When a Wyoming entrepreneur ran a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign to finance design and production of his Google Glass-like invention, the prototype he used to demonstrate that his idea could work used a tiny electronics board built in a factory in Logansport.
Robert Fuziak, an outdoors enthusiast and self-described “tinkerer in Jackson, Wyoming,” wants to build an “Omni-wearable” — put simply, a pair of sunglasses with a fold-back camera attached to the side.
He envisions it becoming a pair of smart glasses, capable of showing the wearer an augmented display on the lenses. But he’s starting with one piece — the camera — in an effort to build his way into the augmented reality dream.
“There’s no way for anyone to know when you’re using the current generation of smart glasses,” Fuziak said. The cameras are mounted in a fixed position, he pointed out, and “it makes for an uncomfortable situation” when you’re with other people.
But if you have to take off your glasses — likely worn to shield your eyes from the sun or to correct your vision — what’s the point of having a camera on them in the first place? Fuziak wonders.
“You really have canceled out the whole reason you wear glasses,” he said.
So he says he’s designed a pair of glasses that use the same technology as the hinge in a flip phone to control a camera. The camera arm is mounted on the side of the frame, and when it’s flipped out, the hinge tells the camera to turn on. When it’s flipped back, it turns off.
“There’s this certainty, you can activate the camera mid-activity and not have to guess that it’s on,” Fuziak said.
A climber and mountain biker who keeps himself busy snowboarding in winters, Fuziak says he’s been working on the concept since the mid-2000s.
Now, computing has improved to the point that it’s more feasible — the camera setup is small enough to fit on the side of a pair of sport sunglasses.
It’s not just the camera that has to fit there — it’s also the electronic components that control the camera, a Logansport electronics manager said.
“They’re trying to get it as small as possible,” Marcie Penn said of the circuit board that Summit Electronic Manufacturing Services is building for Fuziak’s device. “It’s a very dense board.”
How dense? The 3-inch-long board is three quarters of an inch wide and contains 176 components, including some tiny resistors as small as a grain of salt.
Penn is general manager at Summit/ems. The firm has been in Logansport since 1993, when it started as an offshoot of Cal-Comp Indiana, then called Controls Inc. About 44 employees work there, not counting summer workers.
The firm makes electronic components in small to medium-sized quantities for mostly Midwestern clients, Penn said, including some pieces used to build prototypes or to supplement the work of other companies that manufacture in large quantities. The firm does $6 to 8 million in business a year and is aiming to grow to $10 to 13 million, she said.
Summit/ems builds components for clients making a variety of products — everything from Little League timers to GPS trackers to grain dryer controls, Penn said.
Penn describes Summit/ems as functioning like a job shop, since it handles mostly small batches and custom work.
Summit/ems has made some 600 different electronics boards in its history, but around 60 are being made during any given week, Penn estimated.
Many of its clients order their parts in many small batches, shipping out daily or weekly, because they manage their processes following a method called Kanban. In that method, parts aren’t kept in inventory, but rather ordered in to arrive just in time for when they’re needed. One week in May, Summit/ems shipped out 7,844 pieces of all shapes and sizes.
A few clients, like USA Firmware, are design firms that often order special parts for prototypes. Fuziak contracted USA Firmware for his Omni-wearable glasses, and USA Firmware subcontracted with Summit/ems.
“Ninety percent of what we do, nobody else is building it,” Penn said. And Summit/ems builds for enough different industries — agriculture, security, consumer use — that the firm can protect itself somewhat from the ups and downs of the American economy.
“We work really hard not to have our eggs in one basket,” Penn said.
The firm on Wednesday made 16 control boards for a new prototype of Fuziak’s glasses. That order followed up on a similar order last August for USA Firmware, which was used to prove the basic design would work.
A quad placement machine set the surface-mount parts on the face of eight of the control boards on Wednesday. Then group leader Paula Mabrey, who’s worked at Summit/ems for 20 years, used a microscope and tweezers to inspect those boards for accuracy before sending the second batch of boards through.
“Electronics takes a certain amount of dexterity” from workers, company owner and president Larry Graf said. “We’ve always been able to find very, very good, qualified people in Logansport.”
The city is also centrally located for Summit/ems’s customer base, he said — customers from Iowa to Ohio are within a day’s shipment.
Those reasons explain why he drives from his home in Fort Wayne every day. Graf said: “Logansport ... is a really good place to do business, for technology.”