Smart Coaster Development: Turning an Idea into a Market-Ready Product
At BitBox, we thrive on solving engineering challenges and turning ideas into manufacturable products. Following a conversation with a customer about branded merchandise, an internal innovation project was born: could we create a promotional product that was both engaging and technically interesting?
The result was the Smart Coaster – a temperature-sensitive coaster designed to indicate when a hot drink has reached an ideal drinking temperature. More than just a branded giveaway, the project provided an opportunity to explore new technologies, refine development processes and showcase the breadth of expertise available within the BitBox team.
Newly appointed Design Engineer Lilly took ownership of the project, leading development from initial concept and schematic design through to prototyping, testing and production.
The Challenge:
While the Smart Coaster was an internal project, it presented many of the same challenges we encounter when developing products for our customers. The team needed to balance performance, manufacturability and cost, while ensuring the final product remained robust, safe and commercially viable.
One of Lilly's objectives was to explore a PCB-based light diffusion technique she had encountered previously but never had the opportunity to implement.
"I'd seen the idea used for a status LED in a product many years ago and had been looking for an opportunity to apply it ever since. Nobody likes the look of a blindingly bright bare LED."
Alongside creating an intuitive user experience, several technical considerations had to be addressed:
- Achieving a fast and reliable thermal response
- Managing component and manufacturing costs
- Optimising battery life and power consumption
- Ensuring compliance with safety requirements associated with battery-powered products
- Designing for repeatable manufacture and assembly
Perhaps the biggest challenge was balancing cost against performance. Improving thermal sensitivity, visual feedback and overall user experience often introduced
additional complexity or expense elsewhere in the design. Finding the right compromise required careful engineering decisions throughout the development process.
The use of a button cell battery also introduced important safety considerations. Researching battery standards, product safety requirements and best-practice design approaches became a key part of the project, helping ensure the final solution could be both effective and safe.
The Solution:
As with many successful projects at BitBox, development was highly collaborative. Engineers from across the business provided support with CAD, electronics, prototyping and design for manufacture, allowing Lilly to draw on a wide range of experience throughout the project.
Testing formed a central part of the development process from the earliest stages. By validating concepts early, the team was able to identify potential issues before committing to production tooling or component procurement.
Lilly remained closely involved throughout each testing phase, evaluating performance, refining the design and verifying that the product behaved as intended under a variety of conditions.
Close collaboration between the engineering and production teams also ensured that manufacturability was considered throughout development. Testing extended beyond core functionality to include real-world use cases, helping verify performance across a range of mugs, glasses and drinking vessels.
"Thankfully, we have a wide variety of mugs, glasses and water bottles in the office!"
The final product successfully demonstrated how electronics, thermal sensing and user-focused design could be combined within a simple promotional item, creating something far more engaging than a traditional giveaway.
Lessons Learned
The Smart Coaster provided an excellent introduction to BitBox's approach to product development, highlighting the importance of collaboration, testing and cross-disciplinary problem-solving.
One of Lilly's biggest takeaways was the value of drawing upon expertise from different areas of the business. Every design decision has implications for performance, cost, manufacturability, supply chain resilience and user experience. Having access to a diverse team helps ensure products are assessed from every angle before decisions are made.
The project also reinforced the importance of designing with the full product lifecycle in mind, considering not only how a product functions today but how it can be manufactured, supported and maintained in the future.