A dream challenge, making a lean mean fast Cowboy machine fully connected.
Cowboy
The client
In 2017 the former founders of Take It Easy, Adrien Roose & Karim Slaoui teamed up with Tanguy Goretti from Djump to develop a new type of electric bike for an urban public. The company will be selling their new electric bike called COWBOY by this spring (2018) and it promises to be beautiful, intelligent and affordable, what more can we wish for ? The COWBOY is a connected bike equipped with an intuitive motor assistant, an intelligent and removable battery that is nicely integrated into the frame, built-in connected lights, an anti-theft system and GPS tracking. Above that it can be remotely updated and comes with an assistant to support you when-or where ever you need it.
The challenge
On top of the imposed delays and the necessary flexibility while developing the connected bike’s intelligence & the interactions with the motor, the biggest challenge of the project was to integrate all technologies elegantly into the bike’s frame.
The solution
We accompanied COWBOY through the whole conception of their connected bike. We were responsible for the overall product development. This process included but wasn’t limited to the following deliverables; the product specifications, the choice of which components to use, writing the firmware, designing and testing the first prototypes work-like & look-like and the execution & follow-up of the first field tests. This project was carried out in close collaboration between the consultants from our side and the COWBOY developers, followed by a progressive transfer of responsibilities towards their internal technical core team.
Lesson learned
In addition to our expertise in electronics engineering, the agile development process we follow allowed the team to move towards testable prototypes very quickly and try the connected bike in real-life. This gave us very valuable feedback in the earliest stages of development which made it easy to make adjustments to the specifications and functionalities of the connected bike. This iterative and flexible approach pushed everybody to conceive a fully-functioning product within only 1 year.