Hugh and I had a fun visit to the office of JMK Industrial Design last Friday to interview the industrial design team working on the Exbiblio portable scanner. We discussed the story of the Exbiblio scanner, Apple’s influence on the industry, and what it is like to work for a client who turns conventional thinking on its head.

Hugh is planning to post details from the interview this week, but I thought I’d get some images from our visit up on the blog today. Including, if you look closely, the first image of the scanning device (model) that we have ever shown to the public! Stay tuned for more details.

Here are some of the mp3 devices that the design team looked at before working on the Exbiblio scanning pen:

This is the first of a series of posts we plan related to the industrial design of the Exbiblio scanning device. Coming soon, we plan to have interviews with the design team, design sketches, and photos of the prototypes.

I’ll start by showing some charts the design team put together to study existing gadgets on the market for comparison, discussion, and inspiration. The following images show a variety of the USB drives currently on the market. Note that our scanning device is likely to have USB drive functionality in addition to the text scanning and voice recording features.

Brian Piquette (Synapse) and Ian MacDuff (Exbiblio) of our hardware team have provided the following photos of the bits and pieces of Falstaff coming together. Thanks guys!

Sensor Board: CMOS Image Sensor and Illumination LEDs.

This is the image sensor PCB. This PCB holds the CMOS sensor and the white illumination LEDs. It sits in the enclosure perpendicular to the long axis of the device, which points the sensor out the front of the unit.

Sensor Board with Lens Holder

The image below shows the sensor PCB with the milled plastic lens holder. The lens will screw into this plastic frame.

Sensor PCB mated with other PCBs in enclosure.

The PCB visible behind the Sensor PCB si the Main PCB. The Main PCB contains the processing core of the Falstaff unit. It has the ARM9 Processor, Flash and SDRAM.

Button PCB and Main PCB

The Button PCB (top) has the power supply, user interface (buttons and LEDs) and the interface between the sensor board and the main board.