OSCAR

OSCAR was my first introduction to a lot of skills I never knew you had to know when designing and launching an electronics product at any reasonable volume. Supply chain, foreign manufacturers, raising funds, estimating time… the list goes on!

The purpose of OSCAR was to take the LCD from a Retina iPad (at the time a 4th gen with a 9.7″ 2048 x 1536px display) and adapt it for use as an external display with a computer. It was a fairly simple board which converted the eDP signals on the flex to a full size DP connector and provided backlight control.

We launched it as a Kickstarter project and managed to raise nearly £20,000 from 145 people. We manufactured a batch of them in China and I visited their facility in Shenzhen. The PCBs were then returned to the UK where we attached them to displays and housed them in an acrylic case.