Brilliant Pad Smart Self-Cleaning Indoor Dog Potty

Brilliant Pad CEO Alan Cook has been working on pet products for a long time and they have launched Brilliant Pad Self Cleaning Dog Potty. It has superior absorption that eliminates the odor in your home.

This innovative product became very successful and also brought some additional needs. As the first-generation product can only be controlled via buttons on the control box, it was time to make it smart. Therefore, Brilliant Pad partnered with Mezz Solutions to create a smarter way to control the dog potty anywhere anytime!

We call it Brilliant Pad Smar+! Connected, personalized, and smart.

You can control the Brilliant Pad Smart via your mobile app anywhere anytime. Brilliant Pad Smart includes the BLE, Wi-Fi connectivity that is connected to your home network, and Brilliant Pad Cloud all the time. And through the Brilliant Pad Smar+ App, you can check the status of your pad, roll the pad, do all your personalized settings as you wish and even buy a new roll.

So how did we make it?

We clarified what is needed for a better, personalized, and smart Brilliant Pad. We listed out all the requirements and use cases. Then our engineering team started on the electronics and software and mechanical design.

From the IR sensor to the camera placement, we made several prototypes and optimized the design for best performance.

Testing the coverage of IR sensor.
Testing the IR sensor in early stages
Testing different placements for IR sensor and camera with our 3D printed prototypes.
Testing our first PCBA samples
Camera testing under different light conditions.
Our design team worked hard to provide a more beautiful product and a better user experience.

After the mechanical prototype is ready, the mold started. Meanwhile, we continued to improve our embedded firmware, cloud, and app software.

Once the tooling is ready, DV1 samples are prepared in small quantities. Our biggest challenge during the prototype stage was the IR lens which is a 3D printed part. According to the clarity of this 3D-printed part, we experienced deviations in IR detection. With DV1 off-tool samples, we made sure the IR smooth was good through the off-tool IR lens.

As a common practice usually samples prepared in the DV2 stage are used for the certification process. Due to the design complexity, small PCB space, with a camera, FPC cable, Wi-Fi module being very close to each other, we decided to run an EMC quick scan in the DV1 stage to find out critical issues at the earliest stage possible. As a result, we found out some tests were failing. We were right to bring the idea of having an early EMC testing at the DV1 stage. This early test was a great time saver for the rest of the project definitely. This gave us enough time to optimize our PCB design for the best EMC results.

Radiated Emission 
Working mode - Horizontal

@DV1 stage - Fail
Radiated Emission 
Working mode - Horizontal

MP stage - PASS

After finalizing the certification process we started preparing for the pilot production. It was time to simulate the real production in the factory. We were in the factory during the pilot production to make sure everything will go smoothly. We checked all the products, tested and confirmed them at the site. Following the pilot production, the factory continued with mass production which was also smooth.

It wasn’t an easy project given the complexity of mechanical placement of components, hardware design, and software. But we did lots of prototyping, hardware, and software testing in parallel. We were confident with our design capabilities, product development procedures, risk analysis, and early preventive actions which helped us to complete the project successfully.

Do you want to productize your idea?

Contact us now!