Strange kickstarter projects - today: f.lashes - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: BU508A
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 28, 2017, 06:37:14 am
content: Hello,got a notice from a friend of mine about this kickstarter project:https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/flashes/flashes-fun-interactive-led-lashesIf you had ever the need to put some LEDs on your eyelid, this is the opportunity to go.BU508A

author: Falcon69
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 28, 2017, 06:43:04 am
content: I could see these being pretty cool........If you were like 3 years old.

author: Bendba
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: June 28, 2017, 06:48:51 am
content: $40 a set andthatraised already over $90,000!!!What am I missing/doing wrong?

author: Bendba
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: June 28, 2017, 06:54:52 am
content: That's exactly what I don't get, what do so many people find in that worth spending that kind of money.I wonder why I bust my a$$ building sheds and fences in the sun.Might be time for a career change

author: JPortici
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 28, 2017, 07:03:29 am
content: Quote from: Bendba on June 28, 2017, 06:54:52 ami can point you to any number of dumb teenage girls

author: jwm_
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: June 28, 2017, 07:03:45 am
content: Yeah, there are plenty of festivals where these would be totally popular. $40 is pretty cheap actually. People pay that much for much less distinctive light up festival wear. I paid that much making some light up shoes that were a hit (now they are pretty common so I had to move on).

author: julianhigginson
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: June 28, 2017, 07:05:59 am
content: they made 90k on the kickstarter campaign and you didn't because1) they had the idea for this, they found a way to get thin wires and LEDS attached onto a very thin and narrow substrate that can fit around someone's eyelashes, and programmed a LED controller to flash them in different ways, and then marketed it to the world at large well enough that some group of 1000+ people decided they wanted it.2) you didn't.So, I guess in future, you need to come up with some ideas for things that would be useful and/or fun, come up with a marketing spiel to match, then make a plan to develop the product and the marketing campaign, and then execute the plans successfully before someone else does. Then run the campaign successfully, then manufacture and deliver the thousands of units to customers before someone else makes it for a fraction of your best price and floods the world with them.good luck!

author: Bendba
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: June 28, 2017, 07:08:18 am
content: Absolutely, credits to the team for coming up with the idea, designing it and making it a hit.From a designer stand point, $40 is cheap but I'm surprised people spend it on that and yet they whine about having to pay $5 for a coffee or $2 for a jug of milk.It's just that if someone had told me about that idea before, I would have said that he was out of his mind.Good on them for making money out of something that crazy.

author: sleemanj
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 28, 2017, 09:07:04 am
content: That really doesn't look like a good idea for eye safety to me. Or comfortable at all. The things people will do for fashion.

author: mikeselectricstuff
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 28, 2017, 09:13:42 am
content: This is definitely one of those kickstarter projects that's in danger of being copied and available from Aliexpress before their campaign is finished.

author: Halcyon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: June 28, 2017, 09:19:38 am
content: So... good for drag queens performing on stage... or anyone else who wants the feeling of components stuck to their eyelids and flashing lights constantly in their peripheral vision?10 points for being inventive, but realistically I can see these ending up in the garbage after a few uses.

author: julianhigginson
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: June 28, 2017, 09:32:11 am
content: Yep, absolutely a gimmick (and yeah, probably going to be available on alibaba before their kickstarter ends, which is going to be interesting for the backers)But people do pay $40 for a gimmick. They don't do it every day, but plenty of people living week to week can afford to do something like this occasionally if they think it is worth it... ie if it looks interesting and fun enough, or something that'll get them the right kind of attention at a party or a festival.Not my thing, but I can definitely see how it would be plenty of people's thing.And yeah, I wish I'd thought of it, too..:-)

author: Halcyon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: June 28, 2017, 09:39:56 am
content: Quote from: julianhigginson on June 28, 2017, 09:32:11 amJust like the Apple iPhone.... wait... there you go... i.lashes ;-) Brand new idea for you! Just add Bluetooth.

author: BrianHG
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 28, 2017, 10:30:04 am
content: Quote from: wilfred on June 28, 2017, 06:59:48 amThat's not $90,000 in profit, not even close.

author: FreddyVictor
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: June 28, 2017, 10:31:16 am
content: do they turn off whhe you close your eyeswow $40, wish I'd thought of this !yeah, just afewconcerns about safety on this kinda thing

author: Cyberdragon
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 28, 2017, 02:08:31 pm
content: Ok...if thiscan be successful, I'm going to start a campaign to make Bigclivedotcom's "Disco-Piss Urine Colorizer" and make a pretty penny.

author: jwm_
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: June 28, 2017, 03:46:45 pm
content: I mean, many women glue fake lashes to their eyes every day. This really is not that much of a hassle compared to what people do for fashion as desert festivals where your sexual fitness is determined by how cleverly you can use el wire and leds on your person at night and how many BTUs your solar setup can keep air conditioned during the day.

author: TerraHertz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 30, 2017, 03:45:25 am
content: Nice bit of engineering, really. The LEDs must be individually addressable, to get the flow effects. Presumably the tilt sensor is in the battery unit.Now, if they can add an accelerometer to the lash pieces, and get the animation rate up enough... they could do graphics as the wearer blinks. That could be visually quite dramatic.Your eyes could literally say "UP HERE". Or "X X" or whatever. Add a bluetooth UI from a phone app - endless punny possibilities.

author: BU508A
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 30, 2017, 06:06:22 am
content: Quote from: TerraHertz on June 30, 2017, 03:45:25 amYes, I think, that there was a lot of engineering going into this piece of ... accessory.Probably they have put in a µC (µC die) into the plastic to receive the data with I²C and address then the LEDs. The wire (as you can see in the photo) is pritty thinand it should be imho flexible and robust at the same time, which means, that there won't be lot of individual inuslated wires.My guess.BU508A

author: mikeselectricstuff
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 20, 2017, 01:10:54 pm
content: Quote from: mikeselectricstuff on June 28, 2017, 09:13:42 amOK, i was wrong.Banggood, not Aliexpress.https://www.banggood.com/Fashionable-Sparkle-Interactive-LED-Light-Up-Waterproof-Eyelashes-for-Party-Pub-Club-Bar-p-1170806.html?p=WL250420753620130Controller looks identical. Wonder if this is KS just reselling a Chinese product, Chinese subcontractor selling out teh back door, or bangood ripping off pictures?

author: sleemanj
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 21, 2017, 05:07:12 am
content: That controller seems identical. I would bet that this is just another person on kickstarter selling something they found in China.There are a few variants on Taobaohttps://item.taobao.com/item.htm?spm=a230r.1.14.6.ebb2eb2b2LWJg&id=555757710176&ns=1&abbucket=15#detailhttps://item.taobao.com/item.htm?spm=a230r.1.14.41.ebb2eb2x67aSo&id=555842275900&ns=1&abbucket=15#detailhttps://item.taobao.com/item.htm?spm=a230r.1.14.1.ebb2eb2b2LWJg&id=555187189997&ns=1&abbucket=15#detail

author: sleemanj
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 21, 2017, 05:22:09 am
content: Quote from: mikeselectricstuff on July 20, 2017, 01:10:54 pmOnce you know what to search for they can be found....https://www.aliexpress.com/w/wholesale-LED-eyelashes-party.html?spm=2114.search0104.0.0.9bDjBC&site=glo&SearchText=LED+eyelashes+party&g=y&SortType=total_tranpro_desc&groupsort=1&tc=af&initiative_id=SB_20170720211756Some with orders, none with feedback yet, so I guess it's at least possible they have knocked off the kickstarter idea and the kickstarter is legit. Note that some of those aliexpress ones are using the same images as the f.lashes kickstarter

author: amyk
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 21, 2017, 11:11:32 am
content: The Kickstarter started June 21 2017, but if you search for the Chinese phrase for "LED eyelashes", you get articles like this from many years before:http://www.ilishi.com/yuanchuang/huanyusouqi/20131127/1243.html(Pictures are broken at the moment but searching the name of that page in Google images will show you what I mean.)My guess is this product has existed obscurely for a while in the Chinese market before someone noticed, and nowthey want a piece of the action too.Looking forward to a bigclivedotcom review...

author: amyk
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 20, 2017, 02:37:06 am
content: ...and bigclivedotcom fails to disappoint again:

author: stg
author_rank: Newbie
timestamp: March 13, 2025, 04:52:24 pm
content: It's been a few years, and I figured it would be fun to add a few words here since I am the engineer behind this project and a fan of EEVblog.First off, no this was not a resale of a Chinese product! It was an original idea my friend came up with, and there was nothing similar on the market at the time despite what backdated articles may have appeared on markets at some later date. Maker Soomi Park had made static LED eyelashes before though, although we did not find out until later (also that she actually held a patent) and joked that with her name being Soomi we hope she won't "sue me"I made the first pair by hand (etching + laser cutting) in my workshop for nothing but shits and giggles. But then they won my friend some first prize at Maker Fair Rome that year, which sparked the idea of Kickstarting it since the videos from there (the first ones to reach the internet) initially received approximately 3 million views daily! I'm an engineer and I don't get the product either, but I always enjoy building things and thought it could be fun and harmless to try Kickstarter (spoiler: it wasn't) - and apparently, a lot of people *did* think the idea was the bee's knees so, like, why not?And yes, there was actual development! The controller is simple enough: components were selected for price and ability to operate over the entire voltage range of the battery to remove the need for an LDO. The processor runs at a measly 32kHz from its internal oscillator to remove the need for an xtal and stay low power. The actual eyelash flex PCB had to be redesigned many times to find a good curvature and size that "fits all" as well as optimizing the copper layout to control how it bends and make sure there were only soft changes in trace width so that handling stress would not result in "hot spot" bending and crack formation as it did on the first few prototypes. It was an interesting challenge, and in the end, with only minor submillimetre changes to the layout, we managed to change something that would usually break on first removal to something that easily stood up to 10 to 20 or more applications.There are 12 LEDs in each lash, but they are grouped in pairs so there are only 6 segments, which can thus be charlieplexed with just 3 wires. The 3 wires were Ø0.05mm enamel wires and this was a price challenge due to the difficulty of braiding and soldering them. For comfort and "invisibility" we saw no other option. The software is simple: the accelerometer is read and put to sleep, LED brightnesses are calculated depending on the selected "effect" and a software bit-bang routine performs the charlieplexing after which the cycle starts over. This is done a few hundred times per second with absolutely no timing involved: the processor runs everything as fast as possible resulting in around 100Hz PWM for the LEDs. We could have been a little faster, but we wanted not just on/off but dimming, so each segment has 8 brightness levels which, of course, required additional charlieplexing cycles. The slow PWM is why it was so hard to film and appears quite "flickery" in the marketing videos.And no, we did not make $90k*at all*. All in all, we made less than $10k after taxes, marketing, and production costs. This did not by far pay for the time spent getting the final product to our backers which required marketing, design work, engineering, testing, approvals, production, and shipping setup.And yes, we did get copied before we could get the product to our backers. In fact, copies were found in China by another friend of ours for less than $2, complete with design work done by us and pictures of models that were paid by us to produce marketing material. This was half expected by me but not my friend who came up with the idea (more on that later), although I will admit I did not think they would be that fast! The knock-off was cheap but terrible in comparison... the wires were very thick and horribly uncomfortable to wear, it had no accelerometer and thus only fixed effects, it had much lower brightness, did not last as long, did not fit eyelashes well, wasn't as flexible, flickered visibly and sent a lot of light into your eyes (ours you could not see yourself, we made sure of that)... but the knock-off did have something we didn't: a silicone cover for the PCB (yay!)Also, for the record, our production PCBs were heart-shaped and pink, only our round prototype shape was copied. Big Clive sadly did not get to toy with the original (although I could still make that happen). They were produced by MMAB in Sweden (assembled by Alma Electronics) and the guy who did the solder mask actually hand-poured us a proprietary mix of red and white to give us the pink color we asked for - something they had never done previouslyWe should have gotten the project finished a lot faster, but there were significant stressors involved that made the project psychologically exhausting and subsequently the collaboration difficult. When, for the first time in your life, you are hit with hundreds of emails per day and large names like Lady Gaga, Madonna and Fuzzy Door Studios (Seth McFarlane for The Orville) try to get hold of your preproduction devices it is easy to panic and shift or lose focus. Then, in the middle of everything going on, the basement where I had my workshop flooded, resulting in the need to move house and a lot of destroyed equipment and furniture that needed sorting out.It was not exactly fun times, and it was*absolutely not*worth it. We all know how the Internet is, and let me tell you there were*a lot*of rather shitty people saying and doing shitty things all while we were just trying to bring something rather harmless and subjectively fun from the maker community to a wider audience. Even here, right on this thread, there are a few somewhat judgemental comments, although nothing like the hate, threats, and harassment we occasionally had to endure. I say we but honestly, it was mostly my friend who dealt with the online presence... and it took its toll. He was quite visibly stressed and distraught by all the malevolence and was absolutely heartbroken when he learned about the copies.In fact, he almost took his own life shortly after we finished the project. Luckily, he got away with deep depression and*severe*suicidal ideation that lasted a long time, and only in the last year or so do I ever hear him speak positively about life again. For those who think we made a pretty buck marketing a junk product resold from China, I just wanted to let you know that this is far from the truth. Instead, it took a fair deal of work and it cost a very kind soul about 7 years of his life (depression*is*lost time) only because he wanted to give a little joy to the world (money was*never*a motivation), and with zero payout. In fact, he hated the project so much that he refused to ever use the money earned for himself, and instead spent it to send me and my whole family on a vacation in Crete.I'm so sorry buddy, for how this turned out <3I've not been comfortable writing about this until now and this tiny little forum corner of the Internet, a place very few will ever visit, now holds the only full and true story of the F.Lashes project. FWIW.

author: stg
author_rank: Newbie
timestamp: March 13, 2025, 05:42:11 pm
content: Bonus image of what remains of the project, including one of the heart-shaped pink PCBs that were shipped!

author: thm_w
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 13, 2025, 10:37:57 pm
content: Interesting story, thanks for sharing it.

author: coppercone2
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 14, 2025, 03:47:58 am
content: its for raves and shit like thatThe reason why you did not come up with it is because of things like being interested in hard engineering instead of jewelry or fashion. I try not to judge because it starts to make me think of soviet style control over industry and science lolThe one that gets me the most is precious stones though, you can grind and polish and balance a turbine blade inside of a giant mega corporation with level 10 stress (involving 4 bosses, 10 managers) or polish a small rock in your garage workshop and get paid more, and your spec sheet is "does it look good", and then you get to chisel a piece of cheese metal (gold) instead of trying to determine a feed and speed for a dull end mill your manager says is razor sharp.

author: tom66
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 14, 2025, 09:55:04 am
content: Cute idea and thanks for telling your story. Being an entrepreneur is damn hard work.Sorry to hear about your friend's experience.