How I built my bed

All my life I've been struggling to fall asleep, and this is how the elite bed idea came out, I personally designed this bed to reach maximum relaxation. The idea was to combine technology and comfort. Elite Bed has integrated a stereo sound system, light controlled by motion sensors, wifi, and Bluetooth.

I used the software SketchUp to make my first model and then I made a better design using Solidworks. Once I had the idea about what I wanted, I started doing some research about what component I need to build it. I had previous experiences in college using Arduino, an open-source electronics platform easy to use hardware and software (c++).

One of the big challenges was to create the structure of the bed, I had so many limitations and I found a local small workshop to build the bed, I gave them all the specifications but it wasn't easy to build because those people involved didn't have the experience working in something like this. We were thinking about what kind of material we should use and the better one in this moments was mahogany, honestly, it was a bad idea because the bed was too expensive and heavy but at the same time, the quality of the bed was great.

While the people in the workshop was working on the bed structure, I was spending my time working on the electronic circuits, tenting and putting all pieces together. Two months later I got the bed back not painted, that allows me to work and test every single component on the real bed “I remember I was so excited “. After several tests, failing, burning circuits boards and a lot of headaches I got 70% of the electronic working, and I took all components back from the bed to send the bed back to the workshop to paint and polish all additional details.

Building the structure of the bed

The guys in the workshop were excited to build something that they haven't seen, they made a great job following all the specifications and also contributing in the project.

The control panel was one of the biggest issues I didn't counting with a 3D printer or something similar to make this small piece able to hold the LCD and the mini touchpad keyboard. I ran several experiments using paperboard, clear acrylic plastic and more, finally, I made it using a piece of wood lined with leather.

After several more weeks I got the bed back, it was beautifully painted in black, and on the same day when I got the bed I sport immediately to install all components, I wasn't working full time in this project I had to keep doing all my regular work and I was using my spare time to work on that, it took me months but every small progress that I made, made me feel awesome, I enjoyed the path but I was really focused on the goal.

User Experience

Speakers were mounted in the back panel of the bed and also the amplifier, lights and touch sensor in the front.

Two motion sensors on each side and two in the front allows the bed to turn on the lights automatically when the user walks in or when wakeup at night or in the morning. A photocell component also helps to control the light when is dark enable the auto light or not.

Safety was another of my concern and I installed a smoke detector and I took care of every part to prevent damage.

Now you might wonder if my could sleep well after I got done!

Que quick answer is no. 🙂 Because of every time, I went to bed new ideas came up and also noticed a lot of UX issues.

UX issues

The control panel was too low to manipulate and the LCD was difficult to read it.
The stereo system had some annoying noise
The morning alarm was harder to set up
It was difficult to update de software
Sometimes I got hurt by the square design.
The person sleeping on the other side of the bed can not take the control
It was hard to assemble and replace components

I really enjoyed playing music, and see how the bed turned the lights on smoothly in a fade mode every time I walked in.

Some UX worked

Only bottom lights turned on at midnight.
Easy to pug USB charger on each side of the bed.
Automatic music turns off.
Sidelights wer easy to use and activate it by hand touch.

Elite bed version II

Several months later I started to design a new version of the bed and I tried to fix a lot of issues for the previous one, I had to build two bed at the same time, one white and another black. For those, I used pcDuino instead Auduino this tiny CPU came out right after I built my first bed, I was excited to test this out, in this unit I was allowed to install light version of Ubuntu and also had the same Arduino output and input ports, it was easy to write code in the hight level to control the low level. I spend quite a time playing with this small device but at this time a college friend was helping me. The first version of pcDuino came out with some issues, and we had to report and they released several updates.

Pcduino allows us to integrate wifi, audio, and Bluetooth without additional components, it was very useful to avoid the control panel and make the user take control of the bed using the phone.

To build the bed easy to assemble it was one of my priority and I tried to isolate all component and built modular one to make it easy to replace if one module fails or need it.

Build a stable hardware and making secure connexions between electrics components are extremely important and I expend valuable time on this before starting to write code.

So what next.
Honestly, I got disappointed in keep investing more time on this project, I couldn't get more motivations and sponsorship, and the price of this project was too hight to the market in my country. It's possible that I'll keep this idea and add more cool and nice features.