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APRIL 2020 I DESIGN007 MAGAZINE 65 you were on very manual lines without much automation. Back then, Foxconn announced that they were going to have to put automa- tion in because labor costs had come up. It's not going to be about who can automate; it's going to be about who can start making those inroads into some of the other parts of the process. Holden: Do you know what's funny about your quote? I was the CTO of Foxconn from 2010– 2013 who said that (laughs). Marshall: Forgive me! I didn't realize that (laughs). Holden: My quote was, "Foxconn is now go- ing to have to automate because of the rising costs." I worked as the number three man be- low Terry Gou, the chairman of Foxconn. Shaughnessy: As you're counseling these start- up companies, that's one of the things that you would impress upon them. Marshall: Absolutely. The other area we get quite heavily involved in, and where I have an- other one of my ex-Sony colleagues involved, is the regulatory side. Particularly in the start- up world, we've all seen the Kickstarter proj- ect that says, "We're going to ship in three months. All we have to do is do regulatory." Then, you see the project log go on for nine months or a year, and there's a big long tale of woe. One of the things we always say to people is, "You need to think through the regulatory work upfront because it will save you so much time later." I've been working with a U.K. startup, Track- ener, that is doing the equivalent of a horse Fit- bit. It has thrown up some interesting challeng- es, starting with learning about horses. It is a small startup. They have done an enormous amount on a very constrained set of resourc- es and a good proof of concept, which they de- signed in CircuitStudio. Then, we took the prod- uct and started to redesign it in certain places. At the "proof of concept" stage, it started out with a lithium battery, and our take was that a lithium battery in a product you might strap to a very expensive racehorse might not be a great plan. There are a few things that could go wrong there, so we have helped them migrate to a nickel-metal hydride one. It isn't sexy, but it's inert. Obviously, there are issues where you have a chunk of metal close to a set of an- tennas. We had a form factor we had to meet, but the first thing to do was to get the antennas in and work out how the rest of the electronics and case were going to fit around the antennas and be able to perform efficiently. The device goes in a harness between the forelegs of the horse in its chest region. There is also a strap, which goes around the girth, with a heart rate sensor and motion tracking as well. Now, all of the core technology data pro- cessing the startup developed themselves in- house. They have done an astonishing amount of development, with a very small amount of resources, but we came in and supported them on the hardware side. Holden: How will this benefit the user, the horse, or the jockey? Marshall: Sadly, I'm not the best person to ask, but some of the veterinary colleges, along with researchers and leisure owners, are using the technology. In the horse-racing world, there's a lot of interest similar to hu - man athletic performance. Through the de- vice, you can understand rest heart rate, peak heart rate, motion, etc. Overall, there is a lot of work going on in the veterinary world that is way beyond my comprehension. In a way, it's a great case study because it brings to - gether battery safety and how to put a metal battery in close proximity to a GPS and GSM antenna. Holden: Why do you have to start with the an- tenna first? Marshall: It is about arranging the antenna in the right parts of the design because it's a patch antenna on the board. We looked at off- the-shelf antennas, but the problem was there were so many tradeoffs, as well as the diffi -