CASE STUDY
Cost-Effective Elegance for Mass Production – The “Raven” Wi-Fi Router
OUR APPROACH
Ideation
3D CAD
3D Renderings
Design for Manufacturing
PROJECT OVERVIEW
Viasat is a global communications company that offers satellite internet services to 98% of the U.S. population. We were approached to design a Wi-Fi router (code named “Raven”) for use as their standard-issue routers to homes and businesses across the United States for the foreseeable future.
What may seem like a simple design exercise was actually quite complex, and was replete with a list of challenging requirements. The housing had to be molded in no more than two pieces, a minimum of 45% of the surface area required ventilation, the product required unidirectional orientation, it must naturally dissuade people from placing objects on top of it, the enclosure assembly required a snap-lock feature to secure the housing together to allow for quick and easy assembly, and the product required the option of tabletop or wall mountability, to name a few!
Out of all these challenges, the most demanding part of this project was creating a unique, two-piece housing design. In addition to reducing assembly costs, it had to look like one cohesive enclosure…How were we going to hide the part line so it looked like a cohesive mass? Part lines should either be hidden or intentional, nothing in between. Through a combination of CAD, prototyping, and testing, we narrowed in on a final design direction, ultimately solving the dilemma of how the two halves would combine, which led to the final, current production design.
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