Many might know that the Miofive dash cam comes with a shiny glass panel. Here is the story of how it was made.

We have carefully selected raw material.

Intuitively, when it comes to glass, everyone thinks of “glass.” That was the first pitfall we stepped in. 4K dashcam emits a lot of heat; highly efficient heat dissipation is required. But glass is a low thermally conductive material; using it will cause a large amount of heat to remain on the surface.

Users will feel too hot when touching the panel. We tried many different materials to fix this issue and eventually chose Plexiglass, an excellent thermal conductive material with high stability.

Surface Appearance

Ordinary Plexiglass does not meet the metal mirror surface texture we required. Therefore, we need to use plating technology to modify the surface. But besides appearance requirements, our glass also needs to serve as a touch panel. The touch panel is achieved by voltage difference, so it must not be conductive.

Standard plating is putting a thin layer of Nickel; this will cause the glass to be conductive, which cannot be used. To achieve our requirement, we need to adopt non-conductive plating technology.

To achieve our requirement, the raw material needs to go through.
1. Non-conductive plating
2.Silk prints the black background
3.Bake
4.Plating stripping
5.Silk print silver color
6.Bake again
These are the six primary processes to complete the glass. And all materials such as paint must use non-conductive material.

After the above initial stages, we have to refine the edges, which can take place in two steps.
1.Cutting the glass (with a diamond cutting edge)
2.Create a 2.5D edge (with a diamond cutting edge)

Precise cutting

We have a high accuracy assembling requirement, and to make sure the user has a smooth touch at the edge, the glass needs to use a 2.5D design like many smartphones. Regular cutting blades cannot achieve this. We use a special Dimond cutting blade which is nearly three times more expensive but has only 1/4 life span to do the cutting.

The high precision CNC machine could cut at 0,02mm, which is way thinner than human hair—this secures a tight combination with the housing. After two more processes, the glass is finally complete, cutting and creating the 2.5D edge.

Automatic manufacture

After the glass is complete, it has to pass through automatically inspection, using the whole inspection light to ensure the quality is consistent. We use the automatic gluing machine to ensure the glass and LCD panel are attached closely during assembly. To ensure no impurity, the assembling process has to be complete in Class1000 clean room to prevent environmental contamination causing impurity points on the panel.

Amazing right? Every little detail requires excellent teamwork and experts from all areas.