Ask an architect or site engineer where the authoritative record of last Thursday's site walk lives and the honest answer is usually: partly in a notebook, partly in a phone photo of a whiteboard, partly in someone's memory, and partly in an email written two days later that already had to reconstruct half of it.
That gap is not a discipline problem. It is a capture problem. Site conditions are hostile to the tools that would otherwise close it — a laptop is impractical, a phone recording app is intrusive in front of a client, and typing while walking a slab edge is a bad idea.
This article is about what changes when the capture device is a pen.
Why AECO field notes leak
Three properties of construction and design-review work make information loss structural rather than accidental.
Notes are spatial, not linear. A site note is rarely a sentence. It is an arrow to a soffit, a circled dimension, a sketch of a clash between a duct and a beam. Any tool that only accepts text is asking you to translate at the worst possible moment.
The record is verbal and multi-party. The consequential content of a design review is who committed to what. A recording without attribution turns that into detective work; notes without a recording lose everything you did not have time to write.
The transfer step is where it dies. Even a perfect notebook page has to be re-entered somewhere before it affects an RFI, a specification clause or a model change. That step is unpaid, unloved, and the first thing dropped under deadline.
Capturing spatial notes without changing how you work
The EXXY® Smart Pen attacks the third problem by removing the transfer step, and it does so without touching the first two.
It writes in real ink on whatever surface you have. A 6-axis IMU traces the pen's own motion — accelerometer and gyroscope, no printed dot pattern to depend on — so a marked-up drawing print, a site diary or the back of a delivery note all work identically. Strokes are converted to editable text in under one second and reach the cloud before you cap the pen.
That means the sketch you drew standing under the soffit is searchable by the time you are back in the site office. You did not stop to type it.
Whiteboards and marked-up drawings
Design reviews generate artefacts that are not handwriting: a whiteboard sequencing diagram, a red-lined section, a sketch on a coordination print. The pen captures an image of these and transfers it to your devices, so the artefact joins the same record as the notes rather than living in a camera roll.
Attribution in coordination meetings
Coordination meetings run on commitments. A 940nm infrared camera with a 120° field of view maps the room and tracks who is speaking; that spatial signal is fused with audio from dual MEMS microphones with active noise cancellation to produce a transcript where each segment carries a speaker label, in any of 40+ languages.
For a joint-venture project team working across languages — a common condition on large AECO projects — a speaker-labelled multilingual transcript removes a whole reconciliation task.
The 940nm wavelength is invisible, so nothing on the pen lights up during a client meeting.
The conditions the site imposes
Field hardware fails for unglamorous reasons. The relevant specifications are the ones about endurance and independence:
- 8 hours of continuous active use from a 400mAh Li-Po cell — a full site day, not a session. 45 minutes to a full charge on the Qi stand or over USB-C.
- On-device AI on a Cortex-M33 with NPU, so no signal in a basement plant room or a steel-framed core is not a failure. Cloud sync is optional; 1 GB of internal storage holds 10+ hours of audio.
- Grade-5 titanium body, 28 g, 145 × 11 mm. Titanium is the specification that matters for a tool that will be dropped on concrete.
- AES-256 end-to-end encryption. Commercially sensitive coordination content should not be a policy question.
From capture to project record
Capture only pays off if the downstream path exists. Notes and transcripts from the pen land in EXXY® AI Studio, which is where AECO teams already run:
- BIM and IFC model analysis — so a dimension you noted on site is searchable next to the model it contradicts, and a clash you sketched can be checked against the coordinated model.
- Documentation, specification and compliance review — a site observation becomes a specification note or a compliance query with a human approval gate rather than a retyping exercise.
- AI meeting minutes and action extraction — the coordination meeting produces minutes and owned actions from the attributed transcript.
- Document intelligence — field notes are collated with drawings, RFIs and reports instead of sitting outside them.
The test of the whole chain is simple: can a note written on a slab edge on Thursday affect a specification clause on Friday without anyone retyping it? That is the workflow this is built for.
Pre-launch status
The EXXY® Smart Pen is pre-launch, with an Indiegogo campaign launching 25 August 2026 and expected shipping to Super Early Bird backers in March 2027.
- Retail: $499 USD
- Super Early Bird: 25 fully refundable deposit** that is deducted from the final pledge
- Limit: 5 pens per customer; every reservation includes a handmade full-grain Italian leather case
Registering an expression of interest is free — no payment, no card details — and puts you on the list for the launch announcement and product updates. It does not reserve a pen or hold a price.
FAQ
Does the smart pen work without an internet connection on site?
Yes. AI processing runs on the pen's Cortex-M33 with NPU, so transcription, handwriting capture and room mapping do not depend on connectivity. Up to 10+ hours of audio and its transcripts store locally on 1 GB of internal memory and sync later, if you choose to sync at all.
Can it digitize notes written on drawing prints and site diaries?
Yes. The 6-axis IMU traces the pen's own motion rather than reading a printed pattern, so any surface works — coordination prints, site diaries, or plain paper. There is no proprietary paper to order.
How does it handle a coordination meeting with several speakers?
A 940nm infrared camera with a 120° field of view maps speaker positions in the room and that data is fused with dual-MEMS audio, so each transcript segment is attributed to a speaker rather than merged into one block. Transcription and translation cover 40+ languages.
Is it durable enough for site use?
The body is Grade-5 titanium, 145 × 11 mm and 28 g. Battery life is 8 hours of continuous active use, recharging fully in 45 minutes via the Qi stand or USB-C.
Is meeting content kept confidential?
All data uses AES-256 end-to-end encryption, and because inference happens on the pen, no audio or handwriting is transmitted unless cloud sync is enabled.
Do the notes connect to BIM and documentation workflows?
Yes. Transcripts and digitized notes land in EXXY® AI Studio alongside BIM and IFC model analysis, specification and compliance review, and document intelligence, so field capture feeds the project record directly.
POINTY is a development code name. Product renderings are concept visuals and final hardware may vary. EXXY® is a registered trademark of Unime Labs. Questions: hello@unimelabs.com