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yes, but we will have to source new bricks first. We went with these black bricks because a) they looked cool, b) we could afford them, and c) samples of the bricks passed electrical surge and signal quality tests we had performed here in Mountain View. Maybe there's a reason Apple charges $29 for theirs...
see my comment above about noisy electrical signal form the USB charger brick.
We sent this email tonight within an hour of hearing about the first issue. One of our goals as a company is to increase people's quality of life -- starting with sleep. It was immediately apparent to us we had to tell our customers, especially if their safety was at all at risk.
yes the batteries are safe. we believe that the chargers are spitting out a noisy electrical signal, which is causing the battery charger IC on the WakeMate to overheat, thus causing the problem. We have only seen any incidence when the unit is plugged into the black USB charger bricks we shipped with. To date we have logged over 20000 hours of sleep on our system, so we're certain that sleeping with the Wakemate is safe, and that the batteries on the WakeMates are safe as well. This is in addition to the testing and certification we had done on the unit as well before we began shipping units.
We have a comparison chart here: http://wakemate.com/compare/
WakeMate is cheaper, more comfortable, and easier to use.
Getting up in the middle of the night won't affect anything. Our analytics system will, however, tell you that you woke up during the night.
WakeMate uses a science called actigraphy to monitor your sleep patterns by measuring the movement of your body (via your wrist). Actigraphy has been used in sleep labs for decades and is a widely standardized metric of sleep in humans (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actigraphy). The Sleep Cycle app, because it is not attached to your body, does not use actigraphy, and therefore cannot provide the same granular level of data measurement as a device using actigraphy, such as the WakeMate. Furthermore, Sleep Cycle is susceptible to false data collection since it can be easily influenced by the presence of others in the bed, such as a partner or pet.
i am sorry we are not as perfect as Apple. yet.
not exactly similar. Our product uses Actigraphy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actigraphy), which is a different method (and in our opinion much less obtrusive) for measuring sleep phases than the Zeo which uses a headband. Also, our unit is wireless and automatically uploads your data to our web server with very little user input (besides setting the alarm before going to bed).
when iphone users make up the majority of your preorders (and supposedly market), then yes it does matter. if we had just launched for Blackberry and Android, we would not be having these delays...
Hey thank for the encouragement! IMO the authentication chip has some details that are very poorly documented (and as a result gave me months of headaches). if you want to talk shop anytime please feel free to drop me a line at: craig <at> wakemate <dot> com. would love to have another hardware developer working on apple auth to chat with...
don't get me wrong...I am proud of my ability to solder surface mount chips by hand. that said, certain SMT packages (FBGAs, LGAs) are pretty much impossible to solder by hand with a conventional iron.
the surface mount packages we use for the chip components on the WakeMate are a little difficult to solder by hand, unfortunately.
I've updated the blog post to reflect what actually happened...
the majority of pre-orders (> 80%), which were through Google Checkout, were never charged; the Paypal pre-orders, however, were.
We have fully implemented Apple's MFi authentication scheme/protocol for all communication between the iPhone/iPad/iPodTouch platforms and the WakeMate wristband. This involves the special Apple auth IC you mentioned.