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Show HN: Tired of waking up like a rabid wolverine?

kickstarter.com

14 pointsalarmclock28 comments

I would personally be much less inclined to support a Kickstarter project that tried to drum up support with spam:

    http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3506802
    http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3501572
    http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3507260

Flagged.

Sorry, but we don't consider a few posts on a site dedicated to news about projects and requesting feedback to be spam.

Four is.

I like the concept. Not sure how well it will work for people with pets that feel they have a rightful place on the bed though :)

Thanks. We've found the best placement to be towards your face and head. When you turn your head, it detects that really well. So, as long as your pet doesn't sleep on your face or pillow, we think you should be able to set it up so it sees you only. You can adjust sensitivity of the motion sensor too, if needed.

One of my cats tends to sleep on the top of the bed, and picks the side in an apparently random way. This means it would block the sensor on something close to 50% of nights.

Cool product though, and this is a pretty specific issue (e.g. the other cat prefers sleeping in the legs, or under the bedsheets).

Thanks. Very interesting feedback, that's something I didn't think of. You know, a cat's body temperature runs a couple of degrees hotter than humans. I don't think our sensor is quite that narrow in its tuning range to discriminate between humans and pets, but maybe we could do that on a future version or slightly more advanced technology. Just a thought, I'm not guaranteeing that we will do it, or that it's even possible without extremely expensive thermal sensors. Hopefully, the issue you described is not common enough to be a problem for most people.

I think the solution is to wake up on time without the aid of an alarm, not to get a fancy alarm. There is no need for alarms unless you are sleep deprived by children or not in tune with your body.

Alarms are useful as a last resort. My alarm sings at 7.30 but I wake at 7.28 to turn it off. ;)

Especially for catching pre-booked travel, making an exam or meeting, etc. Better safe than sorry. Fortunately, you don't need a fancy alarm for that type of usage.

Let me guess: you're a morning person? I'm not at all convinced that this statement is true for everybody.

I'm an unhealthy person when I'm unhealthy and a healthy person when I'm healthy. I've had all sorts of hours during my life so far.

My comment was more about getting enough sleep than a specific schedule.

There is an app that does a similar thing without any extra hardware (you put your phone on the bed, and it uses the accelerometer).

http://www.sleepcycle.com/

Yes, and for the people that don't seem to mind that approach, please go ahead and try it out. Personally, I can't imagine setting up the phone on my bed every night or under my pillow. We really think our charging dock with included motion sensor that is non-intrusive and requires no nightly setup is a far superior solution.

I find the use of kickstarter more interesting than the tool. Perhaps this is because I generally wake up when my kid starts screaming, rather than when my body tells me it's time.

I've been using the Sleep Cycle app on my phone for a while now, and it's been great. What is the advantage of this approach over a standalone app?

Presumably because it watches you, rather than just timing you.

Personally, I've found that if I set my alarm for (some multiple of 2 hours) + 10 minutes from the time I go to bed, I almost always wake up easily. I like 8 hours, but if I can't get that, 6 will work fine. If I can't get 6, I'll take 4 rather than 5, and while I'll be tired, I won't be "put a bullet in my head please" tired.

Sleep Cycle doesn't just time you. It uses the accelerometers to monitor your sleep phase and attempt to wake you up at an optimal time, just like this thing does.

Yes, the SleepCycle App does use motion too. In fact, I had that idea before they did, but I didn't want to require the user to put the phone on the bed. That seemed really kludgy to me, so that's why I continued on my original path of embedding the motion sensor in the charging dock. I guess I missed out on like a million dollars from that decision, but you never know, maybe we'll beat that figure with this much more sensible device :).

Thanks again for the comments. I guess the other major selling point is that it's a charging dock. My girlfriend loses and breaks the charging cables so often that I almost wanted to switch phones so she couldn't use my charger any more. With this, I have at least one dedicated charger and charging location that she won't take away in a hurry when she's late for work and can't find hers.

Yeah, if you want a charging dock anyway, this certainly serves a nice dual purpose.

My solution to the cable problem was to buy a couple dozen off eBay for about $.70 each. This solution is not for everybody, of course.

Putting the phone on the bed is kludgy, I agree. It's also superbly cheap, though. Anyway, thanks for the explanation. I was just wondering if there might be other advantages to this approach I might have missed. I can certainly see a niche for this version and I hope you find success.

Why do you need a whole iphone for that? You can hack up something like this with an arduino and motion sensors for ~$30

A lot of people already have an iPhone, so leveraging that existing infrastructure costs $0.

It'd be pretty easy to have the thing speak bluetooth and write software to communicate with any phone or computer. I imagine the choice to make it an iphone accessory was a marketing-based one, what with the name and all.

Technically easy, yes. But Global Bluetooth certification is prohibitively expensive. We chose to make it an iPhone accessory, because we think it makes a lot of sense to have a nightstand charging dock (which is where most of the cost comes from) and this wake-up feature in one device.

In software, yes. In a separate device for $70? not so much.

If we get to really high volumes, we can probably reduce the price. Remember, we're just a small operation working on a launch. Tooling for injection molded parts is pretty expensive. If we ever get up to many thousands of pieces, we may be able to get the cost down to that of any charging dock...which again is where most of our costs lie. The motion sensor and lens are very advanced, but they are pretty cheap due to their very widespread use in other products.

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