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Comment by timbowen | Hacker News Reader

1.) LOL I dunno!

2.) I never talked to PG, I can't speak to that.

3.) The problems were absolutely cumulative over the course of development. Neither Greg nor Arun were engineers or technical in any way and the hardware developer had a full time job that was not WakeMate. I started ~1.5 months before launch and was told the hardware was functional. I managed to get the iOS version to work most of the time but the firmware was hosed in such a way that pretty much all units would fail over the course of a few months.

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> the firmware was hosed in such a way that pretty much all units would fail over the course of a few months

I initially had some good experiences with the android version which then got more and more unreliable until I stopped using it altogether. I was led to believe that this was due to bugs in the android app. Are you now saying that it is actually a firmware bug on the devices?

And if yes, is there any hope to have this fixed once everything is open sourced?

The firmware was fixed. Only the initial batch of units that was sent out had the issue. And almost all of those were refurbished by us.

Sigh, that would have been nice to know. Arun told me to unpair and pair the wakemate again. That was it. After telling him that didn't fix it, I got no response. :\

We fixed one of the issues. I processed enough returns on refurbished units to know that there were still several bugs. One of the main complaints is that the wristband would be dead in the morning - I believe this was caused by a firmware defect that caused the bluetooth radio to blare at full strength all night. That being said this was almost a year ago so I might be misremembering specific issues. One thing is for sure though - there were bugs even after we revised the firmware.

As to fixing the firmware - that's absolutely possible although we made some non optimal decisions with the hardware itself that caused the WakeMate to waste a lot of power. That's one of the reasons why the WakeMate's battery is comically large for the amount of usage you get out of the device.

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