Coronavirus can’t stop us! But it will slow us down...
almost 5 years ago – Sat, Feb 15, 2020 at 12:19:57 AM

Backers,

As you have probably heard, there is currently an epidemic of coronavirus that originated in the Wuhan region of China. Even though Wuhan is about 1,000 KM from Shenzhen (the region of China where our product is made) efforts to contain the spread of the disease have adversely affected ALL supply chain operations within and involving China. Shenzhen was shut down for an extra week after the New Year holiday and then there was a mountain of paperwork to be able to officially open up for business again due to the virus, but the good news is that all of our people are healthy and officially back to work.

The bad news is that the 2000 finished Dopplers that were packed and ready to get loaded onto a boat are still packed and ready to be loaded onto a boat. We missed the last boat out of China before Chinese New Year and the port still hasn’t opened back up yet due to the virus. This is a fluid situation that is truly unprecedented in the world, so please hang with us while we work through it safely. We are not the only ones trying to get products out of the country, but we are estimating that we should be able to get the 2000 Dopplers out of the country by the end of next week.

In the meantime, at our office in the States and in Israel, we have been working hard on getting the app ready for the Beta testers. The Beta units are sitting in our warehouse and are ready to go out as soon as we have an app that is ready for testing. In the last couple of weeks, we have been going through an internal QA process to make sure things are working decently well. We aren’t 100% happy with the app’s performance and we are continuing to tweak things to get them working better. That being said, we need to get the Doppler into your hands, so we have decided that next week, we are going to start the beta process even if the app isn’t working as well as we’d like.

The iOS app is in a more finished place right now than the Android version, so we are going to start the Beta program with those that have iOS devices. We have chosen and notified 20 iOS Beta testers that will be getting the initial units. These testers will make sure there aren’t any show-stopping bugs we might have missed. After we are confident there aren’t any, we will send out the remaining Beta devices to those Beta testers with iOS devices (about 40 more testers). We will then focus our efforts on the Android version and once it’s passed our internal QA process we will send out the Beta units to the remaining Beta testers.

We will admit we are nervous to finally send units to customers, it’s been a long time and a rough road and we are hoping all goes well! We do expect things to go wrong and some Beta testers to have trouble setting up and using their Dopplers. But, this is what Beta testing is for and we are looking forward to all feedback.

Along with testing the app and squashing software bugs, we took the Doppler to a local acoustic testing lab to verify that the Doppler will pass Amazon’s Alexa certification testing process. The acoustic part of this testing verifies that the acoustics of the device respond appropriately to a battery of tests revolving around the word Alexa. We are very happy to report that the Doppler passed all of these tests with flying colors and the microphone system we created even performs better in certain situations than an Amazon Echo Dot (which has twice the number of microphones the Doppler) does!

Lastly, we have been outfitting the new warehouse space next to our office to prepare for the arrival of the Dopplers. Since we will be flashing all of these units with the latest software build before they go out to you all we have been designing a Doppler flashing cart. These carts are metal wire shelves on wheels that store and power 20 Dopplers at once with a single power cable. This will allow us to batch Dopplers during the flashing process. Once the flashing process is over we will be doing a final QA on the Dopplers before packing them back in their boxes and then finally off to our backers to enjoy!

In the next update we hope to report back how our initial iOS Beta Dopplers faired, we are crossing our fingers for good user experiences. The wait is almost over!

Thanks, everyone!

-PAI Team

The Dopplers are coming, two if by sea!
almost 5 years ago – Wed, Jan 22, 2020 at 11:55:17 PM

Loyal Kickstarter backers,

We are back in the office after a successful CES 2020. It was a great show, but boy are we tired.

Here is a quick video we took at the show:

Let’s get into a full recap of CES 2020.

We had a lot more video taken at the show this year, it’s really the best way to show the craziness that is CES. Here is a quick sizzle reel:

We had a 20x20 booth again this year but we redesigned it, while still keeping the same general look and feel. Here is a 360 video of our booth:

All the Doppler colors looked AMAZING and we couldn't be happier with all of them. Here are some more pictures of the Doppler at CES 2020:

The Wi-Fi at the show was exceptionally bad this year, but when we could get a good internet connection, the Doppler worked great! Luckily, CES is literally the worst place in the world for a Wi-Fi device to work and it still worked most of the time, so we are confident it will work well next to your nightstand.

We met with many potential distributors, retailers, and partners that all loved the Doppler. It truly was the star of the show!

Although the biggest person we met was none other than 7 foot 1-inch basketball legend Shaq! He stopped by the booth and gave us our first celebrity endorsement! When told about the Doppler’s 6 USB port he tapped the Doppler and said, “I like this”!

Our CEO, Alex, was doing an interview with our friends at the Podfeet podcast when Shaq stopped by. The entire interview is great especially when Shaq shows up, you should check it out.

As is now tradition our booth was a charging lounge so attendees could take a break on our comfy couches and charge up their phones using our products. Well some of them got too comfortable and now must be shamed publicly!

Thanks to everyone on the CES PAI team 2020 for helping us with a very successful show!

Once we got back from CES we went back to work on the Doppler.

Beta Update:

The iOS bug we mentioned in the previous update has been found and fixed and we are working on the final QA for the iOS Doppler app now. Once the app is properly tested, we will then start shipping out Beta units to our Beta testers (finally). Beta testers, keep your eyes peeled for the email!

Production update:

Things are going well overseas and we are about halfway through the production run. Here are some pictures of the Doppler in production:

As we mentioned in our last update we were aiming for 2000 Dopplers to be finished before CNY so we can start fulfilling pre-orders. Well, here they are! 2000 Dopplers ready to leave our factory en route to the ship!

From here, the Dopplers will go through Chinese customs clearance before being loaded into a 20-foot container and put on a boat to Oakland. Once the boat arrives in Oakland, the container will be unloaded and go through US customs and then onto a truck to our office in Santa Clara!

As we mentioned in our previous update the process can take quite a few weeks, around 3-4 usually. Apparently, we aren’t the only ones trying to get things onto the boats before Chinese New Year and we are told that the port is very busy. Hopefully, we make the last boat before the holiday and the entire country shuts down for a couple of weeks.

During the Chinese New Year Holiday, we will be hard at work doing QA on the app and working on sending out Beta units. We will also be preparing for the production units that will arrive in just a few short weeks.

This has been a long journey and we are reaching the end. We can’t thank you all enough for sticking with us!

Thanks again, you guys are the best!

-PAI Team

As 2019 comes to a close... Where is my Doppler?
almost 5 years ago – Tue, Dec 31, 2019 at 10:28:13 PM

Doppler backers,

We have been working really hard to get you all your clocks before the end of the year. Considering it’s the last day of 2019, that obviously isn’t going to happen. We are very disappointed and frustrated to miss another deadline for our backers. The second we have a product that is working well enough to ship, we will.

So what caused the delay? We are searching for exact answers as to why, but it boils down to the fact that the main LEDs for the display ended up arriving about a month and a half after they were supposed to. Both our US representatives and our overseas teams were in constant communication, but things still moved at a snail's pace even with us pushing daily. The good news is we eventually did receive the parts in our warehouse on December 12th. The original schedule had these parts arriving on November 1st and this delay messed up all of our timing and was a logistical nightmare. Once we finally got the LEDs in-house, our factory workers started working on the PCBs for the production of Dopplers.

The factory now is busy working on producing quality Dopplers at a rate of around 50 units per day. We are doing these units slowly to make sure every Doppler is perfect. This is a standard procedure for bringing up a new product and it’s something that can’t really be rushed. The first 2000 Dopplers (enough to fulfill all pre-orders) are scheduled to be shipped before Chinese New Year happens. Chinese New Year is a little early this year as it starts on January 25th.

The Dopplers will then travel by boat from Shenzhen to Oakland and then they will be offloaded to our warehouse in Santa Clara. This process usually takes around 3-4 weeks. Our engineering team will then review the units and assuming everything is looking good, we will ship them off to our customers (finally)! We are now targeting a ship date of March 1st for our domestic customers. All Kickstarter backers will get priority and then all other pre-orders after that. To prepare for the arrival of these Dopplers we are working on renting the warehouse next to us!

Beta Backers

Fear not, you’ll be receiving your Dopplers before March! Your units are sitting safely in our warehouse waiting for the software and app to be ready.

So what’s the latest on the software?  We are happy to report that the BLE issues we are experiencing have been solved and the Dopplers are now connecting via BLE and then to a WiFi network well. We have run into another software bug preventing us from shipping the Betas though. Currently, there is a strange bug with the iOS Alexa integration preventing the Doppler from being properly authorized as an Alexa device when signing in from an iOS app. We are working with our App developer to try and figure out what’s going on here. We anticipate this will be a quick fix and once we return from CES we will ship out the Beta units.

Certifications

The Doppler has also been going through FCC testing to ensure we comply with all necessary standards. We have what’s called a “pre-certified intentional radiator” because we have a Bluetooth and Wifi radio inside, but we still have to go through this testing. Check out these awesome pictures from the test chamber!

In the first part of the new year, we will also submit the Doppler to Amazon certification as well as a third-party security firm to become Alexa certified! This certification is an in-depth process where they test all aspects of the Doppler in detail. We plan on going over this in more detail in the coming updates.

CES

The biggest show of the year is around the corner and we will be there with Doppler beta units! If you’re around, our booth will be 42731 in the Sands and we would love to show you the Doppler. If we have the time at the show we plan on posting another update with lots of pictures and videos from the show. These trade shows are vital for business and we are hoping for another great show!

We have a pretty amazing booth location this year and we are super excited to be next to some pretty big names.

Thanks again for your patience and we hope everyone loves 2020, it will be the year you receive your Doppler! Happy New Year!

-PAI Team

USB-C, wireless chargers, and Beta update
about 5 years ago – Sat, Nov 16, 2019 at 02:19:23 AM

Doppler backers,

We have a shorter update coming to you guys.

USB-C

In the last update (linked here), we discussed an issue we noticed with the USB-C boards. Well, we are happy to report that the issue has been fixed and the USB-C board design is now working as expected! We have released the design to China for manufacturing of the new updated (and working) design. Huzzah!

Since the production of the Dopplers has started (more on this later), we are going to be charging and locking orders in Backerkit next week, so make sure you log in and verify that everything looks right! If you want to change anything or there is a change in your address, don’t worry -- you can change that right up until shipping!

If you’d like to add USB-C ports to your Doppler, please make sure you go to your Backerkit link and change your order from USB-A to USB-C. To do this, you’ll want to go to this page and look up your Backerkit URL: https://sandman-doppler-the-worlds-best-alarm-clock.backerkit.com

To modify your order, use the following procedure:

If you want to order the USB-C add-on, make sure you scroll down because the USB-C choices are towards the bottom of the page. Once you have made your selection, be sure and click the “Update” button in the top right corner of the Pledge Response Question page! If you have any questions on how to do this or are having trouble figuring this out, feel free to contact us and we can change your order to a USB-C version from our end. You can send us an email us at [email protected]

NOTE: If you select the USB-C models, your Doppler will ship with the USB-C upgrade ($25) pre-installed and ready to go, so there’s nothing else you need to worry about.

USB-C cables

Some more USB-C related news! We have added Sandman branded USB-C cables, which can be added to your order via Backerkit and will ship along with your Doppler. To order the USB Cables through Backerkit, you’ll want to go to the add on section and select your cable type -- as of right now, we have 4ft black USB-A to USB-C and a 4 ft black USB-C to USB-C cables. If any of the devices that you will be charging use a micro USB or Lightning connector we also have those in stock!

Lastly, wireless charging pads are also now on the Backerkit as an add on item. These QI wireless charging pads are very simple and work very well for every phone we have tested (iPhone and Android) along with a myriad of other wireless charging-enabled accessories. The wireless charging pad can sit nicely next to or in front of your Doppler to charge all the things!

Beta update

So what's the status of the Beta units, have they shipped out yet? As we mentioned in our last update, we have units in our warehouse waiting for a more reliable version of the software before we ship to customers. We are currently working on BLE (bluetooth low energy) connectivity issues with our App developer and hardware suppliers to identify and fix the problem. Without a rock-solid BLE connection we won’t be able to connect your Doppler to the internet or to Amazon for Alexa to work. With the help and assistance of our partners, we have discovered a very obscure bug deep in the operating system of the Doppler which we are confident is causing the issues we are seeing. Once we fix this issue we will be able to reflash the Beta units and ship them out to our Beta testers. We know it is frustrating to hear that the Beta units are here but not being shipped -- trust us, we want to get these units out as soon as we can too. Having units in our warehouse and not being able to ship them to customers is killing us.

Production update

In the meantime, in China, we are working on incoming quality control and getting all the parts in-house so we can start assembling the production build of Dopplers. We are dealing with some logistical problems with the LEDs at the moment which is the current slow down. Each Doppler has 104 LEDs and we are building 5,000 Dopplers so that's 520,000 LEDs we are shipping to our factory in Shenzhen. Dealing with this quantity of anything isn’t as easy logistically as buying it from Amazon, especially in China. So we are working on these issues with our LED supplier and Future Electronics (our distributor) to get the parts into our factory next week. Once that happens, we can start assembling the circuit boards just like we did for the Beta run, just 25X as big of a run! It’s so exciting! We are still doing everything we can to get everyone in the US their Dopplers before the end of the year. Realistically there just isn’t enough time for shipping internationally before the end of the year.

CES

The biggest trade show of the year is coming up, CES 2020! We will be exhibiting again this year with a huge and awesome booth filled with Dopplers! If you’ll be at the show, please make sure to stop by and say hello. If you’d like to go to the show, we have extra passes for the show, just email us and we will send you instructions on how to register for free.

Ok, back to work on BLE.

-PAI Team

The Beta units have arrived!
about 5 years ago – Sat, Oct 26, 2019 at 02:37:44 AM

We are back!

Before we dive into the meat of this update (and it’s a long one), there is a quick thing we want to note: Beta Backers, we need to verify that you still want to be a part of the Beta testing process. We need to know what kind of phone you have, and your address. If you haven’t received an email from us, please email us at [email protected]!

In case you didn’t see the last update, a couple of weeks back we were in China working directly with our factory on the Beta build of the Doppler!

Ok, let’s talk about the Beta run and how the trip to China went... Spoiler alert: it went well! The first step in any production run (no matter how big) is ordering the necessary parts for the run. Each Doppler is made up of approximately 560(!!!!) individual parts which means we needed to gather and organize -- *checks calculator* darn near 112,000 parts! Now, this is a bit of an exaggeration as this count includes parts that the Doppler has hundreds of, like LEDs, but it’s still a heck of a lot of parts! We have been working on ordering these parts and the logistics of both the Beta build and the production build for the last couple of months and everything is under control.

As the various parts arrived at the factory, they went through the IQC (incoming quality control) process to make sure they all met our quality standards. This process is incredibly important and is critical in order to have a quality product.

One of the more complicated parts of the Doppler is the buttons. These require a couple of different coats of paint and a laser to get just right. We want to make sure all the Doppler buttons look perfect, so during IQC we inspect and approve all the parts that work correctly and reject any that don’t meet our IQC standards. With the buttons, one of the more common failure points is light bleeding out where it shouldn’t, especially around the edges of the buttons. To test this, we have our QA technician shine a light from underneath the buttons and make sure there is zero light bleed.

Choosing a reliable supplier is very important and our factory has a partner electronics assembly shop right next door with multiple SMT (surface mount technology) lines. Having a supplier right next door is very convenient when doing assembly on a board for the first time at a new supplier, but in general, the SMT process is pretty cut and dried and everything went well. The process is the same as we have outlined in previous updates just with slightly different machines each time. We were very happy to be able to watch our boards go through the assembly process. Here are some pictures from the SMT line during the Beta run.

Arguably the most important part of the Doppler is the main display, so we are being extra careful with the IQC on the main display board. The Board had 122 LEDs on it, so in order to make sure all of the parts are correctly placed during SMT and all of the parts work we did a burn-in test, which requires the boards to sit inside an industrial oven for 5 minutes at 80 °C (176 °F) with all of the LEDs on. If all of the LEDs are still lit after the 5 minutes are up, we have a success! If the boards fail during this test, we obviously have a problem. If they pass the test and still work after 5 minutes it’s very unlikely they will fail and any point in the future.

After we tested all of the boards we had 97% of them pass our test, giving us a yield of 97%. For a Beta run, we were happy with these numbers and we expect these numbers to increase further as we work with our neighbors to dial in all aspects of the circuit board assembly process. Having the shop next door is really a treat and one of the advantages of working with suppliers in Shenzhen, electronics shops are everywhere!

To make sure that the Doppler meets our quality standards, it is necessary to do IQC on every part from the display board, to the molded parts, and even the screws. For example, during our IQC inspection of the main body of the Doppler, we noticed some extra plastic (called flash) that wasn’t properly cleaned. Having this extra material on the plastics negatively affects how the rest of the parts fit together… Not good. The injection molding factory is supposed to do this and did for the majority of the flash, but they missed some. So we cleaned up the remaining plastic with a razor blade. We then sent our workers and engineers to the injection molding factory to train their workers on how to properly clean these parts for the production build. This sort of communication and cooperation takes years to cultivate and we are really lucky to have these kinds of relationships with our suppliers.

Once all parts had gone through IQC, we went through and assembled two Dopplers carefully with the production manager and the lead process engineer for our project. We carefully assembled two Dopplers while we timed every step of the process. This time study allows us to gauge how long it takes for each and every step of the Doppler production process. Here are the two units we finished first. Beta 1 and Beta 2.

Once we had rough numbers on how long each step took, we bundled some steps together to make each “bundle” take approximately the same time so as to have a smooth and efficient production line. Having each step be equal length prevents buildup or bottlenecks at different assembly stations. Initially, you might think it would be better to do 5,000 of each task so that you have 5,000 finished units all at once, but the issue there is that if you find out you forgot something or were doing something wrong you have a lot of WIP (work in progress) parts that need to be fixed or redone. Fixing or redoing these parts takes time and materials. Instead of having large numbers of WIP, you move each Doppler through the various steps from raw goods to a finished Doppler as quickly as possible so if something is done wrong you limit the amount of wasted materials and labor. 

At this point, the line was set up and we started making Doppler Beta units! Since we were in the factory, this allowed us to personally review the units coming off the line and see how they looked. We noticed a couple of issues (below), which we will correct before the production run. Some of these issues were a much bigger deal than others and discovering some of these issues is exactly why doing a Beta run is so important.

We also found a couple of firmware and software issues which we relayed back to our software team for them to start fixing.

We ended up making and shipping 120 units to our office before the Golden Week holiday started.

You might be thinking “wait a second, weren’t there supposed to be 200 Beta units?” and you would be right. What about the other 80 units? Initially, we were planning on completing all 200 before shipping them stateside, and we could have done this, but after discussing it we decided to take a slightly different approach. Since we ordered almost twice the number of Beta units as there are Beta backers, we have decided to not rush through the production of the Beta build so we would still have some unassembled Doppler materials before the production run started. These materials will allow our factory to train new workers in preparation for the production build. This means that instead of just using a couple of leftover samples, they can actually train workers with real materials and work on getting the production workers trained to build quality Dopplers quickly. We will also utilize some of the Beta units to send to the various certification companies to do testing associated with a quality electronics product like the Doppler.

Since the Dopplers left our factory, we have had an interesting couple of weeks. About halfway through Golden Week, our freight courier actually rejected the Doppler shipment in the process of leaving China. It turns out they gave us a couple of incorrect forms and this caused our shipment to be delayed until after Golden Week. This obviously bummed us out and slowed things down, but these sort of logistical issues do happen and unfortunately, this time it happened after we had left China, so there wasn’t much we could do other than wait for the holiday to end and for everyone to get back to the office. Slight hiccup notwithstanding, The Day finally arrived earlier this week and we got our shipment of Doppler Beta units to our office!

We have been working on reviewing the Doppler units in detail to see if there is anything we can improve before starting mass production.

Now the big question: When are we sending out the Beta units? We are currently having some issues with the Doppler App (getting the device online and connected to Amazon) and aren’t quite happy with how everything is working currently. Since this part of the setup is incredibly important, we are working with our App company in Israel to fix these issues as soon as possible so we can send out Dopplers to our Beta users.

Another not so great piece of news is our USB-C board upgrade isn’t working as well as we would like. The boards are actually giving us an error on some newer Android phones warning us it’s charging slower than normal USB. This is obviously unacceptable and we narrowed the problem down to a faulty USB-C connector design. Without getting into the technical details of USB-C charging speed negotiation, we have found a new supplier with a proper USB-C port and are remaking the boards. These are scheduled to be done next week and we will verify that everything is working properly, and then we will retrofit the USB-C upgrade for those Beta backers that have ordered USB-C.

Once the App is working better, we will reflash the Beta units to the latest version of the software, do a final QA, and then send them off to our Beta customers! We are hoping to get this done in the next couple of weeks. The good news is one of the biggest hurdles is over -- we have Dopplers in our warehouse! It’s going to be a busy next couple of weeks for us, but we are excited and anxious to get some units out of our warehouse and into our backer’s hands soon.

Thanks, everyone!

-PAI Team