Hey guys, I’ve been holding out on an update because we’ve been in the middle of beta testing and have some decisions to make that I don’t have all the answers to. I was hoping to hold off until I have all the answers (should be in two weeks), but I suppose if everyone wants an update, it’s the least I can do.
We’re caught in between a rock and hard place right now as we have a product that works, and delivers on the promises that we’ve set out initially, but we just don’t think the user experience is going to be great.
Let me expand a bit.
The switch that we’ve been testing does detect presence and it does a decent job at it. It’s the decent part that I don’t like as that’s not the brand that we aim to be.
One of the main issues is the lack of left to right zones. While we didn’t promise this feature, when testing in my office, my switch would turn on randomly even when I wasn’t in the room. We spent days, even weeks trying to figure out why this was happening. We thought it was EMF interference, but what it turned out to be was that people were walking outside my office in the parking lot and it was setting off the sensor. When I brought the distance down to eliminate the sensor going outside of the walls, the sensor never came on when I wasn’t in the room.
The problem with shortening the distance is that this shortens the entire field of view distance and the sensor could no longer pick me up at my desk.
Let me illustrate:
As you can see in the second picture, the area the sensor picks up is too small to reach the back of the office where I was sitting.
So then the next idea was to keep the distance the same, but lower the intensity of the sensor and hope that at a lower intensity, it wouldn’t be able to go through walls. Unfortunately, that didn’t work very well because when I was sitting at my desk, the sensor wouldn’t pick me up all the time as it couldn’t detect micro-movements anymore.
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The only way to solve this is to add left to right zones. Something similar to this:
We’ve gone back and forth with the manufacturer and they said the only way to do this was upgrade the sensor to one that had this feature, but that hasn’t released yet and wouldn’t until Q4. Even then, it was a beta release.
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So we decided to take two paths:
- Continue to develop this switch and see what the beta testers thought and see if we could continue to tweak the firmware a bit to minimize the potential user experience frustration
- Start to develop a new switch with our main manufacturer (the one that makes all of our current switches) that utilizes a completely different mmWave sensor and have them R&D on their own, giving them the pain-points we’ve experienced and see if they can find a sensor that would solve for it
I’ve kept #2 hush, hush because I didn’t want to tip off the manufacturer who’s making the mmWave switch and I also just didn’t want to promise anything to you guys without knowing how well the second path performed. I also secretly hoped that path #1 would pan out and we could improve the experience.
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Path #2 was not panning out initially as the manufacturer informed us that a lot of the mmWave sensors they were testing were not living up to the specs that were promised by these mmWave sensor manufacturers. This is exactly what we’ve been seeing too. These manufacturers will promise this amazing mmWave sensor, but when you test it out, the listed specs are either completely false or they just don’t perform as well as they should.
In addition, with a limited footprint inside the switch, there’s only so many mmWave sensors we could choose from.
It wasn’t until about a couple of weeks ago, the manufacturer sent us some good news that said they found a reputable sensor manufacturer and they’ve been testing it and it’s been performing amazing. I was skeptical until they sent us some videos of them testing and it did seem legit. However, I still want to test it myself and that’s where we are right now.
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The new sensor is a 60GHz sensor that offers the following:
- Left / Right Zoning
- A learning mode where the sensor can learn what objects are in the room that would interfere with readings (ceiling fans, etc)
- Breathing detection
- Counts the number of people in the room
- Plus everything the current sensor offers
The problem is that this sensor is $15 more than the current one, which makes the manufacturer price significantly higher.
Ok, so where does that leave us?
We’re going to continue to develop the current switch (it has finished ETL/FCC/IC testing and just needs to go through Zigbee/Z-Wave certification) but simultaneously develop the new switch. I firmly believe that the sensor works well as we’ve had a relationship with this manufacturer for 3+ years and they are very honest with us in terms of if they can or cannot do something. They are confident in the sensor and have tested it thoroughly. We have a great working relationship with them (the reason we chose a different manufacturer initially was because they were less expensive, had a factory outside of China which saved us 25% tariff, and they’ve developed switches for a large IoT company) and believe they can pull this off.
I will have a working sample on October 21st, but I’ve asked them if they can at least just give me the sensor to test within the next week or two so I can confirm what I saw in the video and also release these videos to you guys bc I’m well aware of how it may look where it looks like we’re just kicking the can down the road while we hold onto pre-order money. I want to share video evidence that the new sensor works and this is why we went this path (if we do).
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At the end of the day, here’s how we’re approaching this (as we do every project). We don’t want to release something that isn’t up to the standards we’ve set. Sure, it would be nice to be the first with a mmWave switch and it would be nice to wrap up this project as it’s already almost a year late. But at the same time, we want to put something out that we’re absolutely proud of, that you guys are proud of, and that sets the standard for what gets put out by other companies in the future.
You guys have paid a lot of hard-earned money for these switches and the last thing we’d want as a company is for you to feel let down by what you’ve received. If it means we have to take a hit on costs (we’d be sacrificing about $100k worth of our own money that we wouldn’t get back in certification fees, tooling, etc and also pay a higher price per unit), I’m ok with that if it means we have an amazing product. That’s the benefit of being privately owned, we don’t have to answer to shareholders who want huge returns and would pressure us to put out a product that simply meets our promises, we can choose to take a hit to put out something that we know is best for the customer (and us quite frankly, these will be in our houses too).
Anyway, what we plan on doing if we do decide to go down Option #2 is to obviously give anyone who’s purchased the switch already the upgraded model for the same price and also extend that same price for any future purchases of this switch (for those that pre-ordered up until the decision is made to go with Option #2). The MSRP will increase about $10-15, but again, that will only apply to anyone who hasn’t backed the switch up until the point we officially go with Option #2.
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I don’t have a timeline on Option #2, but the good news is that the firmware can easily be built upon what’s already created for our base Dimmer model and it will be consistent (we had to build the new firmware from scratch with the new manufacturer as they weren’t able to use the source code).
I also don’t have a ton of answers yet, all I can say is that this is the top priority and the Option #2 manufacturer knows this.
With Option #1, like I said in my novel above, we just need to go through Z-Wave/Zigbee Certification and production, so I would assume it would take about a couple of months before it gets sent to us if all goes to plan (which it hasn’t obviously).
So for those who have deadlines to meet, I apologize, but I don’t think I can give a solid answer for the timeline, other than we are moving as fast as we can and I’m well aware of the frustration (bc I’m also feeling it with this project).
Thanks for attending my Ted Talk.
Edit: I plan to share any videos we take of the new sensor as we create them.