We’re down to three items on our to-do list before we can ship.

We may not hit the July 31st date at this point, but we’ll come close. We’ll post an updated ship date (measured in days or weeks at worst, not months) when we have a better idea of when it will be and will be posting small updates more frequently as so few issues remain outstanding. Additionally, our first run should cover orders slated for August and a large part of September as well, so later ship dates will actually be moved up rather than back.

1. Apple MFI certification

Everything is finally working with the Apple authentication protocol and we just have to submit the WakeMate to Apple for their final approval. Dealing with the finicky authentication chip took up about 75% of our hardware development time and new quirks were being found all the time, particularly with our final board; look for a future blog post with the frustrating details. As far as we’re aware, no commercial product has made use of Apple’s authentication 2.0B coprocessor chip over Bluetooth yet so we’re not surprised by the number of strange issues we’ve encountered.

2. New wristband final touches

We are on what should be our final iteration of the new wristband. Here’s a photo of the current iteration:

Which is relatively close to the original concept drawing done by the design firm months ago:

We’ve learned during the industrial design process that concept drawings can be difficult to realize. The wristband is close to being something we are very happy with. We’re currently dealing with:

• An excess of fabric / bulk
• Bad elastic
• Heat-seal issues (hence the stitching and split ends in the above photo)

3. An unexpected part disappearance

The Flash memory we have been using up to this point is suddenly on factory restriction with a lead time of 26 weeks. We’re now forced to use a different Flash memory component which requires another spin of our PCB and testing before we feel confident going to production. This was an unexpected change, but not a very difficult one to make.

And that’s all we—hey, is that supposed to be on fire?

Other than these few issues, we’re pretty much ready to go. We recently passed FCC and CE certifications and continue to make progress on all fronts.

To all of you who’ve pre-ordered, we express our deepest thanks for your continued patience. You took a chance on a new, unproven company and your support has gotten us where we are today. We’re not perfect and we’ve made a lot of mistakes along the way but you’ve stuck with us anyway. Now that we’re finally nearing the finish line we want to recognize that it is largely because of you that we’ve kept running these past six months.

So, from all of us at WakeMate, thank you.

This entry was posted by Greg on Tuesday, July 20th, 2010 at 8:29 am and is filed under Updates. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.