We’re finally shipping these things!

Confirmation emails will start going out Friday, September 25th and first units will be available for shipping out of our warehouse on Tuesday, September 29th via USPS Priority.

You must confirm your order to receive your Fitbit. You’ll have 1 week to confirm your order. The email will contain a link to a confirmation page where you’ll also be able to securely update your shipping and billing information in case it’s changed. Your credit card will only be charged *when your unit ships*.

Not everyone will receive their confirmation emails on Friday. In general, you’ll receive your email when your unit arrives at our warehouse. 10% of orders will be fulfilled during the first week and all orders will be fulfilled by the end of October based on the current pace of manufacturing.

The website will be open to everyone on Tuesday, the 29th. We’ll be continuously adding new features to the website and device, so stay tuned to this blog.

Thanks everyone for your patience!

Hi everyone,

As a lot of you are aware from the heavy comment traffic on our last post, we’re doing a quick beta test to stamp out the last few remaining bugs.

Here’s where things stand

Fitbit firmware and desktop sync software. This is the software running on the Fitbit itself and the desktop software which uploads data from your Fitbit to our website. There’s 1 nasty firmware bug remaining and a bunch of lesser ones. We’ve selected 10 people to receive hardware to help us stamp this one out.

Earlier today, I think we came up with the fix for the nasty bug. The greater number of testers will help us get some better confidence that the issue is solved, but we probably to have these units running for at least a week, since we’ve found that it can take up to a week for the bug to come up. Sometimes, it will pop up within hours, but other times it can take a while. For instance, I currently wear about 5 Fitbits simultaneously and the bug only hit hit 1 of them after 6 days of use.

Also, the Mac desktop software needs a lot more banging. There’s only a few macs in our company, so it’s not gotten the coverage that the Windows version has. And hopefully, no one finds another major issue. Anyways, we’ll be Fedex’ing Fitbits to our hardware testers on Wednesday and I will probably add 2-3 more people who own Macs to test the hardware as well.

Again, these are free units you’ll be receiving. No need to return them (unless you manage to break it in a novel way, in which case our engineers will want them back to look at it; but you’ll get another test unit) and you’ll receive your actual Fitbit later.

Fitbit website. We’re also opening the website to testers. I didn’t want to state a date before we got all our production servers up and running. Now, we’re pretty close to finishing that task and so we’ll be opening up the site to 25-50 beta testers on Thursday morning 10am PDT. I’m just going through the previous commenters in sequential order and selecting people, while also making sure there’s a good selection of Mac users in there. I’ll be emailing site testers Wed night and if I can’t find your email, I’ll post a comment. I *think* we’ll gradually add more people over the week, but I’m not sure, yet. In any, case, I know a lot of you are eager to help us out, but I think we should be all set for now based on the existing commenters. We think the site is pretty stable, aside from minor bugs and known usability issues that we are addressing, but testers will help us shake out any last minute issues.

Some people have been curious about the stated specs and how the actual hardware is performing. Battery-wise, things look pretty good…between 5-10 days depending on your usage pattern. If you compulsively turn on the display 50 times an hour all day, then it’s going to be around 5 days, otherwise, it’s closer to 10. Wireless performance looks pretty good. While we stated 25-50 feet originally, we’ve found that the device can connect at that range, but to transfer large amounts of data, like 7 days worth of minute by minute data, you actually have to be a bit closer, like 15-20 feet with clear line of sight. That said, every time I sit at my desk, it auto-connects to the base and transfers pretty much immediately. It’s pretty cool. I have a hard time trying to prevent it from auto-syncing when I sit down.

Hi All,

So I’m happy to announce that the first production Fitbits are in the process of being assembled. You can see Unit #2 in its packaging above. We’ve also closed pre-orders.

It’s been a long journey to this point. However, we’re about 2 weeks behind where we’d like to be. A lot of reasons for that, some logistical (some of our testing equipment was frustratingly stuck in Indonesian customs for 3-4 days) and some of our own making. The biggest issue we have right now is assembly throughput; it takes about 600 seconds to assemble and test a Fitbit, which is really long. We’re working to get that time down, but in the meantime, this is what it means for our schedule:

The first 10% of orders will finish being assembled and ship from Singapore to the US on July 30/31. They will arrive in the US on Aug 3/4th. It takes 2-3 days for Fedex International Priority to deliver these and clear customs. We will open these up in our US warehouse and do one final set of testing and verification and to load them with the latest firmware. We currently have 19 firmware bugs, which is not too bad at this stage and which we will stamp out between now and then.

We will start shipping these first units to customers on the week of August 10th. I will make a post when they ship to the US, when they arrive in our warehouse and also comment on the status of our bug queue.

Fitbits will continue streaming into the US in weekly shipments. We expect the last 25% of the orders to be shipped to the US around Aug 21st and shipped to customers on Aug 25/26th. The website will be open to all when the first units start shipping.

In general, you should get a final confirmation email a few days before your Fitbit will ship, which will give you a chance to review your order and confirm or cancel.

We’re excited to get these out to you as soon as we can!

Again, it’s been a long journey to get to this point. Here’s some photos and videos that give you an idea of what’s going on what right now as the Fitbits are being assembled:

Another packaging shot and the display in action showing steps:

Video of the circuit boards being assembled by an SMT machine:

A small set of our finished circuit boards:

Lot of chromed housings and Fitbits with its guts hanging out

Lots of partially assembled Fitbits

A Fitbit being “welded’ together in a ultrasonic welding machine. Ultrasonic waves are used to melt the plastic together in very tightly sealed unit. This is a $30,000+ machine we are using.

Hi Everyone,

We’re still on track here.

The main thing that we’re focused on now is developing testing systems to test each Fitbit as it goes through the assembly process. There’s several steps to the testing process.

The first is testing circuit boards. The Fitbit has 3 circuit boards. 2 are in the wearable Fitbit and 1 is in the wireless base station. After each circuit board is assembled, it is placed into a test fixture. One of our actual test fixtures is show below:

An operator places the circuit board into the fixture and then closes the lid on top of the board. The fixture contains many metal pins which make contact with special areas of the board. When the lid is closed, these pins make firm contact. Through these pins, we’re able to run tests which exercise various parts of the board automatically. Here’s a closeup of the board after the fixture lid has been closed on top of it. The black rubber feet gently push the board onto the test pins:

Basically, we want to ensure that the right components have been placed on the board, that all the components are connected properly and that there are no manufacturing defects such as electrical shorts. We also do some mechanical tests such as automatically pushing the button to make sure that it’s connected properly. Here’s a solenoid switch that when commanded, pushes a button on the circuit board:

2 of the boards are also connected by a cable, so we also do tests to make sure that the cable has been connected properly. Here’s an overhead shot of a test fixture that tests the cable connections. You can see the yellow cable drooping between 2 of the boards:

Here’s some shots of the overall test fixtures:

Once the circuit boards have passed testing, they are assembled in the Fitbit case or enclosure. Once enclosed we do another series of tests to ensure that

1. The enclosure process has not damaged the boards or the cable
2. The charging contacts and the USB cable have been properly soldered

We plug the Fitbit into its charger both ways to test proper charging contact connectivity and also connect the base station to a PC to make sure that the USB cable has been soldered properly and that the PC can communicate with the radio inside. We then do a series of special button presses on the Fitbit to put into a self-test mode, which does a final exercise of its functionality, including lighting up the display, checking components, etc.

In short, all this is to ensure that the Fitbits will be working well when they arrive on your doorstep.

FYI, 4 of our team are also flying to Singapore early Wednesday morning to start the assembly process. I’ll keep you posted on that.

Hi Everyone,

I’ve been holding off on this update until I’ve gotten solid confirmation from our manufacturer. Here’s the update everyone has been waiting for. Fitbits will begin shipping from our manufacturer during the week of July 27th to our warehouse in northern California (about an hour drive from our office). We are shipping everything via Fedex Priority Air to get it to our warehouse as quickly as possible. The moment the shipment touches our warehouse, we plan on turning as many as we can around the the same day and shipping them out to you.

Have a lot of you been waiting a long time? Yes and I’m really sorry. However, we’ve worked closely with our manufacturer to come up with this final schedule and they (and we) are confident we can can hit it.

So what is happening between now and then:

Currently, there are 22+ plastic and metal pieces and 100+ electronic components that make up the Fitbit. Here’s renderings/outlines of some of the plastic and metal pieces:

I really hate the metal pieces in the 3rd row / 2nd column 3rd row and the 1st row / 4th column. Those are our charging contacts. If you remember, we had charging reliability problems in our early prototypes and it took forever to get those contacts right.

Each of the plastic parts needs a mold created for it. A mold is essentially a large piece of steel that has a cavity carved into it. The cavity is the shape of the part that you need to make. This piece of steel can weigh 100+ lbs. Designing the mold and cutting the steel is a slow process. It can take 5-8 weeks to cut and polish the mold. Once the mold is created, it’s placed into an injection molding machine. During the injection molding process, melted plastic is injected into the mold at high pressure and the end of the process, the plastic part is formed inside the mold and ejected out.

Here’s a tool /mold. Note the complexity of the mold and all the pins sticking out. Those pins are used to “eject” the plastic part out of the mold.

Actual injection molding machine and video of injection molding process:

For us, mold creation began a while back and the last molds will be finished by mid-June. There are a lot of parts and therefore a lot of molds. Once the molds are created, we do a production run, where the full quantity of parts will be produced. For each run, we occupy an injection molding machine and the manufacturer only has a limited number of them, so our run has be scheduled and interleaved with all of their other customers.

Also during this time, our manufacturer will be assembling our 3 circuit boards (2 go into the wearable Fitbit. 1 goes into the base station/charger). In parallel, we are designing and building test equipment to functionally test each board as it comes off the line. As each board is produced, it is placed into the test equipment where a series of tests are automatically run that measure voltages, currents, frequency, etc, to make sure that each component has been properly attached to the board and that there are no shorts or disconnects anywhere.

A key check-in date to see if we’re on track will be the week of June 29th. That is the week that we expect all parts to be completed and on-hand. For some of the parts, we’ve got our manufacturer to commit to 3 working shifts a day to meet our demand in the short time required. Once we have all parts on-hand, we will begin assembling all the pieces into Fitbits.

We do expect snaufus to occur and hopefully have padded our schedule accordingly. We’ve already have a couple incidents happen a few days ago. The big scare was that our battery supplier delivered our batteries last week, but most of them were about 1mm too long, which prevented them from fitting inside the Fitbit. We did get a few early samples from them, which were all within our requirements, but somehow the rest of the batch that were produced were not up to spec. Here’s an image I sent them detailing the problems.

The supplier is scrambling to redo all the batteries and I actually just got word from them an hour ago that the new batch of batteries will be ready by June 4th, so this won’t cause any delays.

We also had to re-tweak our wireless radio a bit recently to improve our range as we found that later sample units did not have the range as our earlier prototypes. This required us to get some additional parts, which we’re currently sourcing and I don’t think this should cause any delays, either.

This is the end of yet another long post. Please be gentle in the comments and I hope you all hang in there.

James

In parallel to the Fitbit device, we’re working on the website. We expect to open this up to pre-order customers pretty soon. Here’s a couple sneak peek screen shots of our development. When we’re ready to open the beta of the website up, we’ll make a blog post and any volunteers can sign up by making a comment on that post.

We’re also busy polishing and further validating the software running on the Fitbit device itself. Here’s an older movie of the Fitbit in action when we were just testing basic functionality. You won’t see the button on the Fitbit here b/c when we shot the video, we were in middle of testing the tactile feel of different buttons. You can see the step counter iterating through 10 steps and see the screen in action here:

In terms of shipping, I still don’t have a concrete date other than late spring/early summer. I know you guys are still waiting, patiently. All I can say for now is that we’re getting closer. I’m anxious myself as I want to get the date out there and get my own stress levels down.

Hi all,

Just a friendly reminder. If you have any order inquiries, like changing your address or card number, please send them to orders@fitbit.com, rather than posting a comment to this blog. You’ll get a much faster response that way and it can be tracked. We want to make sure  you get a prompt answer.

thanks all

One of the things we’re trying to figure out as we get closer to shipping is the packaging. Originally, the goal of the packaging was to support the Fitbit in an purely online retail environment only. That gave our designers the leeway to design packaging without having to include a lot of the marketing copy that you see slapped over typical brick and mortar packaging.

Here were a few of the early concepts:

We thought the second “jewel box” concept would provide a great out of box experience for people who bought the Fitbit online and we went pretty far down the path of designing and prototyping the packaging:

However, as we started to get interest from brick and mortar retailers, we realized the packaging had some problems in the retail environment.

One, there was no way for curious people to see the product before they bought it and we didn’t think a single photo on the packaging would suffice. However, we didn’t want to do a typical clear “blister” pack which we felt looked cheap and was extremely difficult to open, at least for people not named Edward Scissorhands.

Secondly, the shape of the box was not ideal. Due to its long narrow shape, we felt when people took it off the shelf to look at it and then placed the box back on the shelf, they would tend to place the box on its back rather than on its narrow bottom. Also, due to the box’s 8″ long landscape orientation, it was not great for pegging onto a pegboard.

So we set out to solve these problems with another round of packaging design. We played around with a few concepts that we felt addressed the need for people to see the actual product, had shapes that promoted “correct” placement on shelves and also was peggable:

Our prime candidate currently is the concept below:

Again, I apologize for the infrequency of these blog posts. I’m a procrastinator when it comes to writing these things, which is bad.  A commenter suggested in a previous post that we make shorter more frequent updates rather than really long infrequent updates, which is what I’ll try to do in the future.

That said, you’re stuck with a long post this time around

On shipping…The bad news is that I still can’t give out a concrete date, yet. The good news is that we’ve resolved the problems around charging, which had been holding us up. I hope to have a firm shipping date soon. We’re waiting for one last round of prototypes to confirm our design and to tune a few last things. You’ve already been waiting patiently and the last thing we’d want to do is ship out anything that isn’t worthy of your wait. Rest assured, my team and I are singularly focused on getting the Fitbit out the door in a high quality way. I get enough queries from friends and relatives constantly asking when we’re shipping.

We’re also steadily working on the website. We hope to release a preview of that before the Fitbit ships so that you can get familiar with the interface.

We’ve also had a bunch of questions about the algorithms behind the Fitbit, so let me talk about that. The Fitbit’s primary method of collecting data is an accelerometer. Its accelerometer constantly measures the acceleration of your body and algorithms convert this raw data into useful information about your daily life, such as calories burned, steps, distance and sleep quality.

How do we develop these algorithms? Our approach is that we have test subjects wear the Fitbit while also wearing a device that produces a “truth” value. For calories, this “truth” device might be something like a Parvo Medics TrueOne 2400 or a Cosmed K4b2. You’d look really stylish wearing one of these:

These devices measure the gas composition of your breath, which is a very accurate way of measuring calorie burn. By wearing this type of device and the Fitbit at the same time, equations/algorithms can be developed that attempt to accurately convert the raw data collected by the Fitbit into the calorie numbers reported by the “truth” device.

Developing these algorithms take a lot of experimentation and test data. Sometimes the algorithms you develop work very well in one case but completely fail in another. For instance, your algorithm might be really accurate for slow walking but starts to fall apart during running. A lot of our research is finding algorithms that work reasonably well across a lot of different scenarios.

Here’s a recent result from a calorie measurement test we ran on a treadmill. RevB is the 2nd hardware revision of the Fitbit. The light grey line is what the treadmill showed for calories burned. The black line is what the Parvo TrueOne 2400 reported. The vertical lines are error bars which show the range of accuracy for the Parvo. As long as the Fitbit falls within those error bars, you can consider the results to be pretty good. As shown on this graph, the Fitbit measures calories reasonably well up to 8mph, where it starts to underreport calories slightly. This is an older result…we’ve improved things since then. The Fitbit’s software is also upgradeable over the wireless link, so as we constantly improve our algorithms, these improvements will be automatically uploaded to your Fitbit.

To develop the algorithms for step counting, we have test subjects wear the Fitbit while also carrying a click counter and clicking off steps. Sometimes we also have the test subject wear competitive devices so that we can measure how good we are against them. Here’s a photo of a typical setup. I’ve masked out the competitive devices to protect the innocent. (also, so they don’t get upset at us )

We really try to put the step counting algorithms through a lot of different (some crazy) scenarios:

This graph shows % step accuracy for climbing stairs quickly at 2 stairs/sec for the Fitbit vs 2 leading pedometers:

You see that we’re fairly close to each other. We all average about ~89% accuracy.

An interesting thing happens when we start taking stairs a bit slower at 1 stair/sec:

You see that the first pedometer really collapses to 20.5% accuracy, the 2nd pedometer degrades slightly and the Fitbit actually improves.

Here’s another graph which shows results from an 80 year old male with a cane walking 0.25miles around the block in 11 minutes (1.5mph). The Fitbit does pretty well here with 97.4% accuracy.

Most pedometers have trouble with people who take soft steps, which include a lot of elderly people. The cane here also can cause confusion, since the cane could look like a 3rd step in a stride. Even though these were some of the best pedometers on the market, they still had trouble in cases where you just weren’t simply walking smoothly and firmly in a straight line.

In general throughout our step counting tests, we found that the more expensive pedometers have better accuracy. If you ever get a free pedometer at work, just toss it out. Are you in the market to to buy a $5 or $10 pedometer? Don’t bother. Chances are you’ll be very disappointed.

Sorry, it’s been a while since our last post. We’ve been tweaking the design to fix some of the issues I mentioned in the last post. I had been hoping to make one single post when all the issues had been resolved, but it’s been taking a while and so instead of keeping you in the dark further, here is the incremental update.

1. We’ve made some changes to improve the assembly time and process. Things can always be better on this front, but I think we’re closed to locked down on this aspect.

2. The button design was changed to make it easier to press. The pressing action is a lot less stiff, due to a softer rubber that we switched to and the shape of the button was altered to make it easier to press.

3. Charging. Ah, this has been the bane of our existence for the past few weeks. I think we’ve made some good progress, though. The stiffness of the contacts has been increased and this has helped in making sure that the contacts would no longer get deformed during the assembly contacts.

However, we still have not been able to get reliable contact between charging contacts. Here’s a couple photos to illustrate things:

You can click through to see the larger pictures, but essentially, there is a lot of side to side movement and up and down movement once the Fitbit has been placed on the charging base station. This movement causes the contacts to potentially miss contact with each other and therefore no charging occurs.

It’s very possible that this misalignment is due to the imprecise nature of the process used to make the prototypes, since we don’t see this misalignment in the computer design files. Our prototypes are made by taking a block of plastic and using a computer driven drill to carve out the prototype. This drilling or “machining” process is a lot less precise than the final production process, which is injection molding: injecting molten plastic into steel molds.

However, just to be safe, we’ve made some more changes to prevent this issue and we are getting some more prototypes built to test things out, but I think it will be at least another 2 weeks before we know the answer for sure. In the meantime, we’ve ordered a lot of the individual electrical components and we expect those to arrive within 8 weeks.

I also wanted to give you a glimpse into the design process that got the Fitbit to this point. In the beginning, we commissioned a top industrial design firm to come up with design for the Fitbit. This firm has done a lot of groundbreaking products including the Palm Zire.

The first stage of the industrial design process was to come up with some basic shape concepts [click through to see larger image]:

These are a subset of the shapes that we considered. This stage allowed our design firm and our team to come to an agreement about the usability and wearability of the Fitbit.

The second stage was to come up with some more developed pencil sketches of the basic shapes. This would allow us to hone in on the aesthetic direction of the Fitbit. Again, these are just a subset:

From these sketches, we selected 3 designs that would be further developed into computer renderings. Here’s the rendering of the winning design:

You can see the Fitbit’s final U shape evolve from the early shape concepts to the final rendering. You might also notice that the winning rendering is similar, but not quite the same as what our actual final product looks like. There are many reasons for this but the underlying thread is that engineering reality often causes the design to change. For instance, it was very difficult to fit all the components into the shape, so the Fitbit had to be thickened…the translucent display effect shown above was technically challenging to execute in a cost-effective and space-efficient manner, etc. In any case, I think both our industrial design and engineering team did a great job in converging on the actual final design that you see on our front page: