Intelligent Doorbell

Updates on Chui, the doorbell that uses your face to connect you to your smart world.

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Chui Summer Update

Chui Family, I want to again thank all of you for your generous support, feedback and patience with us. As is the case with many start-ups, we have been forced to make some very difficult decisions in our short history.  After carefully evaluating the smart home market and analyzing other relevant trends over the past two years, we have concluded that the right decision for our business is to transition Chui to a commercial rather than residential market.  While we are very excited about the potential of this transition, it also unfortunately means we will no longer be able to deliver your residential Chui device, as the feature sets are different.   As a reminder, we DID NOT charge anyone who previously pre-ordered, so you will not see any activity on your statements.   We invite and welcome all of you to continue to follow our progress as we evolve our vision and market.  We make this announcement with great optimism and excitement about pursuing a fresh opportunity to make a significant impact on security and how we as humans interact with technology.  If anyone has any questions or comments, please feel free to reach me on my email - [email protected] - and I will get back to you as soon as I can. Thanks for all you have done to help us bring this technology to life.

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Chui April Update

Hi Chui Family,

We are making great progress with our manufacturing facility and are staying within our timeline/goal to have our hands on production grade Chuis in May.  We are continually polishing our software and firmware and have just manufactured our first batch of PCBs and are running through our quality checks now.  Looking forward into the next few weeks we will be debugging and testing as well as finalizing our enclosure designs.  Stay tuned, pictures to come! 

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Chui February Update

We at Chui hope 2016 is off to a great start.  Moving into the new year we have made great progress on our goal of preparing for our first manufacturing production run.  We were able to piece together a schedule with our manufacturing facility that will last through the summer of this year.  Our most important short term milestone is to have a handful of production grade Chui's in our hands by the end of May.  Currently we are on pace to reach this goal.  As we dive deeper into the manufacturing process we will share with you some smaller goals and deadlines to keep everyone up to date.  Thank you again for your overwhelming support and patience we are getting closer one step at a time.

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Chui Holiday Update

Happy holidays to all of our early backers and supporters.  After a long period of uncertainty regarding manufacturing we have finally made a decision on the best route for us to produce Chui quickly with the highest quality and lowest risk.  We are working through a timeline with the manufacturing facility over the next two to three weeks and should have an estimated delivery date set shortly thereafter.  We know you all have been extremely patient with us and we greatly appreciate your excitement about delivery.  We at Chui are very eager to be taking the next step towards seeing a Chui on everyone’s homes in 2016.   We ran into some delays with sourcing and manufacturing over the past couple of months but we’ve overcome most of those issues and are back on track to keep the momentum moving forward.  Thank you again for all of your support and excitement, please stay tuned for the timeline! 

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A size by size comparison of the Chui prototype design we’ve been demoing vs the new smaller Chui design we’ll be shipping to our backers.

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Update #16

Chui was recently featured during Gregg Lowe (CEO of Freescale) Keynote speech at the Freescale Technology Forum in Austin Texas.  We were more than honored to be showing a live demo to the audience during this presentation!  You can find the video here https://www.freescale.com/webapp/video_vault/videoSummary.sp?code=FTF-2015-KEYNOTE

We have also recently installed a Chui on the Freescale IoT Truck which will be traveling the US and you can find the route here - http://iot.freescale.com/ If you are in the area please go stop in for a demo of Chui!  

We have been working endlessly on finalizing the hardware to get into manufacturing and we are getting closer everyday.  After the conference we have a stronger idea moving forward of what the final design will be and will be updating everyone shortly.  We recently made great progress on the iOS app and now it mirrors the functionality our android app. 

We are continuing to work night and day to get a Chui in everyones home and we thank you for your patience and understanding.  We are very excited with the progress we have made and cannot be happier about the great people who have been so supportive of us along the way.  

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Update #15

As we continue to keep our heads down with developing Chui to be the perfect addition to your home we are out spreading the word as best we can.  Last month we took the stage at the Florida Venture Forum to share the vision of Chui with Florida’s largest collection of investors.  

Followed by a presentation was a group discussion about Chui as well as some demos.  

We are very appreciative of everyone’s encouraging words and our next update will be about our advancement with the product!  

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Update #14

Last week we were all set up for two days in Vegas at the Collision Conference. 

We were able to meet some great potential partners in the smart home/business space and continue to spread the vision of Chui.  

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Yes, you can get Chui notifications on your Android Wear Watch as well!

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Update # 13

A look at the design iterations over the past year! 

We started our testing by hooking Chui up to a doorbell transformer to ensure we could draw the needed power from your existing home doorbell power source.  

After Chui is up and running you can link Chui to your WiFi by generating a QR code on the mobile application and showing it to Chui to transfer the login credentials.  

There are two options to enroll someone either through the mobile applications or the Chui itself.  On the mobile app its as simple as a couple of selfies! 

On the Chui all you need to do is hold the button for 5 seconds until the LED starts blinking rapidly and then press for each picture (5 in total - up, down, left, right, straight forward) 

The latest Chui iteration in action:

A green flash indicates a recognized face.  Please note this design is NOT the final design!! We will continue to iterate to match the aesthetic on the website. 

A real time notification to the app. 

Live video/audio call with your visitor.  

We hope this gives you all a good look inside what we are doing here at Chui, we are excited to continue to send out our progress!  

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Update #12

Happy holidays to all our supporters and backers. We hope you had a very relaxing holiday break and and fresh start to the New Year!  

In the spirit of the holidays we'd like share the following updates, pictures and inside look with the Chui family.  

Chui Devices before undergoing testing (in their safe ESD bags):

This is the first iteration of the Chui custom camera board. You can see the image sensor in the center.

The 20 degree inclined positioning of the Chui camera along with its wide vertical angle allows it to cover most heights:

Concealed illumination LEDs were added for better night time performance:

Chui will work with regular AC doorbell transformers (minimum 8V) as well as regular 5V 1A power supplies. We're also experimenting with Weigand to enable easy integrations with access control systems:

Thank you all for your continued support and understanding.  You have truly made 2014 a great one for Chui and we are extremely excited about what is to come in 2015.  2014 was a year of tremendous progress for us. We are grateful for everyones feedback and thank you all for being a part of Chui.  

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Update #11 Web Summit Part 2 - Dublin

The Web Summit is a 3 day event that has grown from an attendee list of 500 people in 2010 to over 22,000 people from 106 countries.  

Chui was an Alpha Startup there with a one day exhibition stand in the hardware section.  

We were positioned just one spot away from People People, our industrial design team from Sweden! 

Responster held an Alpha Startup competition for the best Startup at the Web Summit.  Thank you to everyone that helped and showed their support, Chui placed in the top 3 overall Alpha startups in the entire conference!  

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Update #11 Web Summit Part 1 - Belfast

The Web Summit kicked off with a smaller event in Belfast.  The event was an intimate gathering at the T13 space with 150 startups, 20 investors and 20 journalists.  

The table below is the star of the popular Game of Thrones series! 

T13 provided entertainment between speakers via BMX bikers...

The Belfast Summit was a great segue into one of the largest technology conferences in Europe!  

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Update #10 Pioneer Festival

Chui just got back from making its international debut.  The first event was the Pioneers Festival in Vienna Austria.  

Chui was named one of the top 50 international startups and presented on stage at the Haus der Industrie (House of Industry).  

The event was a great stride for Chui in the European markets and we were able to develop strong relationships and gain solid traction and exposure overseas. Chui will be featured on a documentary of the festival through TM Wissen/ServusTV.  

We were excited to have our engineering crew from Switzerland join us at the event.  Pictured below is Manuel and Andreas from Nexus Computing working on the Chui Demo! 

We gave away some gear...

Overall the event in Vienna served a variety of purpose for Chui and we are very excited for what is to come from it! 

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Update #9 IEEE DCAS 2014

This past Monday Chui participated in the IEEE Dallas Circuits and Systems Conference.  

The first part of the conference for Chui was the Industry/Academia Demo and Exhibit.  Chui was among a list of incredible demos:

Lane Detection by UT Dallas

Enabling Access of the Internet of Things Devices on the Cloud by TI

1080P60 Multi-Level Lucas Kanade Dense Optical Flow by TI

Samsung Gear VR - Bringing Virtual Reality to Mobile Devices by Samsung

Following the Demos was a Panel of very knowledgeable industry professionals and members of academia.  

Gary Xu - Director of Samsung Research America, Samsung

Terry Sculley - Director of Sensor Labs, Texas Instruments

Raj Patil - Principal Technical Architect, AT&T Mobility

Professor Dinesh Rajan - Chair of Electrical Engineer Department, SMU

Shaun Moore - Co-Founder and CEO, Chui 

The panel was mentally invigorating and sparked great discussion about the future of the Internet of Things.  One great topic focused on how startups and conglomerates can work together to help facilitate user adoption within IoT.  

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Update #8 Support Portal

This week we launched our Support Portal to provide our backers and users with an efficient ticketing based support system, knowledge articles and answers to frequently asked questions. While allowing anyone to voice ideas and suggest features.

Over the coming weeks we'll be populating it with knowledge content and answers to common questions we got from our backers. Feel free to suggest topics, ideas, or features.

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Update #7 New Additions

Monday October 5th

We're happy to welcome two new additions to our team - Gustavo Litovsky and Bonnie Bell.

Gustavo joins us as the VP of Hardware Development.  Gustavo Was formerly a consultant for Samsung and an applications engineer at Texas Instruments.

Bonnie joins us as a Lead Firmware Engineer.  Bonnie formerly worked as software engineering consultant at Qualcomm, an IC design engineer at Intel and an IC design engineer at Hewlett-Packard.  

We are very excited to welcome these two talented individuals to Team Chui!