The Eye Tribe, which took the stage today at TechCrunch’s CES Hardware Battlefield, is developing hardware that allows users to control technology with the motion of their eyes.

In fact, co-founder and CEO Sune Alstrop Johansen told me that the company has started shipping its first units and software development kits (they’re available for $99), and that the initial users should be receiving them now.

Johansen said The Eye Tribe has also raised another $1 million in seed funding, bringing its total seed/angel funding to $1.8 million. (It  also received a $1.3 million grant from the Danish government.) The money comes from “primarily existing investors, board members and key individuals from the US,” he said — new backers include former semiconductor executive Richard Sanquini.

CES marks the first time that the finished product, not just a prototype, has been demonstrated publicly, he added. And although the initial version was built for Windows, he said the company is unveiling a Mac version too. As for the iOS and Android versions that the company has mentioned in the past, Johansen said they’re still on the product roadmap but declined to get specific.

I didn’t get a chance to try the product out for myself, but if you’ve ever wanted to see someone play Fruit Ninja with their eyes, well, watch this video.

As you can probably guess from the fact that an SDK is included, the company is currently focused on recruiting the developers that it hopes will actually build applications that take advantage of these capabilities. In fact, when a prototype of The Eye Tribe Tracker was demonstrated in our Hardware Alley at last fall’s Disrupt Europe conference, the company said it was also going to provide free trackers to developers with the best ideas.

Those ideas also help answer the question, “Why the heck would I want to control software with my eyes?” — they give a sense of what people could potentially do with the technology. The winners include an idea for a device combining eye tracking and EEG technology to help those with ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease) communicate, as well as ideas for driver assist applications, breast cancer detection, drone control, and improved reading on tablets.

Last fall, a company representative told us that users don’t have to train themselves to act differently. Instead, they claimed that after the initial calibration, users could just let their eyes interact normally with applications and the software should respond accordingly.

The company has also said the eventual goal is to partner with hardware makers who want to integrate these capabilities — so in the future, you could get a tablet with eye-tracking capabilities built in, rather than having to buy a separate to device. In fact, Johansen told me this week that the company is setting up an office in Palo Alto “as we believe this will be the best place for us to engage” with the manufacturers.

You can see the specs of The Eye Tribe Tracker here.

Access to clean water is something that most us probably take for granted — after all, it just comes out of taps and faucets and hoses and shower heads with little more than the twist of a spigot. Using all that water can cost a pretty penny (especially in certain foreign countries), but Monterrey, Mexico-based Driblet wants to make sure that people can easily track how much water they’re using in their homes with a device they’re showing off at our Hardware Battlefield here at CES.

The Driblet is a smart water meter that connects to both your pipes and your Wi-Fi network. Meanwhile, a slew of sensors baked into the Driblet box itself constantly keeps tabs on the rate of water flow and all the foreign particulate bits floating around in that water, all of which gets phoned home to the Driblet backend.

Speaking of the backend, the team has made some crucial progress on the software side of things — all of that water quality information can be accessed through a revamped mobile app that also allows users to get water usage goals and forge social connections to see who can be the most environmentally conscious. A bit of a peculiar approach, sure, but a little personal accountability couldn’t hurt.

The TechCrunch historians among you may notice that the Driblet team aren’t strangers to our stage — they showed off a very, very rough prototype of their device at the Disrupt SF 2013 Hackathon to a pretty receptive audience. So what happened from there? Well, the team launched a crowdfunding campaign on Dragon Innovation because of its greater focus on hardware projects, but it couldn’t manage to raise the requested $98,000 to get the Driblet monitor manufactured en masse.

That led to a trip back to the drawing board — the new chassis (seen above) is more attractive and more robust than the 3D-printed prototypes that came before it — and along with it came a pretty savvy shift in vision. The ability to monitor and dig into water consumption tickled some consumers’ fancies but the process of installation and occasional maintenance meant that the end user would have to be at least a little comfortable with getting their hands dirty. This time around though, Driblet is focusing on bigger fish — specifically businesses and buildings that have a vested interest in keeping their hefty water bills low. That’s not to say that they’re giving up on the consumer market though, as there’s room for both approaches to exist. We’ll soon see if this new direction gets Driblet where it needs to be, but the combination of some truly smart hardware and a more refined focus on potential customers means that there’s plenty to like here.

Livemap, a Russian startup on-stage today at our CES Hardware Battlefield, aims to make GPS navigation more accessible to motorcyclists in the form of a new kind of helmet.

After all, CEO Andrew Artischev noted that if you’re riding a motorcycle, interacting with a GPS touchscreen interface isn’t exactly safe or convenient, and even looking at it means taking your eyes off the road. Livemap’s Motohelmet, on the other hand, is inspired by fighter pilots, who have “heads up” displays showing them important information directly in their helmets.

Similarly, Livemap plans to build motorcycle helmets that display navigation information directly in your field of view. The helmets will use an Android operating system with Nuance-based voice control and NAVTEQ mapping data. As for the display itself, Artishchev said it employs “a beaming scheme.”

“That means it doesn’t contain a display that could hurt the user’s eye or make obstacles for his view,” he said. “The image is beamed on the clear visor, is not visible from outside, is transparent, [and] all elements of the beaming system are hidden inside the helmet in a safe way.”

The Livemap team argues that there are no direct competitors — in other words, no other companies building this technology into the helmet itself. What GPS companies like Garmin and TomTom are doing to address this market is building navigation devices that can be mounted on motorbikes, can be shock-resistant and waterproof, and can be connected to headsets via Bluetooth.

But those features don’t fundamentally address the issues mentioned above, because you may still have to physically interact with the navigation device, and it might not be directly in your field of view.

Livemap’s approach has also been compared to Google Glass, and Artishchev discussed Glass as a potential competitor, saying his company will offer better image quality and won’t force users to look at “the upper right corner of the human field of view.”

The team previously demonstrated a full-face helmet using this technology, but now they say they’ve found a way to build the technology into a modular helmet that’s smaller and more convenient. (It also has the benefit of allowing Livemap to go into production with existing helmet shells, which is more affordable.)

While they have yet to build a full helmet prototype (an expensive process) for the modular helmet, Livemap has focused on the key components of the technology, which the team brought to CES. They showed me the actual display that motorcyclists would see while riding, and it was transparent as they claimed — so I could imagine seeing the directions without having my view obscured. They also showed me the voice-controlled navigation application running on an Android phone, and it was able to give me accurate directions around San Francisco.

Part of the Livemap team comes from Sukhoi, a Russian company that has been developing heads-up displays and optical systems for military helmets over the past 50 years. Through a combination of grants, debt, and Artishchev’s own money, Livemap has raised $1 million in funding, and it’s looking to raise another $10 million now. He said it’s been a challenge to get money from Russian venture capitalists who are more interested in backing hardware than software, particularly clones of services that have been successful elsewhere. (At the same time, apparently it’s thanks to financial support from Igor Agamirzian of the Russian Venture Company that the team was able to attend CES.)

“If we speak about my motivation, I want solve to real problems, not invented ones, not social networks for dogs or cats,” he said. Ultimately, Artishchev argued that this could “save the lives of motorcyclists on the road.”

The company has already made deals with the key manufacturing partners, he added, and it plans to start selling the helmet in the US and Canada in the last three months of 2014 for $2,000. The Motohelmet is available for pre-order now at a $500 discount, and you can also get updates by following the company on Facebook and Twitter.

Nest is now rolling out a 4.0.1 update to its smart thermostat after last month’s faulty 4.0 firmware caused Wi-Fi and battery issues. However, it tells me the 4.0 bugs are not responsible for turning people’s heat off or down in the dead of winter. Instead, it says incompatible furnaces and people forgetting to change their air filters are to blame.

This paints a much rosier picture than if you check out Nest’s Facebook wall or run a Twitter search on it.

@nest Coldest night in Iowa in years, and I wake up at 4 AM with the temp. dropped to 54 degrees, and the Nest is cycling on/off constantly.—
Richard Harms (@richharms) January 06, 2014

Customers like Clayton and Richard (seen above) have been flocking to social media to report Nest problems ranging from annoyance to disaster. Some say they’ve come home or woken up in the middle of the night to a freezing cold house. When they investigate their Nest, they find it turning on and off repeatedly, or suddenly out of battery. In some cases it’s shut off or down their heat. One unlucky customer had his pipes freeze because his house got so cold.

One user wrote to TechCrunch explaining his Nest issues in detail:

“At about 4PM Friday, our heat shut off without warning. On inspection, the Nest unit appeared to be stuck in an endless loop of power cycling.  Each time it powered on, it would display the spinning blue loading indicator, and then a message would appear, instructing that we detach the Nest from the mount and reattach it. After being reattached, the unit displayed a message indicating that it was restarting, and the process would repeat indefinitely.

We followed the online troubleshooting guide with no success. We then tried to call support, but were met with impressively-long wait-times and a message acknowledging the existence of a breaking software change that seems to have been pushed out just as the bulk of the country was starting to rely on their furnaces.”

While there are plenty of happy customers who’ve had no problems, others are angry Nest didn’t proactively notify users about the 4.0 bugs. Instead, last month Nest posted to its support center about “Intermittent low battery or connectivity issues with thermostat software 4.0″. There it says:

“We have discovered a bug in our latest 4.0 thermostat software that affects a small percentage of our users…affected users will see a low battery warning on the thermostat, see their thermostat as “OFFLINE” intermittently in the app, and won’t be able to control them using the Nest app….As of Sunday, Dec. 8th, we have a short-term solution and have started updating affected thermostats. We’re rolling these thermostats back to version 3.5.3, which should fix the problem.”

Unfortunately, some people rolled back to 3.5.3 are experiencing a new set of issues. Exacerbated by lots of new users installing Nest products they received for Christmas, customers contacting support are enduring extremely long wait times. Those who do get help on the phone or over email are given long sets of instructions to troubleshoot their own devices.

Affected customers are demanding Nest do more thorough testing of its updates before pushing them out, or at least provide a way to turn off automatic updates. In the meantime, some are switching back to their old, cheap analog thermostats.

But today, I spoke with Nest co-founder Matt Rogers who says the 4.0.1 update is ready and is now being rolled out. He also denied that Nest issues shut off people’s heat. In a statement, the company explains:

“As stated in the support center message, the 4.0 update caused a small percentage of customers to lose Wi-Fi connectivity and therefore the ability to control the temperature remotely. Their heating and cooling remains unaffected except for remote control.  We’ve rolled many of those customers back to 3.5.3 to resolve Wi-Fi connectivity while we work on the fix. In the coming days, we expect to release version 4.0.1, which has the same Wi-Fi performance as 3.5.3 with all the great features of version 4.0.

Regarding the small percentage of customers who experience drained batteries, we work with users who contact our Support team on a case-by-case basis because there are many variables that can cause this – including homes with clogged air filters, or with old or unusual HVAC wiring. Sometimes the fix is to run a power wire, other times the customer’s system is incompatible with Nest. To clarify, this is not related to the 4.0 update. “

It seems anyone with problems or considering buying a Nest should be sure to change their air filters and ensure their furnace is compatible.

Still, Nest will need to better educate customers and ramp up support to avoid being blamed for problems it didn’t cause. Otherwise, customer issues like these could shake confidence in Nest right as Re/code reports it’s trying to raise $150 million to $200 million at a $2 billion to $3 billion valuation. Fortune’s Dan Primack says this round “remains very much a work in progress.”

That work could get a lot harder if investors worry Nest is souring opinions of some of its earliest adopters, even if it’s not responsible for problems. Because accurate or not, people’s opinions on social media influence their friends’ buying habits.

Every product has its vocal minority of jilted users and we can’t verify that all the issues customers are reporting are entirely Nest’s fault. But there seems to be a critical mass of discontent right now. For what it’s worth, though, Rogers sounded legitimately saddened about the 4.0 problems distressing customers, and told me “We do take these things really seriously, even if it’s not our fault.  We’ll answer support calls and we’re always there to help people when they have issues.”

As we move toward having more of our lives managed by high-tech devices, their creators will need to double down on stability and security. Unlike work or entertainment gadgets, devices like Nest’s thermostats and smoke detectors are vital pieces of home infrastructure. Software bugs don’t just cause inconveniences, but real quality-of-life and safety issues. “Move fast and break things” just doesn’t work when you’re involved in our survival.

Tune in Sunday for our live coverage of CES and then later, on Tuesday, Hardware Battlefield where you can see 15 great hardware startups compete head to head for a top prize of $50,000 and recognition as one of the top hardware startups of 2014. This project has been months in the making and there will be plenty of fun and surprises – as well as all of our regular CES coverage from our live team on the show floor.

But best of all, TechCrunch is pleased to announce that the amazing Martha Stewart – lifestyle queen and Maker guru –will serve as a hardware startups judge at Hardware Battlefield at CES. We are thrilled that the inimitable creator, designer, entrepreneur, and founder of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia will be sharing her expertise in product creation and brand building. We are delighted and honored to be teaming with Martha for this exciting event.

You can see the entire schedule right here and you’ll be able to watch the show and all our coverage live right here on TechCrunch. This is shaping up to be the most exciting CES ever and we want you to join us.

You can keep up to date on news coming out of the show by visiting our special Hardware Battlefield page and you can tweet at us using the #cescrunch hashtag. We’ll be doing some great giveaways, lots of live roaming, and the competition will be hot and heavy in our booth outside of the Las Vegas Convention Center.

Are you in Las Vegas and don’t have tickets to CES? Come by anyway! We’ll have space for an audience to watch the competition and who knows – maybe you can join us next year with your amazing product!