Category: Smart Home

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Imaging Smart Home

Back to the Backers: Butterfleye never tires of watching without wires

There’s been an explosion of home security cameras in the past few years, but whether they are attached to some kind of monitoring service or rely on their own apps, they are less convenient to install than they could be. While many of them happily hop on to a Wi-Fi network, they can’t stray too far from an outlet.

Butterfleye combines a wide-angle lens with a big battery to keep it going up to a week without charging. It employs sophisticated sensors that go beyond simple motion detection to include sound detection; it can also differentiate between humans and pets. The company claims it has more improvements in the queue in terms of accurate identification that it plans to deliver via regular firmware updates. Going along with the prevailing model these days, the company offers some limited cloud storage of video the Butterfleye captures with more available for a monthly fee.

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Smart Home

The Grail sniffs out carbon monoxide, shuts down furnaces

Carbon monoxide (CO) detectors are among the most important devices that consumers can buy for their homes.

patent-claimedThe Grail is a new patent-pending CO and gas detector that allows users to shut down their furnaces from outside their homes if CO or gas leaks are detected. It can also be used to activate lights and sirens, and shut down an electrical breaker. The plan is for the Grail to ship in March and for it to cost $129-$149 at retail, although the first 100 Kickstarter backers can get one for $75. Its maker is looking to raise $200,000 by Aug. 28.

There will probably always be consumers looking to buy a CO detector. The Grail’s maker says that what sets it apart from rival devices is that it’s the first one offering the same capabilities with UL certification at an affordable price. There have, of course, been many CO detectors before this, including the Air Mentor, and it’s not clear if The Grail’s features and pricing combination will be enough to hook many consumers.

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Smart Home

JUCEBOX juices up the disconnected IoT experience

When couples have issues communicating, they go to a relationship counselor. When all the Internet of Things products in a home require 17 different apps to operate because they don’t communicate with each other, who do they go to?

If creator Urlich Frerk has his way, they will go to JUCEBOX, a universal device communicator capable of translating between the four main communication langagues used to code the IoT products. This allows those invested in the increasingly fragmented IoT ecosystem to take comfort knowing anything they have bought or will buy are all usable together with JUCEBOX, future-proofing homes for the foreseeable future.

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Smart Home

Domomob has the power, uses electricity to create smart home

Home automation is the healthiest it has ever been, with new products and platforms being produced all the time with the help of crowdfunding platforms. Almost all of them  use wireless technology, and that can mean two minuses — a level of electromagnetic radiation that may (or may not) be dangerous and occasional lapses in reliability.

Domomob gets that, and has crafted a home automation solution that controls existing motorized components in the home using powerline communication (PLC) technology — essentially, networking via the electrical wiring in the home. Doing this eliminates all excess electromagnetic emissions without sacrificing versatility: users have the option to install accessories like indoor or outdoor cameras as well as outfit dumb products in the home with plugs that grant them smarts. Access to the home can be shared through an iOS, Android, or Windows app or through a web portal, with original installations working even in the event of an internet outage.

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Smart Home

Ivan not so terrible, keeps an eye on your place for few rubles

Home security used to be synonymous with pricey hardware and exorbitant maintenance fees. The advent of the Internet of Things has made that a thing of the past, instead using either base stations or the smartphones we all know and love to keep the home safe at a fraction of the cost.

These systems come in many shapes and sizes, but the Wi-Fi-enabled Ivan home security system is the size of a deck of cards. It’s also extremely simple in how it focuses on two main areas: security and IoT integration. Its use of a passive infrared movement detector, or a PiR, ensures that only body heat can trigger alerts sent to predefined family and friends through email, SMS, or Twitter. In an emergency situation, a dedicated panic button also does the same. When all is well, though, Ivan’s IFTTT integration allows users to control any other connected products in the home by using it as a remote control. Ivan is priced at $95 with an expected ship date of February 2016. Goio, the company behind Ivan, is looking for $98,000 before August 12, 2015.

The home security and sensor market is certainly crowded. The addition of Ivan to the mix only serves to make it more so. While its $95 price undercuts competing products like Presence, its lack of connectivity with smartphones and tablets may prove underwhelming for some. More fully featured products include the aforementioned Presence along with the SandboxHome.

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Smart Home

LazyLocks smart lock secures your doors on the cheap

A friend or relative is knocking on the door. Great, now comes the wrenching decision to get up from the couch to let that person in. A connected door lock could come in handy, allowing couch potatoes to let somebody in with just a click on a smartphone app.

LazyLocks is an aptly-named and inexpensive connected door lock that works in conjunction with a free Android and iOS app. It can be easily connected to any door without replacing an existing lock, according to its Indiegogo campaign. LazyLocks uses Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, and displays the status of users’ home doors right on their smartphones, wherever they are.

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Smart Home

Drop connected buoy makes a splash by continuosly monitoring your pool

While a pool is a perfect antidote to a hot, sticky day, maintaining it over the long-term can quickly prove to be a hassle. Keeping its water balanced is a tricky game requiring the right amount of the right products at the right to ensure quality. However, balancing kits can be involved and unclear, leaving owners unsure of what to do.

The drop Wi-Fi connected pool monitor is a solar-power buoy that continuously monitors the temperature, pH, and chlorine levels of a pool. With this information, the iOS/Android drop app can create custom maintenance plans complete with recommendations on which products should be purchased, and how often they should be used. drop takes the guesswork of maintaining up to three pools for up to a week without sun with the option of maintaining more for $9 a month. In addition, an accelerometer inside detects suspicious movement too, sending a smartphone alert when it does. Backers can expect their own drop by June 2016 for $199. Drop Designs Inc. is hoping to raise $100,000 by July 9th, 2016.

With ideas like drop and the Quack Vac out in the wild, it’s never been easier to take care of a pool. drop offers users just enough valuable information to make it worthwhile, with a solar panel truly making the product you can set and forget.

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Smart Home

Ola uses touch sensor, fingerprints to rock the smart lock

Smart locks have become one of the more popular components of the smart home product category. The one drawback of some of them is that they rely on the user accessing a smartphone app in order to open up a door, and that can sometimes take a while –- especially if the smartphone is buried at the bottom of somebody’s bag or, worse, the phone has been forgotten somewhere.

Ola is a smart lock that uses Bluetooth 4.0 connectivity and capacitive fingerprint technology that makes it not only a keyless solution, but also a phoneless one. It’s able to store up to 1,700 fingerprints and takes less than one second to open the door once the fingerprints are read by the touch sensor, according to its maker. Ola is powered by four AA batteries and doesn’t require a Wi-Fi connection, so it will continue to work even if the power goes out. It costs $179 as part of its Kickstarter campaign and will ship in March. Retail pricing hasn’t been set, but is expected to be about 30 percent higher, said its maker, who set a campaign goal of raising $125,000 by July 23.

Ola is bound to appeal to a wide audience. Although it doesn’t require a smartphone for users to open a door with the smart lock, there is an app for Android and iOS devices (and soon Windows) to facilitate registration for new users. The “masters” of the house can also use the app to give or deny access to guests or manually unlock the door via Bluetooth. The only minor drawback is that it’s water resistant, but not waterproof, so if it’s submerged in water for an extended period of time that would break the electronic components of the lock. Its maker also warns that it’s best to dry off one’s fingers before opening the lock because water can impact the sensor’s ability to recognize fingerprints.

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Smart Home

To stay secure, slip a Strip into windows and doors

When homeowners wants to be sure any way in or out of their home is secure, they can either manually check each door or window or go the more digital route by installing a home security system like Presence. Most security systems, though, are reactive rather than proactive, helpful only after something bad has already happened.

Sensative’s Strips aim to provide peace of mind by not only notifying a homeowner of suspicious activity, but helping prevent unfortunate situations from happening in the first place. It does this through Z-Wave compatibility, letting Strips do things like send smartphone alerts about each door or window upon exit. More information means homeowners can take action to ensure the safety of their home. 

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Smart Home

The flick of a switch turns on all the lights with LampLink

To create the perfect ambiance in any room, the right amount of lighting is necessary. Most of the time, though, a room’s outlet placement can limit the kinds of lighting arrangements possible, forcing people to place a lamp somewhere they don’t want it to be.

LampLink is a transmitter/receiver system that allows a user to control all the lights in a room at once without the use of a smartphone. The transmitter is plugged in to a wall switch connected outlet, while the transmitters are plugged into lamps. When the wall switch is flicked on, all other lamps connected are turned on as well.

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