Month: March 2016

Categories
Cell Phone Accessories Imaging

Smart Shoot shows your smartphone around a scene for picture-perfect control

Smartphones have become the go-to device for many people to take photos and shoot video with. But they tend to lack several of the high-end features that are typically featured in standalone digital cameras and camcorders, including facial recognition.

Smart Shoot is a pan and tilt, motorized mount for smartphones that provides face recognition, intelligent tracking and free-hand shooting. It uses Bluetooth and works in conjunction with Android and iOS smartphones The product starts shipping in June. Future pricing isn’t provided via its Kickstarter campaign. But early bird backers can get one for a pledge starting at $88. Its maker hopes to raise $80,000 by April 3.

The device has some things in common with Galileo and Swivl, two earlier Kickstarter-funded projects. However, Galileo is designed to work with iOS mobile devices and GoPro cameras, while Swivl can be used with Android and iOS devices, as well as DSLR cameras. The largest potential obstacle for Smart Shoot is that –- from its campaign video, anyway — it doesn’t seem to move as smoothly as the earlier devices.

Categories
Connected Objects Kids/Babies Sensors/IoT

Butterfly Bluetooth thermometer lights up your life like a baby’s smile

Caring for a feverish child is a consuming process. Parents not only must keep a close watch on the child’s temperature using thermometers even during stressful times like in the middle of the night, but they also have to keep track of the all the measurements to better inform doctors of the child’s health.

Butterfly aims to make this easier to do. It’s comprised of a dime-sized temperature sensor, a base station, and a mobile iOS/Android app. The water-resistant temperature sensor can be stuck onto a child’s body to constantly gather temperature readings. These readings are sent to the base station and displayed on its small LED screen, and reflected in the three colored lights Butterfly uses to quickly inform parents at a glance. (A blue light is normal, a yellow light means elevated temperatures, and a red light means a fever.)

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Categories
Connected Objects Pets

KYON connected collar coalesces canine care

While keeping a dog is an extremely rewarding life decision, it’s also a time-consuming, sometimes draining endeavour. With so many aspects to constantly think about, many pet owners would quickly welcome a device into their lives that would help with it all.

The KYON smart collar is exactly that, a thin, lightweight collar equipped with a wide range of connectivity features that helps owners monitor the well-being of their little furry loved ones. KYON works using Bluetooth in conjunction with a base station or a companion smartphone app to do this, featuring embedded GPS technology and an altimeter to ensure owners know exactly where their pooch is at all time.

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Categories
Aquatics

Triton lets you breathe underwater like Aquaman, ignore small talk with fish

editors-choiceWitnessing the aquatic nature underneath lapping island waves is an activity imbued with wonder. But while it’s easy to marvel wonder at the unique, vibrant underwater life teeming below, it can be a little uncomfortable having to wear huge tanks with a limited supply of oxygen to explore.

Way back when, Sean Connery’s 007 was given the solution to this problem in the form of a small device that could be worn underwater to breathe normally while swimming. Now, that device is actually here. Titled the Triton, the lightweight re-breather allows anyone from snorkelers to lifeguards to breathe underwater without any addition equipment. A clever implementation of technology works to make this happen, with the device’s microporous hollow fiber keeping out water molecules while still letting in oxygen.

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Music

Guitar Now helps aspiring guitarists strum without getting fingers numb

The road to learning any musical instrument is littered with pain, heartache, frustration, and the nagging urge to quit. The last one is so great that most people do so, despite the myriad of benefits that come from playing a musical instrument.

While the guitar is one of the more accessible instruments, it also makes it the one most give up trying to learn. Guitar Now is designed to make it a lot easier to grasp the foundations of the easy-to-learn but hard-to-master instrument. It’s comprised of three parts: a collar that wraps around the guitar’s neck, a top plate that fastens to its front side, and a range of sliding inserts. Each of these inserts is key to the Guitar Now concept because each employs a design that guides a new learner’s fingers directly to the strings that need to be played, at once teaching finger, form, and chord placement.

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Categories
Cycling

Bimoz e-bike conversion kits gets your ride ready for more intense trips

The destructive potential of everyday actions is so obvious that it’s almost a crime not to do something — no matter how small — in order to reduce their effects. Besides the health benefits they proffer, riding bikes has long been touted as an eco-friendly alternative to gas-guzzling cars and trucks.

Sometimes, though, the distances or terrain involved can be too difficult to overcome on a daily basis. This is what the team behind Bimoz wants to help with. Riders can use the connected e-bike drive to make most any bike electric by the 250w motor inside of the middle hub, allowing it augment a ride for up to about 93 miles at a time.

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Connected Objects Cooking Food and Beverage

A rising TempehSure means you have a fever for freshly baked protein

The biggest challenge for most vegetarians, vegans, or just anyone wanting to cut down on meat is trying to find a suitable replacement for animal-based protein. Tempeh is an unprocessed, fermented plant-based protein that has enjoyed status as a staple food in Indonesia for centuries, and for good reason: every four ounces of tempeh packs 18-20 grams of plant-based protein. In other words, a lot more than many other non-meat sources.

Tempeh isn’t exactly the easiest to make, though, making the TempehSure Protein Pod an attractive option for alternative eaters. The toaster oven-like device is a dual-stage incubator and pasteurizer that creates tempeh from soy or any other legume over the course of a 24-hour process. Users need only to prep the legumes, add the packed-in starter culture, place the mixture inside the TempehSure, and press one button to start the process of creating tasty tempeh.

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Categories
Connected Objects Imaging Maker/Development Sensors/IoT

Sweep eyes an opportunity for affordable LIDAR sensors

LIDAR sensor technology is being used in a growing number of products. For example, these sensors serve as the eyes of self-driving car, enabling them to detect other objects on the road. LIDAR scanners are sold on their own, but they tend to be too pricey for the average consumer, sometimes coming in at more than $1,000.

Sweep is an inexpensive scanning LIDAR sensor for consumer applications including high school robotics projects. digital art and drones. It can also be used to get the dimensions of a room much faster than it would take when using a tape measure. It can also be used to detect when somebody walks through a doorway or tries to touch something they shouldn’t. Sweep uses sensing technology that differs from most other LIDAR sensors on the market –- a technique that enables it to use lower power components to perform long-range measurements.

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Categories
Smart Home

The ZOE smart home hub doesn’t echo your data in the cloud

With the Apple v. FBI court drama unfolding, it’s never been clearer how important the topic of individual privacy is. In this post-Snowden age, no one really knows where all these mass amounts of data are sent to and who gets to look at them, prompting many to take matters into their own hands. Protonet’s ZOE is a smart home hub specifically made for these people.

A lot of criticism levied against Internet of Things devices is their potential to be directly hijacked by hackers or government entities or have the data they generate compromised since these devices rely on less than secure cloud technology. ZOE is special, though, in that it’s completely cloud independent: everything ZOE does is processed directly on the hardware itself. So not only does ZOE control and organize all of the major smart home devices on the market now (with an open platform capable of connecting and controlling many more), it does so without compromising any user data.

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Categories
Connected Objects Music

Aset and Pharaoh smart headphones turn Android on its ear

Wireless headphones provided a major boost to the headphone market. One reason why is that doing away with the cord made it much easier –- and safer — to use headphones while exercising.

patent-claimedThe patent-pending, over-the-ear Smart Listening Device (SLD) headphones take Bluetooth headphones one step further by adding the Android operating system, enabling users to download music and other media files directly to the headset. Other features include a built-in pedometer to track fitness accomplishments, USB connectivity, built-in GPS, and built-in internal microphones for phone calls and Skype conversations. Each set of headphones can play 8 hours after less than an hour of charging its lithium battery.

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