Author: Nicholas Echevarria

Categories
Smart Home

airBell connected doorbell alerts you to shenanigans via Wi-Fi or phone call

In this day and age of drone deliveries and comet landings, physically knocking on a door and waiting for someone to open it can seem a little dated and, frankly, boring. Even missing deliveries seems like something that really shouldn’t happen anymore, but for most people, it can be a commonplace occurrence.

With airBell, you can rest assured that you’ll always know exactly who’s at your door at any time and be able to promptly react. The connected doorbell sports a 3.5″ touchscreen, a motion sensor to detect guests, and can call you, send you an SMS or a push notification, or even facilitate a video chat using the onboard camera with your Wi-Fi or GSM connected smartphone or tablet. This means that you won’t have to rush anymore to open the door or miss anymore packages as you could direct the deliveryman accordingly. An alarm sounds if the airBell senses a suspicious presence and a one-touch SOS gives you the power to call proper authorities based on unexpected emergencies too. The campaign’s $25,000 goal aims to get the $159 airBell into backer’s homes by December 2014.

Although the airBell serves up a multitude of functionality and can be occasionally useful with the wayward package every now and then, its biggest problem is the fact that smartphones exist. Why buy a completely separate device that can basically do what a smartphone already does? Just because something can be automated doesn’t mean it deserves to be, but at least the product will serve as a great a conversation starter for all those home automation fetishists out there.

Categories
Connected Objects Cooking

MAID smart oven trades in a cookbook for digital display and an app

Burnt brownies? Melted macaroni? Catastrophic couscous? Fear not, intrepid culinary explorer, as the MAID Oven is here to guide you towards gastronomic glory. Let the smart oven be your personal kitchen assistant with its touchscreen display and ability to recognize both gestures and voice to tell you exactly what ingredients to use and how to prepare a dish from a database of crowdsourced recipes.

Don your apron with pride when you expand your talents by discovering little-known recipes from around the world, and share yours with the world when you feel experimental. Don’t get lazy though, and make sure that apron continues to fit with the dietary and exercise suggestions provided by the companion iOS/Android app which interfaces with your smartphone to track your activity during the day and suggests appropriate foods. These recommendations are tailored to your culinary habits and caloric needs over time, factoring in the adjustments you personally make to recipes as well to make them all your own. Throughout all of this, you still retain control over every part of the process , but when the MAID Oven can automatically set time and temperature during cooking, why would you care? The MAID Oven can be had for a donation of $449 for delivery in November 2015. The campaign is seeking to raise $50,000.

Having been in production for about two and half years now, the time and effort put into this product shines through. It’s incredibly robust and fully featured, offering a full oven that can make sizable amounts of food. Here’s hoping the build quality is something that will last. The box is mighty big, too, and finding space for it in smaller places might pose a challenge. To be honest, the only thing the MAID Oven is missing a 3D printer capable of creating the food itself, but we’ll wait around to see where subsequent versions lead before getting ahead of ourselves.

 

Categories
Connected Objects Imaging

Fireside seeks to rekindle interest in the digital photo frame

With smartphones, tablets, and all of our other devices containing cameras both portable and capable enough to take quality photos and video anywhere we’d like, we’ve amassed a glut of media that we may enjoy having, but unfortunately don’t get to enjoy. As much as we’d like to go down memory lane more often than we do, finding, organizing, and displaying all of our media is a time-consuming process. Digital picture frames do exist, but they’re usually of shoddy construction and the user still has to upload everything manually.

Fireside combines smarts and beauty in order to organize, curate, and display all of your photos from disparate devices all on one slickly-designed, HD frame. The product does this by backing up photos and videos taken normally on any iOS or Android device connected with the Fireside app. Once cloud-side, they are made searchable with auto-tagging and filtering based on criteria like time, date, and age. After, algorithms and personal input are applied to show users contextually relevant content, like the birthday of a friend or family member.

Celebrating a holiday? Fireside will display previous holiday festivities.) Similar to Pandora, users can create stations based on keywords to add an element of pleasant unpredictability, giving all your content the chance to be enjoyed. Constructed from materials like chrome and glass, its minimal design can be mounted on a wall and multiples can be kept at other people’s homes to easily keep them up-to-date with users and their families. A black or white Fireside is going for $399 and includes one year of cloud service. It has an expected delivery date of June 2015 provided it hits its funding goal of $100,000.

The Fireside really backs other digital photo frames on the market into a corner. If the intelligent cloud service that supports the product doesn’t turn out to be a bust, then the Fireside will have a leg up against other frames like the Flink, Famatic, and most notably the Nixplay. Although the Nixplay can interface with every social network and also receive emails of photos from friends and family, its still manual at its core. Ultimately, the Fireside’s automation claims along with its sleek design will be impossible to ignore.

Categories
Connected Objects Food and Beverage

B4RM4N connected cocktail market uses its smarts to make others stupid

Although a bartender’s tricks and talents can seem pretty easy to us inebriated folk, the truth is that it takes quite a long time to perfect the skills necessary to mix drinks that won’t make us grimace while we sip them. Worse yet, when most of us try our hand at making a drink or two for family or friends, the end result is a drink that doesn’t look great and the realization that we really don’t know what we’re doing at all.

To become presentable to the public again, you could buy a bunch of books or plunk down the cash for a mixology course, or you could grab a B4RM4N and let it do all the work. The device is a modern mixologist in a three-piece shaker, comprised of a stainless steel that encloses a Bluetooth LE antenna, an accelerometer, and LED lights all in a one, high-tech package. Pair it with your smartphone, select a recipe with the B4rm4m companion app, the number of servings, and it will lead you step by step in the process of creating the perfect pour. It even tells you how long to pour ingredients and shake them all together. With over 110 recipes and counting, there will never be a lack of ideas. You can even have the app suggest recipes to you based on what’s currently in your fridge, and if that egg vodka mint actually ends up tasting good, you can share it with the B4rm4m community so that anyone can make it. The B4rm4m is currently going for an early bird price of $99, jumping up to $199 upon release. Backers can expect theirs in July 2015 if the campaign achieves it funding goal of $100,000.

The similarly titled Barman is a campaign in the past that is very similar to the B4RM4N. Both have similar features, but the B4RM4N goes about things in a more compact way, while the Barman uses an external scale to help you create your drink. All in all, the B4RM4N is a svelte device that will look good in many scenarios and its social features make it not only useful but very fun, too.

Categories
Cycling Maker/Development

Bamboobee lets you build your own bike from bamboo

There’s a certain satisfaction from building things on your own that is unfortunately absent from an economy that wants us to buy everything pre-made and brand new. That experience doesn’t do much for us, so instead of going to your local bike shop and riding one out the door, why not make your own? The Bamboobee lets you do just that with a package that includes all the parts necessary to build your own bike frame from bamboo. Termed a BIY (build it yourself) bike, the Bamboobee makes it easy to assemble your own cross-country frame in just three days by giving you the instructions to do so along with a platform to do it on.

At this point in the campaign, the inventor is also offering a kit with everything but the wheels for an additional $139 so that you can be 99% at the end of the third day. The combination of beautiful materials and the excitement of riding a bike of your own making will have many interested in such an unique product. They’ll just need to be careful their assembly is up to snuff as it could lead to potential accidents. All in all, the Bamboobee’s customization options sure attract as does its $179 price tag. Backers can expect delivery of the bamboo bike in Februrary 2015. The campaign is hoping to raise $15,000.

Categories
Tech Accessories

GoDrive lets your phone or tablet read microSD cards

The Achilles heel of most devices is their lack of storage. Even if we find ourselves in 2014 with SD cards that have incredible capacities, our smartphones and other device most likely don’t have more than 64GB — a paltry amount comparatively speaking. In addition, transferring these files from device to device is more of hassle than it should be.

The GoDrive wants to smooth that process out just a bit by offering an extremely portable USB micro SD card reader that works with your smart devices, GoPros, and even drones. To achieve this, the GoDrive is compatible with both USB 2.0 and micro USB connections so that you can easily manage up to 128GB of additional storage on-the-go.

The device’s portability will definitely come in handy, but just don’t go sticking your new toy everywhere without considering a USBCondom first. A donation of $16 will get you a GoDrive in August of 2015. Pilot Electronics, the company behind it, just needs $40,000 to get started.

Categories
Smart Home

Tank Utility lets your smartphone keep an eye on your propane tank, makes Hank Hill proud

The use of propane to heat a home can sometimes be a pain. Supply levels must be kept up with or else homeowners will find themselves without shivering. This can also lead to frozen pipes and flood damage, both which can be extremely costly to any homeowner. The Tank Utility helps ward off these problems by being your personal propane assistant. The remote smart meter monitors your propane tank level by connecting to your Wi-Fi network, relaying that information back to your smartphone for review. You’ll receive personalized alerts when you’re low and schedule deliveries right on your phone. In the meantime, it’ll be able access diagnostic information about consumption trends, efficiency, and other problems like disconnected Wi-Fi or low battery, all while keeping an eye out for leaks and other strange usage. With the device requiring no tools to install and able to work in temperatures as low as -20°, it is an incredibly useful tool to effortlessly keep on top of things around the home. Combine this with other home automation solutions like the ActuSwitch and the Ninja Sphere to really keep things under control. Expected in May 2015, the Tank Utility is priced at $200 and is looking for $20,000 in funding.

Categories
Tech Accessories

Reversible USB Adapter lets you be smug about your plug

The tyranny of the USB port has finally come to an end with the Reversible USB Adapter. There are no surprises here: the product does exactly what it says. Attach it to any USB connection to instantly tame its fickleness and reclaim the few hours out of the year spent trying to jostle those connections into place. With so much time spent trying to do such an inane task, it sure is welcome. This adapter is part of trend of making what used to be a daily headache just a bit easier to handle: just compare this adapter’s good deeds with what the Super Motor USB Flash Drive does for storage. With both of these products, the utility is certainly there — it just needs to make sure it’ll last. If not, what would be the point of purchasing one now with the advent of USB 3.0? The Reversible USB Adapter is priced at just $7, while the campaign itself is looking for $10,000 to relieve your connection woes. Backers can expect this cure-all by December 2014.

Categories
Chargers/Batteries

ONE CARD sneaks two phone adapters into one thin charger

There are a lot of portable phone batteries that claim to be light enough to forget about while powerful enough to recharge your phone a million times very quickly. Many claims are quickly debunked the moment you realize there’s a brick in your bag for most of the day. The ONE CARD is looking to shame all the rest by offering a 2,200mAh battery in the form factor of a credit card.

Despite its 6.5mm size, small enough to stick in your wallet, the ONE CARD is still extremely versatile sporting connections enough for the iPhone 4/5/6 and Android phone and an LED power indicator to keep you informed. The campaign boasts about its featherweight qualities by saying you can easily walk and talk with it, but who would want to do that? In any case, you shouldn’t have to for too long as the ONE CARD charges devices at 1A, or about 1% a minute, limiting the amount of time you’d need to wait. And if the ONE CARD is too petite for your taste, also on offer is the ONE THING charger which has a 10,000mAh battery in the size of a pack of cigarettes that can charge up to two devices at once. Currently, a ONE CARD is going for $17, while a ONE THING is going for $35, with a delivery date of December 2014. The campaign hopes to raise $1,200.

Categories
Smart Home

ShutterEaze makes sure your smart home isn’t blindsided

Home owners over the past few years have enjoyed the explosion of support for all things home automation. Everything from your toaster to your thermostat to your doors can be controlled with a smartphone, leading to increased convenience. Even as so many of these parts of home are being automated, there are as many that haven’t been, like shutters. Automating them is a time-consuming, complex process. ShutterEaze is looking to make it extremely easy.

The ShutterEaze system works with all types of shutter louves and is easily installed using nothing but clip-on parts. When it’s on, the system can be controlled with a remote control or an iOS/Android device. The ability to control shutters in groups, set a sunrise and sunset mode, and set your own schedules are the added benefits of using a smartphone or tablet, relieving homeowners of the daily burden of having to open or close their shutters. No HomeKit integration has been announced, but the company is currently working on ZigBee integration to expand the ShutterEaze system’s usefulness. The product is currently priced at $159 with an estimated delivery date of May 2015. The campaign is looking for $40,000 to make its way into homes everywhere.