Category: Smart Home

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Smart Home

VOME gives Siri a bunch of outlets around your home

It’s 2016 and the smart home “revolution” is well underway. Unfortunately, that revolution fizzled out as soon as it started. The problem isn’t a lack of devices — look anywhere online for connected home devices and discover a glut of dual-syllabled hubs and plugs for anything you may need — but rather a lack of standard tying them all together. This was the problem at the very beginning, and it continues to be a problem now.

Mark Van Der Spuy’s VOME home automation system tackles this problem by piggybacking off of iOS. Specifically, Siri and Apple’s foray into home automation with HomeKit. The VOME system itself is comprised of a 4-Way Control Unit that any dumb object can be plugged into, allowing anything from lamps to curtains to coffee machines to be controlled simply by issuing voice commands to Siri.

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Smart Home Travel

The portable Securmate is a security system for wherever you need it

For those with enough determination, the mechanical locks that are supposed to protect most people usually fail to when it really counts. This is not many households have any kind of home security. One of other biggest reasons why is because traditionally, home security companies target those in permanent living situations.

The Securmate portable home security system changes that trend. The portable security system is comprised of a palm-sized sensor with a motion detector within and a controller. First, the controller — a small Android device running the Securmate app — is plugged into a wall outlet or USB port. Second, the wireless sensor is attached to a door or window with the provided double-sided tape. Finally, the user arms the system using the controllers, creating a Wi-Fi intranet that covers and protects most small- to medium-sized spaces.

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Smart Home

Get a grip on your connected life with the Moband gesture wand

Alternative forms of device control are all the rage now, and for good reason. Smartphones and other touch-based devices are great for communication but usually end up adding complexity when it comes to smart home control.

The team at iWave designed the Moband to give smart home enthusiasts or anyone looking to more easily control their connected home objects another way to do so. The gesture-based universal remote control comes with 10 preset gestures (e.g. swing up, down, left, right, rotate, etc.) or the ability to create custom gestures, all of which can be linked to the functionality of one or more remote controls already in the house.

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Sensors/IoT Smart Home

Knocki lets you turn surfaces into a remote for anything

editors-choiceIt’s 3 a.m. and it would be nice to turn the TV and lights off without getting out of bed.

patent-claimedKnocki is a short, cylindrical device that attaches to any surface and transforms that surface into a touch interface that can control other devices. Users set Knocki to perform specific actions through a set number of taps. It uses non-acoustic sensor technology to detect gentle surface gestures that are even a short distance away, but Knocki also has the ability to filter out random vibrations. The device works anywhere there is Wi-Fi, and there is a companion Android and iOS app for it.

 

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Imaging Smart Home

Patrolling your home is how the Orbii security camera rolls

The appeal of home security solutions stems from always being connected, allowing a user to always know what’s happening back at home. Most of these systems use video cameras to supplement alerts and other notifications with smart recognition technology to detect the source of a disturbance, for instance. Depending on the size of the home, this can require purchasing many cameras, making what should be economical systems far more expensive.

Orbii solves this little problem. Its spherical design lets it move by shifting its internal center of gravity, like a hamster in a hamster ball. Inside, a central sphere contains omni-directional drive motors that shift the sphere in any direction with control and agility, letting it freely roam (and map the environment over time) or be controlled by smartphone or tablet app. This makes it easy for users to take advantage of its 720p HD camera to get a clear picture whether it’s day or night due to built-in night vision, with eight hours of onboard storage or 30 days of cloud storage available for footage.

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Smart Home

Gidjit Beacons know their place in the smart home

Outfitting a home or apartment with connected technology seems like a good idea until the simple action of turning on a light means unlocking a smartphone, searching for the connected light’s specific app, launching it – you get the idea. Despite the noble intentions behind connected tech, a lot of them actually end up making what used to be simple tasks way more involved.

Team Gidjit thinks its Gidjit Beacons can help in this regard. Each beacon is a small, disc-like device that can be placed in any room and associated with whatever connected devices are present, like Nest thermostats, Philips Hue lightbulbs, or even Apple TVs. As users move from room to room and in closer proximity to different Gidjit Beacons, the Gidjit iOS app displays a constantly updated list of available devices and services that can be directly controlled, all without having to go on a wild goose hunt every time.

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Connected Objects Health and Wellness Smart Home

Fixo is a well-rounded smart home disc

Those who’ve made the leap to outfitting their apartments or homes with smart home devices can quickly recall the horrors of trying to figure out how make everything work together. The tired Internet of Things trope of disparate standards is anything but, still making things difficult years into the IoT craze. And to add insult to injury, each of these products can look so wildly different that choosing to put them all in a single space can result in a serious decorative crisis.

Some smart home systems, like the Oomi and Kasia, present potential backers with an all-in-one system that avoids these issues. Fixo, however, takes it up a notch with a stylish design that looks great presented on a table or on the wall anywhere in the home. The HD-camera equipped multi-face smart clock features a dedicated suite of apps along with a wide variety of integrations so that users can do everything from check weather forecasts, remind themselves of their next Google Calendar appointment, consult recipes in the kitchen, refer to the bountiful knowledge of Wikipedia, or just snap some selfies or video call loved ones and friends.

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Smart Home

FlipFlic won’t leave you blinded by the light

It can be a major drag to face interruptions every time the window blinds need to be adjusted due to glare.

FlipFlic is a solar-powered, energy-saving device that adjusts window blinds based on sunlight, temperature or any schedule that is set via the accompanying app. An iOS app is already available and an Android version will follow soon. The automation device is easy to install. With one click, FlipFlic, which is about the size of a roll of quarters, attaches to window blinds magnetically.

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Smart Home

The Ezcontrol hub speaks your smart home’s language

With most dwellings boasting a wide variety of devices and home fixtures that communicate in different ways, outfitting a home with connectivity can be a messy affair. Since the dawn of the IoT movement, smart hubs have sprung up offering to standardize the hassle — some more successfully than others.

One that seems to have the right idea is Ezcontrol. While it isn’t an entirely new idea, its dedication to a simple premise — a smart hub that communicates using Wi-Fi, infrared, and RF waves — makes it a low-cost, straightforward solution. Being that most items in the home communicate with one of those three standards, everything from the connected fridge to the air conditioner to the garage door can all be controlled using a single companion app preloaded with compatibility with over 5,000 devices.

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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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