Category: Smart Home

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Smart Home

The Sense smart home hub uses common sense to securely monitor and control your home

editors-choiceOne of the biggest worries when it comes to using any Internet of Things platform revolves around security. With most technology out in the world vulnerable in a million different ways, the last thing anyone wants to do is introduce even more vulnerabilities to the most sensitive parts of one’s life.

To combat this, former members of Mozilla Firefox and Qualcomm have joined forces to create the Sense smart home platform. The elegantly styled glass device acts as an intelligent camera and hub for the home by leveraging the use of a wide-angle 1080p camera with infrared capabilities along with a microphone. By itself, it can recognize who’s home and send meaningful notifications about unusual sound and movement. Together with other popular IoT devices, it can automatically control devices like Nest thermostats, speakers, and televisions based on whatever preferences it learns from each owner — cutting out clunky smartphone use in the process by instead using voice and gesture control.

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Chargers/Batteries Smart Home

The YOUMO modular power strip makes supplying power electrifying

While smartphones and laptops continue to slim down and offer more powerful specs, the humble strip keeps on chugging along in all its practical, drab glory, doling out power and taking names. Most of the time, though, it doesn’t offer much in the way of functionality.

The YOUMO is a smart modular power strip offering users a wide range of plug-and-go modules for a custom power solution for any situation.  Good Gadgets, the three-man team behind the Kickstarter campaign, has designed YOUMO modules to be lightweight for travel and aesthetically pleasing, a far cry from most dollar store varieties. It all starts with a base cord in three different lengths and seven different colors. From there, six modules can connect in any combination to each other.

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Smart Home

Kasia smart home system lures mainstream home owners

While the smart home segment runs rife with activity, it doesn’t stop companies from coming up with their version of a “revolutionary” system. It makes sense that there are still companies looking for that breakthrough: being able to control everything in the home from anywhere some sort of data connection is too powerful to ignore. The problem is packaging the capabilities to a wider, mainstream audience.

The Kasia smart home system pairs a brightly colored interface with ease of use in an attempt to get at the heart of the solution. Everything stems from its always-on Hub where up to 149 Kasia modules can connect with it and each other using mesh networking for more stable, longer-reaching connections. This family of modules lets users monitor and control anything in the home. The Kasia Plug covers the majority of gadgets and appliances so that users can turn them on or off while the Kasia Switch looks exactly like a normal wall switch but communicates with the Hub as well. A Kasia Remote is also available and features customizable buttons for individual devices, groups of devices, or entire scenes.

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Smart Home

PlantSitter babysits your plants when you can’t

Plants are easier to take care of than most pets, but they too must be fed -– something that’s not always easy. After all, people can’t always be home and, even when they are, they sometimes forget to feed their plants. Unlike dogs, plants of course don’t bark when they’re hungry. (At least, they shouldn’t.)

PlantSipatent-claimedtter is a soil-mounted, smart plant monitoring system that uses sensors to help owners care for their plants. If a plant doesn’t have enough water, PlantSitter will detect that and send the user a message immediately. The device also measures the nutrition levels in the soil of a plant by measuring the soil’s electrical conductivity (EC). By measuring the soil’s EC, along with its levels of moisture, PlantSitter can make an estimate of the soil’s nutrition levels.

The patent-pending device works in conjunction with a MiGrow app for Android and iOS mobile devices. PlantSitter gets connected through Bluetooth to a nearby smart device equipped with the app. The app monitors a plant by interpreting the received data and making sure the values are within limits prescribed for that specific plant. Data collected from PlantSitter are stored on the device maker’s servers and users can browse the info by hours, days and weeks.

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Chargers/Batteries Smart Home

Orison smart home battery takes charge of off-grid power needs

High energy costs continue to put a strain on the budgets of many families. The U.S. energy grid is also overburdened and sometimes unreliable, especially in the summer when many people are running air conditioners. Renewable energy sources including solar and wind, meanwhile, are widely considered to be major parts of the solution, but they tend to be intermittent -– limited to when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing.

Orison patent-claimedis a plug-and-play energy storage system that’s designed to work in any country, whether the user gets energy from the grid, the sun or another source. The battery system automatically stores energy when utility rates are low, and then uses that energy to power the user’s home or business when rates are high. During a power outage, it can automatically power a home or business and make sure none of the stored energy is sent back to the grid. By localizing energy distribution, users can save money while lowering peak demand on the grid.

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Lighting Smart Home

Deter dodgy types from the home with the ComfyLight system

While traditional home security systems are no doubt comprehensive, they only really serve to alert homeowners and authorities after a home is compromised. What good is a security system if it doesn’t actually prevent intrusion and burglary in the first place?

The team behind the ComfyLight connected light bulb design it to address this failing. Embedded with Wi-Fi connectivity and motion sensors allows the ComfyLight to automatically turn on and off when entering or exiting a room. Over time, it learns a homeowner’s patterns to replicate when they’re out for the night, for example, to deter would-be burglars.

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Imaging Smart Home

Spot is a low-cost, feature-rich camera for the connected home

Home security cameras have a bit of a reputation of lacking the kinds of features worthy of the excessive prices they’ve demanded. Seeing an opportunity, there have been a rash of companies looking to make better money by advertising a better product. iSmartAlarm is hoping their version of a lower cost yet versatile smart home camera will strike a chord with consumers looking for a better value.

Spot has all the expected features for a product in this category: HD-resolution video, night vision, sound and motion detection, push notifications, and both cloud and local storage supporting up to a 64GB micro SD card. The company tries to set its product apart in two ways.

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Smart Home Television

SmartEgg cracks a smart remote control system and timer for your home

Universal remote controls still offer a pretty good way to reduce the number of remotes needed to power all the electronic devices in a room.

patent-claimedBut SmartEgg takes the concept of a universal remote a few steps further. The egg-shaped universal remote control center works in conjunction with Android and iOS mobile devices to automate one’s home. It can control any infrared device using Bluetooth 4.0, according to its Kickstarter campaign.

SmartEgg has an internal timer to switch electronics on and off — even when the user is not home. It also has a self-learning capability to adapt to old or new devices, and will interact with devices if certain conditions are met. For example, it will mute the TV if the phone rings. SmartEgg also supports iBeacon technology.

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Smart Home

Eco Automation monitors your scene, keeps things green

At some point, the connected revolution lost its way and became a Tower of Babel of many incmopatible companies and standards. Zero Energy’s Eco Automation platform not only address the disparate world of these devices exist in, but takes advantage of the information being obtained to automatically monitor and conserve energy in addition to tailoring the connected home around the user’s lifestyle.

Its Eco Technology Bridge is the centerpiece of the platform, pairing nine radio protocols like Z-Wave, Zigbee, Wi-Fi and an array of others with a universal translation engine to make sure they all understand each other—and leaving room for another should another important spring up in the future. The Eco Automation’s Energy Meter connects directly to electricity panels and provides real-time consumption and production reports, going so far as to pick up differences in an HVAC’s power draw to determine when a filter needs to be a changed and offering up preventative maintenance reports for everything else.

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Imaging Smart Home

Koova security camera does everything but chase intruders away

In the United Kingdom and many points beyond, cameras are everywhere. With smartphones, security cameras and the increasing presence of the Internet of Things, they’re being crammed into everywhere else at a fraction of the cost they previously were.

Cue Amaryllo International and their Koova, the device it’s claiming to be the world’s smallest auto-tracking camera. The company sees its low-cost Koova being used in home, garage, office and small business situations. The sleek looking cylindrically shaped device is Wi-Fi connected, boasting HD quality and 8GB of onboard memory.

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