Categories
Imaging Smart Home

The Mercu smart home orb falls short of groundbreaking

On any given day, another product promising to be the center of the connected home experience makes its way to the crowdfunding world. Most of the time, they suffer from lack of connectivity and features, forcing users to combine them with accessories to truly get the most out of them.

With the Mercu, Taiwan-based GalaThings promises an all-in-one product combining surveillance capabilities, sound and motion detection for intruders (and a siren to scare them off), and environmental detection keeping tabs on humidity, temperature, luminance, and smoke. In addition to these features, three other aspects of the Mercu make it particularly useful: Wi-Fi, ZigBee and BLE support, the option to save pertinent video locally with its SD card slot or on cloud storage with Dropbox integration, and an IFTTT interface on its companion smartphone to create custom events.

Categories
Connected Objects Imaging

The FRAME connected home camera keeps your life in focus

The notion of connected home cameras usually focus on the security benefits they provide. For the team at LifeSmart, its FRAME lifestyle camera is looking to buck that trend by making it the core of your connected home experience.

With FRAME, LifeSmart looked to design something that looked good but fit into a user’s life as more than a security camera. To do this, it developed a software platform that can be expanded on later on. So, while FRAME right now features night vision and motion detection capabilities, it will feature many more as time goes on using the same set of 1080p lens, mic, and speaker hardware.

Categories
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.

Categories
Maker/Development Sensors/IoT

MATRIX’s sensor platform seeks to be The One for the Internet of Things

editors-choiceSmartphones are so ubiquitous because just one replaces a wide variety of real-world objects. This has yet to happen to in the world of Internet of Things. Instead, more and more companies create more hardware that do different things, and therefore, introduce more fragmentation. This makes things difficult for the developers and end-users who would have been clamoring for a standard that could simplify the entire IoT experience.

By applying the lessons learned from what the smartphone did for the real world, the folks at AdMobilize have designed MATRIX. Just as a smartphone combined a number of capabilities into one, slim package, MATRIX’s 15 different, embedded sensors do the same — just for the home or business.