Alexa in your car plus other uses with this Kickstarter device

Devices & Integrations
1

I saw this yesterday and thought it might be of some interest to a few of you. It has Alexa built in on top of the other uses which means you can control Smartthings from your car with your voice.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1598272670/dashbot-a-49-robot-for-your-dashboard/description

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2

That looks really cool! I bought an extra dot to put in my car, so it has all the features, read audible and kindle books, control smartthings, bluetooths to the car audio - anything you can do at home with a dot. But no fancy led wave display. :wink: So I wonder what extra things it can do beyond a dot
maybe get music directly from your phone and route it to the car audio?

3

That’s exactly what it does. Think of it as Siri and Alexa in one box or Ok Google a a Alexa in one box.

4

This actually looks like it might be cool. Might save lives even.

5

Of course it looks cool: it’s a kickstarter video. Everything’s cool in a kickstarter video. :wink:

These folks list as their credentials “two successful kickstarter campaigns.” Which I guess means successful at making videos that look cool and getting people to part with money. One of their projects was supposed to ship in December 2015 and by August 2016 it still hadn’t shipped. And that one was Miles simpler than the dashbot.

I’ll look at it once it’s actually available to ship. Until then, it’s all just marketing. :sunglasses:

6

That looks like the new dash identifiers for Lyft/Uber cars.

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7

You have a hot spot or something in your car? How does it work if it’s not on the same Wifi as SmartThings? Interested in this
 Please share more details.

Thanks

8

Hot spot in the car. Your dot talks to amazon servers, amazon servers talk to smartthings servers, smart things servers talk to your hub. So it doesn’t matter where the Echo or Dot is in the world, as long as the internet works. :wink: And unlike the Echo, the Dot pairs with external Bluetooth speakers, so it pairs nicely with the cars audio system. It really is a lot of fun.

9

Well, I’ll be damned! Will have to think this one through. Our iPhones can both be on our cars BT at the same time and we can pretty much well do everything through Hey Siri if we are plugged in but this is cool never-the-less.

Thanks for the info!

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10

So here’s the one down side I haven’t wrapped my head around yet. Do you have to manually enable wifi hotspot on your phone every time you get into your car, because that would get old really fast. Or do you just have wifi hotspot always turn on? Is there any downside to doing that?

11

I got a virgin mobile hotspot and leave it in the car. Pay as you go, with no start/stop fees. It stops working when the money/dataplan runs out, so there’s no overage. Put more money in to start it back up. So If I don’t use it for a month or two, I can start it up for a trip or something. The only downside, is don’t leave alexa playing music overnight
 when you park your car.

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12

Wasn’t SmartThings a Kickstarter campaign at one point? I agree with you that LOTS of them are pure vapor. I’ve backed a few. The one that I actually got was UBI. Wish I hadn’t.
If this thing does ever ship, I’ll buy one. I’ve spent $50 on far worse things before. Just remember, there’s no sex in the Champagne Room.

2 Likes
13

SmartThings was indeed a kickstarter campaign. It made it to market, but overpromised in the initial campaign.

Besides promising Bluetooth, The following factors fed significantly into the positive reaction to the campaign:

So the concept of ‘it just works’ for SmartThings was born. We built a platform that easily connects everyday things to the Internet. Our vision is to include always-on cellular connectivity in every SmartThings Hub, so you just take it out of the box, plug it in, and it’s connected. Even better, when you buy new devices, what we call Things, from the ThingStore, they’ll be pre-assigned to your SmartThings Hub. Plug them in or turn them on, they show up in the app, and you’re immediately in control.

And

We love NFC and plan for SmartThings to support it within our mobile apps for phones that have built-in NFC readers, which would enable scenarios like those in the Kickstarter video right out of the box for smartphones that have NFC technology.

Four years later, no Bluetooth, no cellular connectivity, and no NFC.

Obviously, it did make it to market, which is good, but it’s a very good example of why I don’t pay any attention to what a kickstarter campaign promises unless they hold a patent. I wait until it comes to market to see what it actually delivers and evaluate it then. :sunglasses:

4 Likes
14

Wow, they really promised a lot which wasn’t delivered. Seems the tradition continued even with v2. LOL

15

You mean V3, V2 already failed to meet the promised added features, Still no Bluetooth and limited local ability(one smartlighting)

16

No, I meant they continued to not meet promises with V2. Hopefully samsung will stop the company operating in this manner in the future.