The Latmetric kick starter launched, and pre-order is ready.
I’m disappointed about the price point though, and I won’t be getting one.
If anyone else is interested though, I thought I would post it to let people know.
I’m disappointed in the price too… I’d hoped for a lower price, but honestly, it’s about where I feared it might be. I was able to get in at the super early bird plug in level, so I decided to get one despite the higher than hoped price. I may end up regretting it later, but I hope that I’ll be able to tie in some nice HA features that will make things a bit more visually friendly, and therefore more likely to be used by my wife, who’s not nearly the geek that I am.
I’m already envisioning two immediate situations where I could use it:
- Garage door’s left open. I get notification on my phone if either of my garage doors are left open, which is great when I’m at work and she’s at school and the kids are at school. I just close the doors. But during the summer (she’s a teacher) when they are all home my kids might be out side playing and want/need the garages open, or they might gone out for a moment, and left 'em open. There’s no way for me to tell and it’s possible the garage could get left open for hours. I’ll setup LaMetric to flash a message and/or sound an alarm when the doors are left open. Hopefully she’ll see that and close them if they kids aren’t outside.
- I run a program at night before bed that checks if I have windows or doors open. Right now Ubi just says if a door or window is open… not which one is open. I’d like to display on LaMetric which window or door is open.
Some future uses: Send a message from plantlink to LaMetric (Either through ST or IFTTT) when my plants need water. Display a message when an upstairs light is turned on after the kids bedtime… just gives us an idea if a kid is up and playing around or not.
I got in at the Super Early Bird price…but I’ll have to think about it since i already have a Nimbus which seems to do some of the same things. We’ll see…
Yeah, I’m really disappointed in the price. @chrisb How well is the UBI working for you ? Do you like it?
I don’t see any of those uses, because I’m mounting an old iPad and going to use it as a wall reader for displaying messages. For the cost, I just think the LaMetric is too limited.
I’m enjoying Ubi, and I think Ubi is getting better, but it’s still limited. Right now there are three things I use it for: Timer, Weather Forecast, and ST.
The Timer works pretty well and works better than a kitchen timer for me because I can sometimes get “lost” in a show/movie that’s playing and while I hear the beep from the kitchen, it doesn’t always register in my mind that: “Hey, idiot! That beep means go get the bread out of the oven so your wife doesn’t hit you when she gets back!” The Ubi is a more in your face interruption. Much harder to miss.
The Forecast works well enough… quick access to today or tomorrow weather without pulling out a device.
ST in good… but not perfect integration. You have to understand that we’re talking about to very different computer systems talking to each other, plus Ubi is still pretty young, so there are some inherit limitations right now. I can get it to do whatever I want (generally) but it often requires some level of ‘jumping through hoops’ on the ST side. (For example, in order to be able to say: “Close the garage” and have it ONLY close the garage and not open it if it’s already closed) requires a smart that I wrote, plus the use of a number of virtual on/off tiles.)
Like what many others said, the functionality is limited on such a pricey item. It’d be nice to have a few of these around the house to make the home come alive, but at this price point, I can barely see myself buying one.
It might be better value to purchase a hue set and replace a few bulbs to let you know the status of various things.
A display would be nice, but I’m sure there’s many things coming out over the next year that would provide much greater functionality. For this price, you can mount an old Android tablet on the wall and create a simple dock app.
Yeah, me too. I would rather get a 1.5 Android tablets for that price…
Well, it’s proving to be a very popular project on Kickstarter. Over 1250 backers and passed $200K. The first two stretch goals (new color option, Internet Radio), have been met.