Well I got the Quirky + GE Spotter…
Packing:
Cool box. Comes with wall-wort adapter. Tiny little instruction card. Had to put glasses on to read it.
Unit Aesthetics:
About 3 inch diameter x 1 inch in height. Little house shaped window on top with LED and optic sensor for programming (later). Has two dime sized magnets on base (strong) to stick to metal things. Looks kinda like a little white mini iRobot.
Setup:
Once you download the Wink app, it walks you through about 8 steps. The last 5 are just getting you ready for the blinky-light show. Anyway, you need to create an account, then choose your wireless router or AP (it finds them) and then enter in the password for your wireless. Then it tells you to put the device in pairing mode and set the phone face down on the house window. It flashes some secret flashy-light morse code into the window and then your phone buzzes and tells you success or failure.
I Started trying to set it up with my galaxy note. Could not get it to ever finish with success. One time the unit started acting like it was paired but the app kept saying failure. I looked all over the device to find a factory reset pin hole, but nope, there was none. Googled and nothing there either. Nothing on the website either. Tried removing batteries for 10 minutes, nope. BTW, had hell of a time to figure out how to open it to get to batteries. Twist cover CCW! Tried deleting and reloading the app, nope!
I started to put it back in the box and then I saw my sim-less iPhone (My SmartThings remote in garage/shop), grabbed it and downloaded the app and tried most of the above again, nope some more. then I found something after pushing a back button… “Reset Device”. Hmmmm their iOS app had something the Android app did not. Never seen that before :-). Anyway, finally got it working after about an hour+.
User Interface / Test Drive:
Very basic UI with little wheel metaphor with house shape in middle. Currently the app allows you to only to create/turn on/turn off triggers and cause simple actions. Like “If the temp goes above xx, notify me”. Or, “if motion stops, notify me”. The app doesn’t even let you see what the current sensor values are though. There’s triggers for sound, light, motion, humidity and temp. If you had their power strip you could trigger a action to turn a socket on I guess. Maybe have a fan connected to that socket to cool the spotter down, hehehe.
The little house light blinks when things happen, that’s kinda cool I guess.
Overall:
Too simple right now. There is no API that I can find so no way to make a SmartThings Thing out of it yet.
Things it should do:
- Allow me to see current sensor values in the app.
- If sound is detected, call me on my phone to listen, or record it for xx seconds and forward wave file to email/SMS.
For now:
I’ll see if the wife wants to use it to tell her when the washer/dryer is done.