I couldnt find anything on the community page about this product so I thought I would share. Its a neat idea, it would be handy to detect specifically who has walked into a room.
At first, I thought it was some kind of fancy motion sensor or I-beacon but it knows who you are by your smartphone. My problem is that at home, I don’t always carry my phone around when I walk from room to room.
OK, there’s a legitimate patent for a single sensor zone recognition device. (Well, N plus one, because if you only have one room, you’ll need two sensors to capture the exit event. )
The problem is the classic “hardware is hard.” They’re estimating delivery in ten months, my guess is they’ll miss that by quite a bit, just because pretty much everybody does.
I like the idea of it, I wish them a lot of luck, but personally I would wait until it was shipping to evaluate it. It’s just really hard to tell at this stage what it’s going to deliver.
JMO
good point, for some reason that hadn’t crossed my mind. I must subconsciously think of my phone as a third appendage…
Yeah unfortunately it might not make it to market like many crowd funding projects, they have only %20 of their goal with 2 months left.
Someday, we’ll probably get some kind of embedded chip just under our skin…
Some people have already done that with NFC chips. Personally, I wouldn’t, but I know people who have.
probably sooner than any of us might think…
Hm… this looks like a set of beacons with some very nice software around it.It looks a bit expensive to me though for what it is.
If you are a bit crafty you may something very similar yourself with a couple of beacons and Webcore.
The wearable beacon option has been discussed in the forums before. The specific one you pictured, from radius networks, can be purchased with a wristband and is popular for a big conventions.
There are a couple of issues with it besides the aesthetic ones. The first is that Beacons use Bluetooth and Bluetooth goes through walls. So it’s very hard to define a room the way human beings view them. The Beacon may not see any difference between the kitchen and the dining room next to it, or even the bedroom one floor up.
To get around that, beacon companies like estimote have developed zoning technology, but that requires three or four beacons per room, which gets pretty expensive.
The patent for the device being discussed in this thread is the ability to identify a zone with a single device. I’m not sure how they’re doing it, but it’s pretty cool as a concept.
At my house, as I mentioned before, I do have an IBeacon on my wheelchair and I use it to detect when I enter a 3 m zone around the wheelchair ramp by the front door. It works well for that, but of course having it attached to the wheelchair is convenient since I’m not going anywhere it doesn’t.
I keep forgetting to mention, but Zuli already has a patented single room presence detection that requires you to carry your phone. But it doesn’t have an open API or represent itself as a sensor. It triggers its own app. And it just turns on its own pocket socket, plus an integration with nest. It’s been available for purchase for about two years now.
It’s cool, but just not enough integration to be useful. And you still have to carry your phone around with you.
It looks like they finally made it to market, albeit a little later than promised.