If you’re the outdoorsy type who likes to fish, a new project is up on Indiegogo that will help you improve your catch. The project is called ReelSonar and it’s a high-tech fishing bobber. It looks pretty much like a normal fishing bobber except it has sonar technology inside, and can communicate with your smartphone.
That sonar technology is able to shoot ultrasonic sound waves into the water up to 150 feet deep to find where the fish are hiding. The fancy bobber connects to your Android or iOS smartphone using Bluetooth 4.0 to show you where the fish are. The bobber will even sense the water temperature and salinity and suggest the best bait to use.
When the fish finally come to bite your bait, the bobber will light up and the app will signal that fish are nearby. The app will even give you the relative size of the fish and estimate how many fish are nearby. Once you find a honey hole, you can tag the location of the spot using GPS.
The first 300 orders can get a ReelSonar unit and the app for just $79(USD). After that, the price goes up to $99. If the project reaches its $70,000 funding goal by January 21, the product will be released this Summer.
In Insert Coin, we look at an exciting new tech project that requires funding before it can hit production. If you’d like to pitch a project, please send us a tip with “Insert Coin” as the subject line.
It’s been said that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Improving on a good idea, however, is truly the ultimate homage, according to the makers of the new Pinoccio microcontroller. Inspired by the Arduino, the brain trust behind the Pinoccio decided to take the stuff they liked about the popular platform — ease of programming and low cost — and add some features to make it even better. These include a rechargeable battery, a temperature sensor and a built-in radio that allows one Pinoccio with a WiFi shield to communicate wirelessly with other Pinoccios. The microcontroller also delivers performance that stacks up well with an Arduino Mega but at a smaller size — the Pinoccio only measures a couple of inches long and an inch wide. The project is currently trying to raise $60,000 at Indiegogo, with supporters netting the standard Pinoccio by pledging $49 and a microcontroller with a WiFi shield for $99. For more details, feel free to check out the video after the break or peruse the project’s Indiegogo page by clicking at the source link.
Previous project update: The Lomography Smartphone Film Scanner was apparently ready for its closeup. The Kickstarter project more than tripled its $50,000 goal with two more weeks to go.
Arduinos are fun to tinker with, but there’s one problem. Once you’ve built something cool, you pretty much have to tear it down to use your board for another project. Sure, you can always buy multiple Arduino boards or proto shields, but what if you want to turn your creation into something a bit more permanent and a lot more compact? Say hello to Permaduino, a small battery-powered Arduino prototype board that just launched on Indiegogo. It features an Atmega328P (natch), two AAA battery holders with a 3 to 5V DC-DC converter (up to 180mA), a 25-column breadboard with VCC and ground, plusFTDI, AVR-ISP and USB interfaces. Best of all, Permanuino conveniently fits inside a standard 8mm videotape case (as long as you don’t mount large components on that breadboard). Interested? Hit the break for the Indiegogo link and campaign video.
Few of us are fortunate enough to enjoy clean municipal tap water — the rest have to make do with clunky bacteria-riddled filters and wasteful bottled H2O. Enter Zuvo Water, which has hopped on Indiegogo to fund its elaborate and tech-centric Stratus water purification system. It includes WiFi-enabled hardware, filters, optional “intelligent” faucets and a cloud-connected smartphone app that’ll tell you when to swap out old cartridges for new ones. These are no ordinary filters either — they go beyond simple carbon filtration by combining ultraviolet light (UV), oxygenation, and carbon with a patented five-step process, which Zuvo claims makes it the “only filter system in the world that is self cleaning.” Beat that, Brita.
Two kinds of Stratus filters can be part of the setup: a countertop model for existing taps and another that fits under the counter to accommodate one of Zuvo’s touch-sensitive faucets designed by D2M (which was incidentally behind Kickstarter-success Instacube).The faucets come in Bamboo, Acacia tri-flow and Hibiscus designs, and with chrome, brushed nickel or oil-rubbed bronze finishes. In case you don’t have your smartphone app handy, the taps are equipped with LED lights to show the water’s filter status as well — blue means clean, yellow means not so much and red means you should probably get a new filter, pronto. In addition to managing your filters, the aforementioned app also offers a personalized hydration coach that’ll remind you of your daily water consumption needs.
It was all bad timing, really. Just ahead of CES 2012, Microsoft announced that year’s event would be its last, blaming product schedules that just didn’t match up with the annual show. There was no question that the tech giant’s absence would be felt the following year, the first time in recent memory the Consumer Electronics Show wasn’t kicked off by a Microsoft keynote. It signaled, perhaps, a slight shift away from the days of huge companies dominating the event’s headlines — a phenomenon helped along by the recent attention-grabbing successes of a number of crowdfunded projects, many of which were present at the show.
The move from Bill Gates to Steve Ballmer was one thing, but a CES without Redmond? That was just unheard of, a specter that loomed over the show, even as the CEA happily announced it had sold out the company’s floor space in “record time.” In the end, of course, Microsoft was still at the show, albeit in a less overt form, by way of third-party machines from Sony, Samsung and the like, and in the form of a cameo by none other than Ballmer himself — a sort of spiritual baton-passing to the company’s keynote successor, Qualcomm. Heck, even the Surface Pro reared its head backstage at the show.
We’ve been covering telepresence robots for years, but those that have materialized aren’t exactly within most people’s budget. However, if all you need is some way to rotate your view on the other end of the line, then you may consider Revolve Robotics’ KUBI. With six days left and just over $27,000 away from the $50,000 goal (the team was able to knock 50 percent off the original goal), this Indiegogo project hopes to offer a relatively affordable and simple telepresence solution for existing tablet users. The KUBI itself is essentially a tablet mount that can do a 300-degree pan plus 90-degree tilt, and the prototypes we saw featured two spring-loaded aluminium arms that elegantly pinches the tablet — we’ve been told that they can even fit Microsoft’s Surface in landscape. The robot is pretty much platform-agnostic as long as the tablet supports Bluetooth 4.0 Low Energy, which is how the robot receives its motion commands.
Crowdfunded projects have been one of the surprise success stories of this year’s CES. Thankfully, we’ve got one of the most knowledgeable people on the topic around, Indiegogo CEO Slava Rubin.
Slava told us that Indiegogo essentially tears down the gatekeepers. Whereas many great projects would languish in the minds of their creators, services like Indiegogo have been able to bring them to fruition, creating a market and bringing together a group of rabid fans in a matter of days if not hours.
We also had a chance to speak with Sonny Vu, CEO of Misfit Wearables. He described his experience with Indiegogo and how it felt to be one of the biggest (and coolest) crowdfunded projects on the net.
Plenty of companies are experimenting with thought-reading gadgets, and in the cluttered South Hall here at CES, we came across the folks from InteraXon showing off their Indiegogo-funded “Muse brain-sensing headband.” It measures EEG signals from four forehead sensors and two tucked behind the ears, and sends those brain measurements to other gear via Bluetooth. InteraXon has developed an app suite for mobile devices to showcase the headband’s capabilities, including thought-controlled games and brain tracking, exercise and fitness software for improving cognitive function, memory, attention and for reducing stress. That’ll come bundled with any purchased units, but an SDK is also available for third-party developers to explore other possibilities.
They had a demonstration set up on the show floor, so we thought we’d sit down and take it for a spin. The headband was flexible and surprisingly comfortable, and with a bit of fiddling, we were good to go. One monitor showed brain activity on a couple of complicated graphs, while a scene on a second monitor grew busier as our concentration increased. Watching one graph react to blinking was pretty cool, and once concentration levels reached over 85% on the animated scene, it started to snow. While this obviously isn’t very relevant to any potential applications, it was fun to watch the hardware clearly working as intended. You can check out our shots of the headband in the gallery, or check out the video of us trying it out below. Unfortunately we were only allowed to use it for a limited time — the demonstration was in danger of breaking due to this editors’ massive brain.
The Bonsai is gadget with a soul, one that hopes to make a global difference by changing the way we go about an activity many do on a daily basis. It’s a shaving accessory, and it’s being funded via Indiegogo right now, with creator Craig Battin and his team looking for $125,000 to turn their final prototype into a production shipping device.
The Bonsai is a razor rinsing device, one that can save up to 99 percent of the water the average person uses rinsing out their blade under a running tap. It’s essentially a cup, one that you fill with a set amount of water at the beginning of your shave, which then creates a spray via high-pressure circulation of water. It also filters out hair and other debris, which you can then dump when you’re done.
Battin explained via email that growing up in Las Vegas, the need to conserve water was ever-present, hence his fascination with this problem in particular.
“I can remember driving over Hoover Dam with my family on the way to Arizona and seeing the “bathtub ring” of Lake Mead grow and grow, and it was very alarming to me,” he explained. ” At the most severe point in the ongoing drought, I believe the lake level had dropped by 120 feet. When I joined the workforce after college, I was forced to shave frequently, and I was always bothered by how much water I wasted each day. That was the genesis.”
While the water conservation aspect drove the Bonsai’s initial development, Battin and his team quickly turned their attention to other areas of concern. These prompted the design of the filter to get rid of gunk that can clog drains, especially with daily shaving, and also the way the Bonsai actually blends your shaving cream with the rinse water as you go to create a solution that’s easier on your face since it’s oiling your razor as you go. The project will also offer an oil that you can use in combination with the Bonzai to enhance that effect. Battin explained that too much attention has been focused on razors, hence the lack of forward movement in terms of changes to the way we actually shave.
“It seems like we’ve been riding this trajectory where the only feasible innovations involve the physical razor or the blades, so you end up with things like vibrating handles and lethal 6-blade cartridges,” he said. “I think the lack of disruption has everything to do with where the focus has been, and the fact that consumers really don’t have many alternatives.”
Of course, the Bonzai also saves money by saving water, and Battin claims, by extending the life of your razor blades. It’s powered by a rechargeable battery and works both in and out of the shower. The gadget is available during the Indiegogo campaign for a pledge starting at $79, and the team estimates they’ll begin shipping devices by July 2013. If you’re a slave to the shave, as most of us likely are, you could do worse than to back this project and its aspirational goal of cutting down on the environmental toll it takes for us to clean up our ape-like faces and bodies.
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