The team of developers and engineers behind Omate are aiming to bring a device by the name of Omate TrueSmart to the public in the form of a smartwatch that runs Android. Over the past few months – and years, even – there’s been an increased bit of attention set on wearable devices such as […]
Build a better Sea Monkey and the world will — well, fund your Kickstarter campaign, hopefully. Dino Pet’s certainly got a couple of things going for it: tiny glowing animals and dinosaurs. The pet’s creators clearly took the whole “dino” part of dinoflagellates to its logical extreme, fashioning a sauropod-esque transparent casing for the bioluminescent marine algae. Caring for the tiny glowing creatures is fairly easy: expose them to sun during the day and give ’em a shake at night and agitate them into glowing for you. The Dino’s creators also provide food, to help keep ’em going. A $40 pledge will get you one (the $30 level is, sadly, all sold out now) when they start shipping in February. More information can be had in the source link below, including whether or not you should drink them once they arrive.
Via: This is Colossal, PSFK
Source: Kickstarter
Yes, it’s another crowdfunding campaign for a smartwatch. The latest competing for your backing dollars comes from upstart Omate, which has today launched its TrueSmart watch on Kickstarter. The hook here is that the watch will work as standalone device without a smartphone, letting you make calls, send texts or, as the company suggests, even pair it with Google Glass for some fully-wearable computing. As with other smartwatches, though, it can also act as a smartphone companion to serve up notifications and the like, and the company is hoping that developers will tailor their apps and create new ones specifically for the device; it’s simply running Android 4.2.2 underneath Omate’s custom launcher, which the company notes is rootable for those so inclined.
As far as the hardware goes, you’ll get a 1.54-inch color display (240 x 240 resolution), a 1.3GHz dual-core Cortex A7, a built-in 5-megapixel camera, 4GB of memory (with up to 32GB supported via microSD), a micro SIM card slot for 3G connectivity, and an IP67-rated water-resistant design (available in black only). Those on board will have to pony up at least $179 to back the device, which is expected to ship in October or November.
Filed under: Wearables
Source: Omate TrueSmart, Kickstarter
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.
Here’s one to get the maker community’s mouths watering. SparqEE CELLv1.0 is a compact certified cellular board that plugs directly into Arduino and the Raspberry Pi shields, letting you piggyback on networks all over the world. The company, naturally, is offering up plenty of potential applications for the technology: remote home automation, pet tracking, RC copter flying. You know, the usual. As ever, though, the fun of these sorts of things is in the execution the manufacturers never dreamed of. Of course, $70,000 is a fairly lofty goal for the component’s Kickstarter campaign, so SparqEE needs all the help it can get. Watch the company’s Kickstarter plea after the break.
Previous project update: Choose Your Own Adventure is chugging along. The page-turner of a campaign is currently at $30,878 of its $100,000 goal. Thankfully, it’s still got nearly a month to get there.
Filed under: Peripherals
Source: Kickstarter
Just what is the Pixy? It happens to be a tiny camera that measures roughly half the size of a business card is capable of detecting objects which you have “trained” it to detect. This particular form of “training” is very different from Jedi training, as it is done thanks to holding the object located in front of Pixy’s lens and pressing a button. Pixy would then try to look for objects that sport similar color signatures via a dedicated dual-core processor which is capable of processing images at 50 frames per second. Pixy will then send its findings that will comprise of the sizes and locations of all detected objects, where that can be accomplished through a variety of interfaces such as UART serial, SPI, I2C, digital or analog I/O.
Pixy is capable of detecting hundreds of objects from seven different color signatures. It is right now a Kickstarter campaign, where it will be able to be yours as long as you contribute a minimum of $59. Pixy happens to be a partnership between Carnegie Mellon University and a small Austin-based company that call themselves Charmed Labs. As Pixy is powered by its own processor, it will not bog down the Arduino’s CPU with processing images, so one should not experience too many performance issues.
Pixy Brings Machine Vision To Robot World original content from Ubergizmo. 
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Hex3, the company behind a successfully Kickstarted pressure-sensitive stylus called JaJa – which got a pretty solid review from my colleague Darrell Etherington last year — has launched another stylus crowdfunding project, called Nota, that’s aimed at making scribbling on a tablet more precise.
The shtick of this latest stick is that it has a very fine tip: 3.7mm no less — which its creators claim makes it less than half the size of “most” other stylus tips. Being so thin allows for greater precision when drawing/writing vs thicker-tipped styluses owing to less distortion of the lines being formed.
Nota also has a more rigid tip than rubber-tipped alternatives, being as its tip is electrically active silicon, rather than squishy rubber to mimic a finger. Ergo, it can be more precise (and presumably doesn’t feel as draggy as some rubber styluses can).
Nota is apparently compatible with all Android and iOS tablet apps, according to its creators. And is powered by a single AAA that can last for up to six months of use.
The project has already passed its $40,000 crowdfunding funding goal with 17 days left to run. The two cheapest early bird pledge tiers have all been bagged so Nota now costs $39 or more via Kickstarter. It’s expected to be shipped to backers in January.
It’s been a crazy 36 days since Plug started its Kickstarter campaign. First, Plug is now called Lima due to some trademark issues. But everything else stays the same. The $69 adapter will seamlessly transform your USB drives into a personal Dropbox for all your devices. And now it will support Chromecast.
As a reminder, here’s how Lima works: you plug your router into the little adapter, as well as one or multiple USB drives. After that, you launch the app on your computer and then everything will go through Lima thanks to a deep filesystem integration. All your files will be moved to those drives and available on all your devices, at home or away. The only limit of this Dropbox alternative is the amount of storage space you have on your USB drives.
Lima is actually a small Linux-based machine that creates a VPN network between your devices and the adapter. The overall experience feels a lot like browsing and using your Dropbox files, except that you can choose to cache some folders on your device or not — it works like the offline playlist button in Spotify. Finally, you don’t have to pay a subscription fee and you own your files since they are not stored in an Amazon S3 data center. Lima expects to deliver its adapters in December.
For its new Google Chromecast feature, the company takes advantage of the SDK to stream media content to your TV using your phone or tablet. Music, photos and even videos should all work. For a little bit more than $100 ($69 + $35), you can stream everything that is on your computer from your sofa.
“We automatically re-encode all the videos that are stored on Lima,” co-founder and CEO Séverin Marcombes tells me. “An h.264 version of each video will be kept in Lima’s cache.”
That step was already necessary to allow Lima users to watch their videos on their phones and tablets — especially for iOS devices that can really only stream h.264 videos. The team just took it one step further by building Chromecast support into the iOS and Android apps.
Even more impressive than the device itself is the Kickstarter campaign. Back in July I wrote: “the Kickstarter campaign just started but its goal is pretty low. At $69,000, the Paris-based team will certainly attract a thousand backers to reach its goal.” It turns out that this sentence diminishes what the team has accomplished.
In just 12 hours, Lima managed to shatter its $69,000 goal. In fact, with $858,000 and 24 days to go, the campaign is now the 10th most-funded Kickstarter campaign in the technology category. In this list, there are pretty well-known projects, such as Form1 and Oculus Rift. The question on everyone’s mind now is whether the campaign will break the $1 million barrier.
There’s nothing worse than getting set for a fun-filled day of Trike Drifting
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There’s a thriving cottage industry of smartphone extension accessories, seeking to harness all that compute power and battery life, and also often make use of some of the phone’s on-board sensors. Well, here’s another: a neat iPhone extension for macrophotography fans that could also have a variety of medical and/or industrial use-cases.
The Illumoscope — currently seeking $60,000 on Kickstarter to fund manufacturing costs — is a case for the iPhone 4/4S/5 that has built in macro photography optics plus a light conditioning system to allow for optimal illumination of whatever it is you want a closer look at. The extension means you can use the iPhone’s camera to get a lot closer to a subject than you would otherwise be able to, to capture very fine detail. Or go investigating.
Examples of things you might want to peek at in more detail include jewellery stamps, electronic circuitry, insects and detailed art works, say its creators. They also envisage various medical scenarios such as checking out your moles or looking into your inner ears for infection — rather than having to get someone else to do it for you (the Illumoscope was actually devised by a audiologist). Yes there are various macro lens iPhone accessories already on the market but the Illumoscope goes one better by supporting multiple use-cases, not merely the taking of pretty close-ups.
It also makes use of the phone’s built in flash to do the lighting up required to get a clear close-up but moderates the beam to avoid over-saturation. The basic system consists of an iPhone case (which can be reversed if you want to switch back to using the phone’s camera sans macro optics) plus a variety of attachment accessories to support the various use-cases.
Attachments include a borescope for in-ear or other nook-and-cranny investigations; an observation chamber where insects can be contained for closer inspection; and fixed view and measured view scopes for scanning large areas at high magnification. One posited scenario for the latter attachments is checking your hotel bed for bed-bugs. The creators also note the borescope attachments could be used for peeking into port openings on electronic devices — which could be handy for makers and tinkerers.
The campaign launched this week and most of the early bird $25 pledges have been snapped up already. For that pledge price you get an Illumoscope plus two observation chambers, two borescope tips, one measured view scope and the Illumoscope software (the device apparently works with “many” iOS camera apps too, though).
If it hits its funding target — there’s a way to go but the campaign only launched this week and has grabbed 40 backers already with 28 days left to run — the Illumoscope’s creators are aiming to ship to backers this October.
Motion-based PC interfaces are all the rage, thanks to Microsoft’s Kinect and the folks at Leap Motion. San Francisco-based Haptix is sure it’s got a better solution than the rest, but it needs a healthy $100,000 to get there. The company’s got a Kickstarter page going for its self-titled peripheral that can be clipped to a device or placed on a table to offer up both a 3D sensing layer in the air and a multi-touch layer on a flat surface. The dual layers give you more ways to interact with your device, and a chance to rest your palm on the table, when the whole reaching out thing proves too tiring. In the Kickstarter pitch video below, you’ll also see a Haptix picking up brushstrokes, which could certainly have some cool implications for artists.
Filed under: Peripherals
Source: Kickstarter
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