Hasta La Gadget!

The FLIR ONE iPhone case significantly ups the imaging powers of your iPhone 5 or 5s, making it into a thermal imaging camera that lets you see heat signatures from either live people and animals from up to 100 meters away, or from environmental sources including heating ducts, wall gaps and more.

Most of FLIR’s products to date are aimed at hunters and professionals, but this iPhone case brings an affordable smartphone-based thermal camera to the masses for the first time, the company told me at CES. The FLIR is $350, which might seem steep for a case with a built-in camera, but it’s actually around $750 cheaper than their least expensive standalone model currently available, and it provides an easy-to-use interface that anyone could quickly learn.

The app for the FLIR ONE offers numerous modes that interpret thermal data differently, with some showing many degrees of temperature, and others more clearly showing more or less binary differences between extreme heat, average temperature and extreme cold. Amazingly, it also picks up residual heat, like that left by a foot on a carpet for quite a while after a person was there.

At first, I was a little skeptical about the potential use cases for a thermal iPhone case for the average consumer, but the company’s representative at CES explained that you could use it for something as simple as figuring out whether your dog is climbing up onto your bed when you leave or not. It could also be used for home security, detecting thermal leaks in your house, or finding water leaks in pipes behind the walls.

Of course, it can still be used for industrial and commercial applications, too, including contracting, home inspection and building maintenance. Users can snap photos of infrared images for their phone’s library, and share pictures from within the app. There’s also a plan for an SDK later in 2014, to let others build apps for the case.

The case also has a battery within that powers the camera itself for up to four hours of continuous use, which can also provide up to 50 percent more power for your iPhone, too, if used as a backup battery. The company says it’ll ship this spring, but pre-orders are open now. Thermal imaging might not be on the top of every smartphone user’s wishlist, but it could end up appealing to more people than you might suspect.

If there’s one lesson to be learned at this year’s CES, it’s that everybody and their mothers are going nuts for wearables. More than a few of these peculiar gadgets are meant to make sure you’re getting enough exercise, but a new fitness tracking hardware startup thinks they’ve got an edge on all the wearable incumbents that have popped up these past few years.

You see, rather than just counting your steps for the day, the Atlas — which is being shown off for the first time onstage at our Hardware Battlefield — is capable of determining exactly what exercises you’re doing to give you a better sense of both your fitness level and your form.

Well almost exactly. Creators Peter Li and Mike Kasparian claim that once the Atlas is lashed to your wrists, it continuously keeps track of its movement in space thanks to a built-in accelerometer. While all that is going on, a finely tuned algorithm chews on all of that spatial data to try and figure out what exactly you’re doing at any given moment. After all, the motion signature of bounding up and down while you’re running should look decidedly different from if you’re knocking out push-ups or standing still(ish) for weighted squats. Meanwhile, the Atlas’ backside sports an optical pulse sensor to determine just how hard you’re actually working out, which when combined with all that other data should yield one of the more thoughtful quantified fitness experiences.

Down the road, Li hopes to build Atlas more of an educational tool too: he and his colleagues are targeting the wrist-worn gadget for a Q4 2014 launch and with it will come the ability to derive a Form Score to give users an idea of how good (or terrible) their bench presses are.

The reason for the “almost”? In order to accurately determine what exercises you’re doing, the Atlas has to have a baseline reference for the motion data that those exercises generate. And even then, the chances of you having perfect form while you exercise is questionable so there’s a certain level of acclimation involved here as well before you really start to hit your stride.

“You can wear it as a Fitbit for a week to get your basal metabolic rate down,” Li said. But that’s the fatal flaw that Li sees with some of Atlas’ contemporaries — to hear him tell it, the number of steps a person takes each day usually doesn’t vary dramatically so the value of that information is limited. Atlas on the other hand was designed to monitor the full range of person’s fitness activities in the hopes that the people who really care about exercise

At this stage, the company is working with personal trainers in Austin to flesh out the repertoire of exercises that the Atlas is capable of picking up on. In its pre-release prototype form, it’s capable of recognizing two dozen exercises like bicep curls, squats, pushups — you know, some of the perennial favorites — with support for 50-100 to come as Atlas inches closer to its initial release. Interest piqued? The team has just kicked off an Indiegogo campaign, and you can check them out here.

It was an inauspicious beginning. At the MakerBot event last night at CES 2014 the intro music tended towards soft hard rock. On the plate was a lilting guitar anthem by the Foo Fighters and then a song by Incubus, Pardon Me.

So pardon me while I burst into flames.

Luckily, nothing did.

Instead, as I sat in the audience last night, I was struck just how exciting the proceedings were. Bre Pettis, CEO and a former school teacher, came out coughing, saying “Cool,” dressed in black like a nerdy Johnny Cash. He had a lot to say and his presentation was, in some strange way, a near-perfect facsimile of an Apple keynote: the amazing stuff the company is doing (3D-printed hands, soccer balls that students in the third world kick around and then use to light their homes at night), the retail spaces they’ve opened throughout the Northeast. The sales, the total employees, the dross that borders on self promotion but is a necessary part of the CE dance.

Then there was some information on their MakerBot Academy, an effort to push MakerBots into every classroom. “My parents bought me an Apple II+,” said Pettis, comparing his plans to another major hardware player that pushed their product into classrooms before the business world knew what was happening.

Arguably, the home PC market and the home 3D printer markets are, in a way, opposed. Home computers can do anything while 3D printers can only make anything. However, 3D printers allow for the imagination to run rampant. By creating things out of thin air they are a high-tech magic wand, a technology that allows us to hack the physical world in the same way Apple II users hacked the digital.

MakerBot products do two things right: first, they mirror the best practices of the CE giants. They are simple, easy-to-use, and offer intuitive, free software solutions. The segmentation of the products into Mini (for everyone), the Replicator (for the prosumer), and the ultra-large Z18 (for the small manufacturing shop) is spot-on and the trade dress – the sexy design, the cartridge-like filament holders, and the removable extruders move the 3D printer from a wonky, home-brew object of nerd veneration to a usable product that anyone with a rudimentary understanding of coffee makers can use.

MakerBot also owns the conversation when it comes to 3D printers. While the tinkerers online scream “Sell-out!”, Pettis is defining the face of 3D printing for the world. Through branding, design, and enough open source software and hardware to remain dangerous, he is selling a world where 3D printers are as ubiquitous as samurai swords were in Kill Bill – familiar tools that everyone has and everyone understands but few can use with precision or effect.

I’m a proponent of 3D printing, as you well know. I’ve owned a MakerBot for a few years now and it’s changed the way I think of how things are built and expanded my skill set in the way my original Atari 800XL all those years ago taught me that computers weren’t scary, and that they could be a source of pleasure and a true calling. A company that changes the world at CES is a rare treat. Everything else at this circus is a sideshow. MakerBot is the real deal.

Cyanogen Inc., the makers of an alternative Android ROM that last year raised $30 million (in two chunks) in VC funding, from Benchmark Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, to try to turn what has generally been a geek project into something with more mainstream appeal, has named an official hardware partner for its endeavour.

Fittingly enough, this partner, OnePlus, is itself a startup — albeit, one founded by a person with experience of putting CyanogenMod on phones. Namely, former Oppo VP Pete Lau, who had been involved in bringing CyanogenMod to Chinese OEM Oppo’s N1 smartphone.

Lau has clearly decided to take that experience and apply it wholesale, in a new setting — where the effort isn’t an adjunct to business-as-usual Android handsets.

In a blog post announcing the news, OnePlus said: “The CyanogenMod team will work in tandem with us to combine the best hardware with the best software. They are developing a custom version of CyanogenMod with special features and tweaks.”

The first fruit of the partnership is going to be called the rather tongue-twisting OnePlus One. There’s precious little detail at this point about how the phone is going to differ from the N1 running CyanogenMod — not to mention stand out from the more-vanilla-Android crowd. But it doesn’t sound like it’s going to be a mid-range device, with a pledge of “the latest and highest spec hardware” for the OnePlus One.

Other descriptors used are “fast, clean and beautiful”, which is all terribly non-specific so it’s a case of wait and see what the partnership delivers. The biggest trick the pair will have to pull off is making CyanogenMod attractive to a more mainstream user than has generally been the case thus far.

The OnePlus One is due to debut in the first half of this year, with a limited launch in “selected markets” initially, but with the aim of broadening availability down the line.

H/t to @whatthebit

[Image by Johan Larsson via Flickr]

The $99 Fitbit Flex is about to get an injection of fashion. Today, at CES 2014, Fitbit is announcing a partnership with the fashion brand Tory Burch for a line of accessories. Pricing has not been announced yet, but chances are these accessories will cost nearly as much as the $99 Flex.

Fitbit released the Flex in the spring of 2013. It’s a wonderful fitness tracker, and Fitbit managed to pack an array of sensors into the svelte package. The Flex ships with a wristband, but the actual dongle is a tiny pebble-like device, designed to slip into a pocket — or apparently be worn as a pendant if the Tory Burch concept is any indication.

With this partnership comes a milestone for Fitbit. Spawning an accessory ecosystem is often viewed as a positive health indicator for budding consumer electronic companies. Once a device maker, such as Apple or GoPro or Fitbit, can convince other companies to support their products, the road to success tends to get a bit smoother.

These Tory Burch accessories are scheduled to hit the brand’s stores and website this spring. The companies’ have yet to announce pricing, but since a Tory Burch silicon iPhone case costs $45, there’s a good chance these Fitbit accessories will not be inexpensive, either.