Tag: Home Automation

I watch a lot of those tiny house shows with my wife that seem to come on every day on HGTV and other home improvement networks. The idea of having less junk and working less to…

For better or for worse, our appliances are getting smarter. But like their simpler ancestors, they usually come with their own remote controls, be they physical controllers or apps. French startup Sevenhugs thinks it has the…

You know the old joke about how if someone ever invented a device that does everything at the push of a button, people would still ask for a device that would push the other device’s button…

Like 3D printers, electronic door locks and PCs on sticks, it seeems like everyone’s making personal assistant devices these days. One of the latest electronic PAs is Mycroft, and it stands out from the rest by…

Last year, we checked out a light switch that let you toggle lights just by waving your hand. Knocki lets you do that and more but by knocking or tapping on a surface. Unlike the Clapper,…

These days, there are projectors small enough that you can easily mount them wherever you want. But the Beam smart projector provides an even more convenient option, because it screws into and gets power from E26…

If Cubic Robotics sales pitch is to be believed, we’re one big step closer to having a personal assistant on the level of J.A.R.V.I.S. in Iron Man and Samantha in Her. Its presenting its Android-based Cubic…

Washing clothes shouldn’t be rocket science, but you’d be forgiven for thinking that when you look at the controls of modern washing machines. So when cloud services company Berg set out to create a prototype for…

Home automation technologies have been around for a while, but most systems require additional gadgets to be plugged into each outlet you want to add to the system, and are generally quite costly. bRight Switch wants…

Remember SmartThings, which was successfully funded on Kickstarter a few months ago? It was understandably a huge hit with backers who wanted to make their homes infinitely “smarter.” At the end of the campaign, $1.6 million…

Developer Mike Leslie is working on what he calls Project Rita, a device that “keeps track of all of the information that the user is personally interested in” and ultimately “present the user with the right…

I love the idea of an intelligent home, one that has a lot of functions that can be programmed and controlled from far away, but the overall cost of such automation has generally been pretty high.…

One of the cool technologies from the Iron Man movies is the computerized take on the Avengers’ butler Jarvis. The Ubi computer can’t be sarcastic and exchange witty banter, but it might be the closest we…

Thermostats are usually boring little devices that are typically plain rectangles or circles with a manual slider that you use to choose the temperature you want your house to be. The problem for many people when…

Siri can trade jokes and witty banter with you and even serve you beer, but programmer Christopher Deutsch aka CDeutsch has come up with a more practical application for the virtual assistant. Using the help of…

Kinect hacks are the big new thing for geeks with time on their hands. That’s all fine and good since many of the hacks we have seen lately are actually things that are interesting. A hack…