Home Automation

Talking Coffee Maker Accepts Verbal Commands

talking coffee makerEven if you’re still way too sleepy to see your coffee maker’s buttons, you can still operate and program this coffeemaker just by using your voice. It asks you questions and you respond. For example, say “Set the coffee brewing time” and this smart cookie will prompt you with “Please say the time”.

Of course, there are still buttons in case you want to go ‘old school’. This maker brews up to 10 cups and lets you remove the carafe mid-brew to snag a quick cup. Plastic filter and carafe are dishwasher-safe.

Buy now!

Price: $99.99
(Please note prices are subject to change and the listed price is correct to the best of our knowledge at the time of posting)

FaceID – Facial Recognition Security Scanner

FaceID facial recognition securityFuturistic TV shows and movies show modern authentication systems as either retinal (eye) scans, voice scans, but rarely full facial scans. Well, the future is here today. Enter FaceID, a system that scans your face and matches it against one of up to 500 profiles in its internal database.

Not only that, but these are 3D images captured by using multiple cameras, and must be matched by an actual face. In other words, a photo will not suffice. It adjusts for variances in lighting, and claims a 0.0001% margin of error. Surprisingly, this sophisticated gadget carries a price tag under $500.

Buy now!
Price: $419.99
(Please note prices are subject to change and the listed price is correct to the best of our knowledge at the time of posting)

Dyson Air Multiplier – Fan Without Blades

dyson air multiplier fanIndustrial designer and inventor, James Dyson, is at it again. This time, he’s moved away from vacuum cleaners and onto fans. Fans, you ask? Yup, fans, but take a look at the photo. It doesn’t have any blades!

It just looks like a cylinder. What it does is pull in air and amplifies it 15 times. No wonder it’s called an ‘air multiplier’. It’s easy to clean, is safe with kids, has 90º oscillation and tilt.

Buy now!
More info from the manufacturer
Price: starts at $299.99
(Please note prices are subject to change and the listed price is correct to the best of our knowledge at the time of posting)

MIT Team Develops Temperature-Dependent Color Changing Roof Tiles

As you know, we love featuring ‘green’ and/or environmentally related advances in technology, and here’s another. This time, a team in the Department of Materials Science at MIT have devised a roof tile that changes its surface reflectivity depending on the temperature.

In a nutshell, at low temps, it absorbs as much sunshine and heat as it can, while at high temps, it is more reflective. Fantastic. Nicknamed the Thermeleon, these roof tiles could save 20% on cooling costs.

via DMSE MIT

Retrofit any Video Camera With This Motion Activated DVR Security Recorder

If you’ve already started on the road to securing your home and business with video cameras, great. But if they’re just real-time cameras, then you’re missing out on the valuable addition of digital recording via an attached DVR.

Well don’t worry. You can snag yourself a DVR that can be used with any camera. It also goes one step better and only records when it sense motion. That’s right – it’s a motion activated security recorder.

The DVR-9122 from KJB Security records at a max resolution of 704×480 @ 24 fps and stores the video on an SD card. It can also overlay time and date stamp on the video and you can schedule when it should record.

Buy now!
Price: $222.99
(Please note prices are subject to change and the listed price is correct to the best of our knowledge at the time of posting)

Pansonic Shows Off Its “Eco Ideas” House

We may not have reached a real substantive climate agreement in Copenhagen this past week, but thankfully this is not stopping companies around the world from making steps towards improving our dire environmental state. Take Panasonic for example, which is testing out ideas for an eco-friendly house that may actually produce more energy than it uses. Now that would be novel!

Aptly dubbed the Eco Ideas House, it includes things like vacuum insulation, LED lighting, hydrogen fuel cells, and of course, smart monitoring & control systems [pictured]. The folks at DVICE took a tour and wrote about it.

Safe Slice Protects Your Hands and Fingers While Chopping Veggies and Foods

Here’s a kitchen gadget that you’ll definitely like, especially if you’re not a chef – it’s the Safe Slice hand & finger protector. Ok, I gave it the rest of the name, but that’s what it does. It drips your veggies, fruits or whatever so that your fingers never come near the knife’s blade.

It can even help you slice nice and evenly or at least perpendicularly! Inexpensive, and could save on bandaids and ow-ies.

Buy now!
Price: $6.49
(Please note prices are subject to change and the listed price is correct to the best of our knowledge at the time of posting)

via Kitchen Contraptions

Using your iPhone to Remotely Control Your Garage Door

We just posted that Smart Start iPhone app from Viper that lets you start your car remotely, but what about opening your garage door remotely? Why you ask?

Here’s the scenario – you wake up on a cold winter morning, maybe in your upstairs bedroom, and you’re already late for work but just can’t imagine getting into that cold car sitting in your garage, but you’ve got the Smart Start iPhone app. Great, except that it’s going to take more than a minute or two to get that car warmed up, and you don’t want all the noxious exhaust filling your garage and seeping into your house as well.

Convinced? Ok. So one enterprising techie has already figured out how to rig his garage door [Howto] with some X10-enabled equipment that he could then control via an iPhone app called X10 Commander. And just so you know, that’s not the only game in town – there are more apps for the iPhone for your home automation control, such as iLinc.

Gadget Gifts – Ideas, Recommendations, Suggestions

We’ve put together a list of gadget gifts for the gizmo-lover in your life. These aren’t just great for the Christmas holiday season but any time of year. For the most part, we’ve tried to stay away from the usual and obvious electronic gadgets like MP3 players, phones and cameras, but instead bring you a variety of neat electronic gift ideas and in most cases useful items that are still worth their salt as far as gadgets go.

Perplexus

Let’s start with some toys/puzzles/games. Perplexus is a spherical 3-D maze with a ball bearing that you to need to navigate around a maze. Simply to learn, hard to solve and master!
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Brondell’s Perfect Flush Toilet Retrofit Kit Saves You Money

As you well know, most of the time you flush the toilet, you’re flushing water and money down the drain needlessly. What’s really needed on toilets is a 2nd button that only uses half the water. Brondell’s Perfect Flush product retrofits your toilet to have that 2nd button without you having to go out and buy and install a whole new toilet.

The Perfect Flush toilet retrofit kit can be installed by anyone and takes about 30 minutes. If you use the calculator on their website, even with average usage and costs plugged in the Perfect Flush will save a family of 4 enough money on their water bill to pay for itself within a year. If your costs and usage are higher, for example, if your toilet water tanks are larger, then you savings go up. What’s more important is that you are doing your bit to save the environment as well.

Ideally, those newer toilets should also really have an adjustment to regulate how much water is used per flush and Perfect Flush has that as well. Eco-friendly Perfect Flush is compatible with most toilet tanks ranging in types and sizes 1.28 through 7+ gallon per flush.

Buy now!
More info from the manufacturer
Price: $92.89
(Please note prices are subject to change and the listed price is correct to the best of our knowledge at the time of posting)

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