motes

Monitor your world with $39 Motes sensors

You're sitting in the living room. You're wondering if the Mother-in-Law's Tongue growing in a pot in the back room needs to be watered. You could get up and stick your finger in the dirt, or you could check your smartphone and see what the plant's personal sensor says.

The Motes Indiegogo project offers several different flavors of remote sensors that work with iOS devices (Android and Surface coming soon). Each sensor costs $39. That price point and the variety of sensors available has attracted plenty of interest. The Motes project has already doubled its $22,000 goal with 35 days of fundraising left.… Read more

Dress your iPhone up as a universal remote control

Your iPhone already controls your life, so it might as well control your television, too.

Plenty of apps let you use your iPhone as a remote control, but when an app alone isn't substantial enough for you, you can turn to the new VooMoteOne. This consists of a clip-on external device in combination with an app. The whole kit and caboodle costs $99.

Your hundred bucks makes you a god among your household appliances. Follow the straightforward setup wizard and then lord the VooMoteOne over your electronics. Turn them on and off at will. Make them sing louder.

The app allows for profiles so you can set up specific bundles of electronics for each room. The app contains a large database of devices, but it can also learn a new device if you point the old remote control at the LED transmitter on the bottom of the VooMoteOne.… Read more

IBM launches Mote Runner for sensor networks

IBM on Monday rolled out a software development kit for an application dubbed Mote Runner with the aim of spurring the adoption of sensors in various devices, products, and systems. The real goal is to enable the so-called Internet of things by making sensor networks easier to deploy and manage.

Mote Runner is a free download. IBM made the announcement at the 2010 Sensors Expo & Conference. The Mote Runner moniker refers to motes--or wireless sensor nodes--that gather information including temperature, movement, and light and refer back to a network.

Meanwhile, Memsic, which makes these micro sensor systems, will include … Read more

The new TV remote: Your bare hand?

The TV remote control of the future isn't an expensive device with an LCD screen and blinking lights. It's your hand.

The classic TV remote control most of us have grown up with has been around in essentially the same incarnation for half a century. It's been tweaked over the years, but now one company is looking at ditching the remote altogether and using a camera mounted below a TV screen that senses hand motions instead of button pushes. The result is something that seems right out of Minority Report.

But the high-tech user interface Tom Cruise coolly manipulates onscreen isn't even all that far-fetched now, thanks to incremental improvements. Until now, the most innovative new input for entertainment in the living room has been the Wii-mote, the motion-sensing remote control/wand that has made Nintendo's game console a cultural phenomenon. Swing it like a tennis racket and you can pretend you're playing tennis, point it at the screen and use it like a mouse to navigate menus.

Televisions have progressed as well, with better picture quality and capability. Now TVs can record TV shows, stream Netflix movies, check the weather, read news headlines, and skim RSS feeds. The menus on those TVs appear more and more like what we see on our computer screens, so a new interface that operates more like a mouse seems almost inevitable.

Featured Freeware: gMote

gMote is one of the easiest to use mouse gesture tools around. gMote's dual-pane configuration interface makes it a snap to create and program mouse gestures, and takes extra steps to teach new users how it works via a prompt on first run to check out the built-in tutorial.

Press the create button, make your mouse gesture in the test window, and then use a pull-down to assign one of the 30-plus actions. The actions center on browser, media player, and word-processing commands. However, program execution, Web site selection, and hot-key combinations are also easily added actions.

To make … Read more