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Roost Smart Battery joins Facebook's foray into the Internet of Things

The smart battery maker will be among the first to join's Facebook's Parse initiative.

Nate Ralph Associate Editor
Associate Editor Nate Ralph is an aspiring wordsmith, covering mobile software and hardware for CNET Reviews. His hobbies include dismantling gadgets, waxing poetic about obscure ASCII games, and wandering through airports.
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The Roost Smart Battery works with a conventional smoke detector. Roost

The Roost Smart Battery aims to make your old smoke detector a little smarter. And it's getting a little help from Facebook's Parse, the mobile-infrastructure company Facebook acquired in 2013.

Roost will be among the first companies to join Facebook's Internet of Things initiative, which was announced today at Facebook's F8 conference. The Roost battery will use Parse's backend technology for cloud-connected gadgets to ferry notifications from the Roost to your mobile phone.

For the uninitiated: Roost's Smart Battery works by baking Wi-Fi technology into a form akin to a traditional 9V battery. The battery pairs with your Android or iOS device, and will send an alert to an app on your phone whenever your smoke detector starts chirping. You'll be able to use the app to reach out to a pre-configured emergency contact or emergency services, and it'll also let you know when the battery is running low: Roost claims you'll only need to replace it once every five years.

Perhaps most importantly, you can pick one up for about $40, and it'll pop right into your existing smoke detector -- no need to buy new hardware. There's no word on international availability, but that $40 price tag converts directly to about £30, or AU$50.

There's no word on when the Roost Smart Battery will be available. It successfully hit its Kickstarter goal last year, and the pre-orders are scheduled to start shipping in Q2 2015.