51–58 of 58 posts
1) All screenshots are of iPhones, is there Android compatibility? 2) PushingBox only allows login with a Google account. Both of these mean I could never be your customer.
You've made some interesting choices here. Lots of people here are questioning using a gateway, but I think this is a great choice for what you are doing, and required to get decent battery life. However, I think using ZigBee will end up pricing you our of most markets in the long run. Especially if you elected to go with the very pricing Xbee modules from Digi. These are developer friendly, but way to expensive. If…
As an outsider to the space, your comment makes it sound like ZigBee is never a good option. Is this so? Is there a 'target market' for ZigBee?
You'll probably find that most price-sensitive consumer devices that don't need to interface to a standard protocol like WiFi will use very basic RF communication with a homebrew protocol. It makes the engineering cost much higher than using more complex devices, but spread over hundreds of thousands or millions of units, that cost vanishes.
OTOH, industrial markets are a lot less price sensitive. Also, quantities sold will be much less, so the device's unit price has to be higher to make building it worthwhile.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As an outsider to the space, your comment makes it sound like ZigBee is never a good option. Is this so? Is there a 'target market' for ZigBee?
Industrial. You'll probably find that most price-sensitive consumer devices that don't need to interface to a standard protocol like WiFi will use very basic RF communication with a homebrew protocol. It makes the engineering cost much higher than using more complex devices, but spread over hundreds of thousands or millions of units, that cost vanishes. OTOH, industrial markets are a lot less price sensitive. Also, q…
However, I think we will see it fall out of favor in consumer markets unless thye drastically reduce the license fees.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I use a technology called ZigBee. It's a wireless protocol made for Internet of Things devices. This part represent about 60% of the production cost. This chip is expensive but gives years of battery life. Curious about what price did you expected?
I expected this to work through either wifi or a very cheap USB dongle. The price point for a base station with one device should be 49.99 and each additional device should retail for 14.99. That's my honest opinion.
Those price points are hard to reach for retail pricing, but are pretty close to the "in bulk" pricing that I've got things down to (once you factor in labour, NRE for solid firmware, etc). If you want a cheap and unreliable setup, you could probably get the node price down to around $5 or $8, but I don't think I'd want to rely on it.
The web page gives me pretty much absolutely no idea what this product does, except for the abstract "notify me of things". How does it do it, how do you interface to it, etc?
In fact there are more details on the Indiegogo page. Can you take a look and tell me if I have to add some details? ( http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/notifon-the-notifying-obje... )
"Sensors
Notifon is universal. You can use any sensor that has two states, such as a switch, a push button, a magnetic door switch, a relay... Notifon allows you to predefine a set of actions for each state."
Just put that (or a simplified form of it - a graphical illustration is helpful) somewhere quite visible on the actual product page?
How do you know the garage door is "open"? If you receive an identical notification whenever the sensor is triggered, the door could be open or closed. With something like a garage door, knowing its state is very important, perhaps more important than knowing when the sensor has been triggered. When someone leaves the garage door open (kids), this is what we need to be notified about. Is the Notifon up to this task?…
Of course the Node can trigger two states. So you know when it's open or closed. You can set a different message for each state.
The magnetic switch in the video - I have used before, and they do not distinguish between "open" and "closed".
When someone opens the garage door, a notification is sent: "garage door open".
When someone CLOSES the garage door, a notification is sent: "garage door open".
Unless you can provide further explanation, the device only notifies of "activity", not specific activity such as open or closed. In which case, you're being a tad misleading.
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Of course the Node can trigger two states. So you know when it's open or closed. You can set a different message for each state.
Sorry, but just saying "it can do it" without explaining how, is not convincing! The magnetic switch in the video - I have used before, and they do not distinguish between "open" and "closed". When someone opens the garage door, a notification is sent: "garage door open". When someone CLOSES the garage door, a notification is sent: "garage door open". Unless you can provide further explanation, the device only notifi…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry, but just saying "it can do it" without explaining how, is not convincing! The magnetic switch in the video - I have used before, and they do not distinguish between "open" and "closed". When someone opens the garage door, a notification is sent: "garage door open". When someone CLOSES the garage door, a notification is sent: "garage door open". Unless you can provide further explanation, the device only notifi…
I think you should try again to play with your magnetic switch. Here is some help: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reed_switch