Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Point – A smart house sitter

formdevices.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 116 posts

Re: Point – A smart house sitter

#101

Post by nmattisson »

Agustus wrote: post #97
nmattisson wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi Agustus! Form finance and 1/5 of the engineering department here. :) 1. The Kickstarter price will be $79, with early-bird options for less. Retail will be more expensive. 2. No. 3. There is a small metal plate with double-sided tape that you attach to your wall or ceiling. Point then attached with magnets. 4. This summer! Beta units earlier if you are OK with a rough experience. 5. We might look larger than we ar…

Thank you Nils! How can I e-mail you to have one as soon as possible at $99?

If you want to make sure to get one of the early-birds, sign up to the newsletter. Since it's mostly friends of ours on there we'll send a reminder before the launch so you can be ready. The launch mailing list will only get one email once the project is already live.

Re: Point – A smart house sitter

#102

Post by nmattisson »

coldpie wrote: post #99
kristiandupont wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not at first but it's very likely that we will at some point.

I would be far more interested if it were open source, or at least had a public API.

We do have an API, but it might not be public from day one. There will be a beta-tier on Kickstarter that will get immediate access, and when we consider it solid we'll open it up.

Re: Point – A smart house sitter

#103

Post by blacksmith_tb »

trebor wrote: post #83
tlrobinson wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, why do you turn off WiFi at night?

I'm getting suspicious of WiFi's actual safety, potential EMF sensitivity and all that. The same wavelength at higher powers cooks food and has never actually been proven safe at lower levels. Even though it's non-ionizing radiation ... so are the various nuclear radiation particles/waves. So we're running a test to see if turning the WiFi off affects our sleep.

I would worry more about your neighbors using your network, the transmitter in your cellphone is much more powerful than in your AP, and I will guess that you sleep much nearer to it as well... In either case, the strength falls off with the square of the distance.

Re: Point – A smart house sitter

#104

Post by nmattisson »

mhb wrote: post #96

Not necessarily easy, but a nice addition would be if it could sense water situations - broken washer hose or failed hot water heater tank.

It does come with a humidity sensor, so if the leak leads to elevated humidity levels you could spot that something was off, but it's going to depend on a lot of factors in your room. Finding water leaks is our radar, but we don't dare to make promises right now.

(on the Form team)

Re: Point – A smart house sitter

#105

Post by simbas »

ISL wrote: post #15
mrmaddog wrote: post #7

I really like the idea of unobtrusive anomaly detection as a product, but I wonder how much benefit I could actually derive from this. Perhaps it is nice to have a log of whenever the front door opens, but that feature certainly won't sell me on its own. It is cool that they can tell when a window breaks, but... how much good does that notification do for me? How confident can I be that this is not a false positive a…

If you're a landlord or hotelier, this is like a black-box/speed camera/friendly supervisor for your property. Music too loud, or smoking in a non-smoking place? This thing lights up and lets your guest know to tone things down. If it gets too loud, it switches color and logs the infraction. Appliance failure or security concerns get monitored too.

does that detect "any" kind of smoke?

Re: Point – A smart house sitter

#106

Post by shostack »

RankingMember wrote: post #50

I wonder if it can sense the difference between a cat throwing a glass off a counter and a burglar breaking a window. I love home security stuff like this, and hope this rolls in at a decent price point.

Well, in theory if you had some Dropcams setup or something like that you could just login and confirm whether it is anything worth acting on.

Re: Point – A smart house sitter

#107

Post by nmattisson »

owenmarshall wrote: post #65
RankingMember wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, a system with false positives is worse than no system at all imho because it trains you to disregard warning signs.

My apartment was broken into because the security system was disabled. The security system was disabled because it used a cheap glass break sensor that would trip if both my dogs barked at the same time - both, not just one. Naturally this was untenable. I'm a bit leery about glass break sensors, to say the least.

We're combining data from different sensors, so if Point hears broken glass, and then notices the temperature changing or street noise being louder than usual we can more accurately detect broken windows.

Re: Point – A smart house sitter

#108

Post by nogridbag »

jgillette wrote: post #33

There are two textboxes on the screen to be notified when it becomes available. I first tried the bottom one, and it gave me an "Too many subscribe attempts for this email address. Please try again in about 5 minutes. (#8715)". I tried it a few times after waiting a few minutes, then went back to the first textbox, higher on the page, and that one worked without issue.

I had the same problem, but a different error code number: "Too many subscribe attempts for this email address. Please try again in about 5 minutes. (#8617)". I clicked the Submit button once.

Re: Point – A smart house sitter

#109

Post by nmattisson »

jhonovich wrote: post #78
kristiandupont wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have a full-blown home security system installed currently, you might not feel that this is enough for you. We are primarily targeting people who don't want those systems either because they are too expensive or bothersome, or because they feel that it's a tad orwellian. As I wrote in another response, many of the features have been designed with home sharers (AirBnB hosts) in mind.

How accurate will it be in detecting whether someone has broken into my home? Are you positioning your product to accurately detect intruders?

We detect if people are present (from sound, so not if they're perfectly quiet) and notice broken windows. If you see a broken window alert followed by people present in your home timeline when you're not expecting them, I would draw the conclusion that it's an intruder.

[on the Form team]

Re: Point – A smart house sitter

#110

Post by Agustus »

nmattisson wrote: post #101
Agustus wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you Nils! How can I e-mail you to have one as soon as possible at $99?

If you want to make sure to get one of the early-birds, sign up to the newsletter. Since it's mostly friends of ours on there we'll send a reminder before the launch so you can be ready. The launch mailing list will only get one email once the project is already live.

Okay, see you when it clears Kickstarter.
Post reply on HN