Sensors and sensibility: Quirky’s Spotter multi-purpose monitor module

Was briefly enthused...

At first, I thought I could buy one of these and stick it on my home network and then be able to use my PC or Raspberry Pi to graph the sensor data over time.

Nope.

SMS When ..

It would be good if it could SMS me when the internet is down.... oh... hold on....

The Imp thing is ok but what a lot of us really want is all the Imp goodness but on a server hosted at home. Totally good if they the server syncs up with a cloud service .....

I propose a new proverb

Fools and their privacy are easily parted.

Please think before you post

It's a neat idea and soldering iron free for those that want that - which seems like everyone these days. It would be a piece of cake to knock the whole thing up with an Arduino and a few hours of code so quit bitching about the implementation and roll one yourselves.

The point is that it's an IDEA - what you do with it is up to you but make no mistake, this is the future unless you still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.

why not bypass the wink parts and go straight to the Imp?

This looks like a service (wink or Quirky/whatever by GE) built on top of the Imp service? So what if you ditched the Quirky part and used Electric Imp directly instead?

Would that give you more or less software service for your hardware?

Another "Nothing" wireless device!

I will get excited about this sort of product when it has some form of usefulness. With no output signals and and YET ANOTHER PROPIETARY COMM SYSTEM, there is no useful work that can be performed by this device.

There are literally hundreds of wireless thermostat/humidistat/motion sensor products available today and this really does nothing to improve on those products. (And it's made by GE)

The NEST thermostat does the same thing for temperature, COULD do all the other humidity, light & motion things and since it has industry standard outputs, it can actually control your furnace/boiler to do useful work.

It ALSO can communicate with your home network via WiFi AND thus your phone can control it. NO SERVER REQUIRED!!!!! Also there is no integration or special software required since it has outputs.

I do commercial and institutional Building Automation and this crap will eventually be sent to me by some "sustainability director" asking if we can somehow tie it to our building controls.

The whole point of a control system is to make things work automatically and being on a wireless network and requiring an external cloud server are two major strikes against this product as applied to uptime and availability.

The third strike is security and I will guarantee that they have little to none in their system.

Yes, this is a great "idea" but it has been done way too many times before by better companies.

I stopped reading at...

« communication between the two always goes through a server. You’ll need to set up a Wink account »

I mean, seriously. :-/

Open Source to the rescue?

If open source products are driven into the market place, these products might open up a little to be competitive in the software form.

I see that getting this information creates huge power industry advantages. Power Grid products, something GE is deeply involved with, could really use this data to create a "flexible" grid based in automated reactions derived from statistical analysis. Why they can't share the base data and control more directly with the end user is beyond me.

It maybe possible to create your own computer-router, then strip/redirect/tee communications from these products, dependent on knowing the format of the data packet. Information can be forwarded to you via e-mail or text or server-at-home connection via browser/vnc to your phone.

As with most of open-source, the parts are there, they just have to be assembled.

Aaah, the things dreams are made of.

I always figured that 'quirky spotter' was a game you played while people-watching in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Not better than the smaller guys

I’ve been buying a bunch of these types of Home sensors networks things for the past year or so when they come up on Kickstarter. Like Twine, Smart Things, Knut, etc.

Other than the really low price point it has nothing but bad reviews.. I expected more from a huge company like GE. I am probably going to stay away from this one for a little while.

IMO, for the money, out of all the others I’ve played with.. so far I like Knut the best. We’ll see if any other name brand companies jump into into this industry. But so far the smaller guys have done a better job with the functionality.

They could have hit the mark with this, if it talked to ANY of the home automation systems already in place...