AXIS Gear will make your existing window blinds or shades smart

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This easy-to-install device will let you control all your shades with a tap of a finger to save you time and effort.

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With seemingly everything in and around our homes becoming connected, it’s hard to envision everyday life without automated window shades and self-adjusting blinds. Well, it looks Toronto-based startup AXIS feels the same way. That’s because the team has unveiled AXIS Gear, a motorized add-on that can make any new and existing window unit smart.

So if you’re tired of constantly having to raise and lower the chain or looped cord, you’re in luck. This intelligent gadget will automatically take care of it all for you at pre-programmed times and even in response to light levels. Beyond that, you’ll be able to regulate your blinds using on-device controls or right from the palm of your hand with its accompanying mobile app.

In terms of hardware, the easy-to-install product consist of an electric motor, a rechargeable LiPo battery, a light sensor, a solar panel, a Bluetooth radio and a microcontroller, all housed inside a sleek wall-mounted box. The Gear’s solar-powered and wireless motor can be attached to the chain or cord of existing window shades. Meanwhile, a suite of sensors will enable you to configure “intelligent scheduling,” such as lifting the shades in the morning and turning down the blinds during the hottest periods of the day to help conserve energy. Looking ahead, the team also hopes to integrate the unit with some of today’s most popular smart home equipment running on ZigBee or Thread protocols and IFTTT so that you can customize your own scenarios that best suit your needs.

AXIS has designed their intelligent system with safety and security in mind. For starters, Gear not only lets you come home at night to much-need privacy knowing all your shades are lowered, it can help give off the impression that you’re home while away. But even more importantly, motorized blinds eliminate the all too common danger of strangulation by preventing the chain/cord from dangling freely so that children, in particular, can have a safe environment to play in.

Interested? Head over to Gear’s Indiegogo campaign, where AXIS is hoping to reach its $100,000 goal. Delivery is expected to get underway in late 2016.

Slate is the world’s first portable smart scale for nutrition

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Who needs the latest diet trends when you have your own personal nutritionist?

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The holiday season is fast approaching, which means plenty of sweets and hearty meals. It’s okay though, because you’ll tell yourself that your New Year’s resolution is to lose weight. Fast forward a few weeks into the New Year, and alas, you’ve already abandoned your plan! Tracking calories and nutrients can be challenging, but it doesn’t have to be. A Calgary-based team of engineers and a registered dietician has created a solution to your fitness woes.

Meet Slate, the world’s first smart scale that provides personalized nutritional information like calorie intake, food weight, fats, protein, carbs and other macronutrients you need to track to reach your personal health aspirations. With Slate, you can set up customized goals and targets, and it will recommend what to eat based on a calculated BMI. The startup wanted to bring the same level of accuracy to health and nutrition that exists for fitness trackers.

Using Slate is much simpler than committing to a New Years’ resolution. The smart scale connects to your smartphone over Bluetooth. When you place your food items on the scale, the mobile app (available for both iOS and Android) will deliver an accurate nutritional breakdown from its large food database. Slate boasts that it is designed with its users in mind, so every aspect of the app has been carefully crafted. The app can also track and log in your daily calorie and nutritional intake, offer personal recipes tailored to your calorie goals, scan barcodes on packaged foods, and integrate to your wearables and apps including Apple HealthKit, Fitbit and MyFitnessPal. Not only for the weight watchers, Slate can be a valuable tool for the health conscious, the busy professional, diabetics and even athletes.

This portable, lightweight scale is just 5.5″ x 5.5″ x 0.6” in size and has the max capacity of 2.2 pounds. What’s more, it can measure in ounces, grams and kilograms. It has a food safe, stainless steel surface as well as tare weight so it will only weigh the food and not the container. Slate is powered by a built-in Li-on battery that’s rechargeable via microUSB.

So, are you read to take control of your health? Head over to Slate’s Indiegogo campaign, where the team is currently seeking $50,000. The first batch of units is projected to be out for delivery by April 2016.

Stewart wants to be the middleman between you and your autonomous car

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This tactile interface is designed for fully autonomous cars and hopes to help mediate the trust issues between man and machine.

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Self-driving cars are no longer a futuristic idea, with an estimated 10 million expected to hit the roads by 2020. In fact, companies like Mercedes, BMW, Tesla and Nissan are among countless others that have already begun to implement these autonomous features into their automobiles. Although such vehicles offer obvious benefits such as faster travel times, enhanced safety and more convenience, some folks believe it eliminates a sense of freedom, expression and control while behind the wheel. In order to promote a positive relationship between man and his machine, Felix Ros has developed Stewart — a servo-controlled joystick that will help overcome society’s reluctance in embracing fully autonomous vehicles.

Stewart will provide you with constant updates about the car’s behavior and its intentions. However, if you don’t agree on the car’s next course of action, you can manipulate the tactile interface to change this. The device will learn from you in the same way that you can learn from it, hopefully resulting in a mutually trusting relationship. It should be noted that Stewart is merely a middleman between the autonomous vehicle and its driver, and is no way intended to actually control the car.

Through nuanced force feedback, Stewart will tell you what the car plans to do next, such as which direction it will choose and whether it will accelerate or brake. Yet, if you disagree with the vehicle’s planned course of action, you can intervene with the joystick to get the car to take your preferred route, or to simply drive in a different style. According to Ros, this puts emotion back into driving within the margins of what is considered safe.

“So why would you want to control a car that drives itself? Learning to trust a (new) technology takes time. A feeling of control can help to build a mutually trustful relationship,” Ros explains. “Humans are very unpredictable creatures that tend to change their minds frequently. For example: while driving you want to make a detour or you may need a coffee break. These changes of plan can easily be communicated to the car trough Stewart.”

Stewart is equipped with six servos, which are controlled by an Arduino Uno (ATmega328). A Processing sketch calculates the transition of all the six degrees of freedom and feeds that information to the Arduino. Intrigued? Check out the Maker’s official page here, as well as his step-by-step breakdown on Instructables.

Gest lets you control your PC and phone with your hands

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Hello, Gest! Goodbye, keyboards and mice!  

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In anticipation for the next wave of smart devices that will infiltrate our everyday lives, more and more companies have set out to find new ways to interact with these gadgets. With hopes of moving beyond things like the mouse, keyboard and touchscreen, one Austin-based startup has devised a wearable that lets you control your computer or smartphone by simply moving your hands. Introducing Gest. 

The brainchild of Apotact Labs, Gest allows you to work with your hands in a more intuitive way, whether that’s switching between apps by twitching your finger, pointing at the screen to move the mouse or twisting your palm to adjust sliders in Photoshop. The whole premise is that you’ll never have to think about what you’re doing, you’ll just be able to do it.

The lightweight device features a palm strap with a bulk of the gadget resting on the back of your hand, while four finger connectors (which look like half rings) are attached to the main unit via short wires. 15 discreetly embedded sensors boast a latency of roughly 40-60 ms for greater accuracy and more recognized gestures, despite your hand’s orientation. So no matter if you’re drawing, typing, modeling, presenting or composing, Gest can learn the meaning of those motions and help you get things done fast in a more natural way. What’s more, you can customize your own gesture commands for additional.

“While Gest may be one-size-fits-all on the outside, on the inside it’s all about you. Everyone moves their hands in unique ways; the way you point at the screen is probably different than your friend,” its creators explain.

Thanks to the combination of accelerometers, gyroscopes and magnetometers, Gest can determine your finger positions and offer unparalleled touchless control that would otherwise require a mouse or keyboard. Meanwhile, thumb movements are inferred using data from the other sensors. The wearable is equipped with Bluetooth Low Energy, LED status indicators and a rechargeable battery capable of lasting through a full day of work.

Impressively, Gest can function just like a keyboard, only that you can type in the air or on any surface without all of that clickety-clack. And that’s not all. The Apotact Labs crew has opened up an SDK with the hope of enabling developers to create new applications, integrations and use cases for the gesture control system, from manipulating virtual reality objects onscreen to adjusting layers and changing brush sizes in Photoshop. The company will also offer developers access to custom skeletal models and motion-processed data, as well as raw sensor data that’ll bestow the freedom to innovate using its Java and Python APIs.

“The last time we saw a truly drastic change in the way people interact with technology was when Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone in 2007. We believe we’re on the cusp of another transformative change,” explains Mike Pfister, CEO and co-founder of Apotact Labs. “We built Gest on a foundation of technology that will enable it to become the de facto standard for gesture interaction.”

Intrigued? Head over to Gest’s Kickstarter campaign, where Apotact Labs is currently seeking $100,000. Delivery is slated for November 2016.

Every cyclist needs this handlebar-mounted device

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Dashboard is to cars as BeeLine is to bikes.

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In today’s environmentally conscious society, cycling has become the main mode of transportation for many city dwellers. This method has also proven to be a faster way to get to-and-from work, compared to rush hour traffic and crowded buses. However, there are some downsides that come with biking, such as getting lost, stopping regularly to find directions on your phone, and the unfortunate, yet very possible occurrence of getting struck by a vehicle amid the hustle and bustle. Cyclists already do our environment a favor by reducing emissions, so why shouldn’t cyclists have a safer and easier commute? Two London-based cyclists return the favor with BeeLine, a smart and affordable navigation device for bicycles.

Mark Jenner and Tom Putnam, the brains behind the navigation unit, came up with the idea when they planned to meet up for lunch, only for both to get lost on their bikes. And so, the duo decided to create BeeLine to make riding fun and stress-free. The wristwatch-sized device works quite similarly to a compass. Instead of pointing you north, BeeLine navigates you in the general direction of your destination, while also noting the distance to go. This “stripped back” concept of navigation allows for a safer and more engaged journey. It only requires a quick glance for directions, leaving you free to focus on the road and not looking for street names.

BeeLine’s setup is as effortless as its way of navigating. The gadget simply snaps onto your bike’s handlebar, and only requires the use of your smartphone to select the destination in its accompanying mobile app prior to heading out. You can save frequently used destinations for a one tap service, too. From then on, you won’t ever have to stop to find directions on your phone.

BeeLine’s capabilities extend well beyond navigation as well. It can show you your speed and distance traveled, or act as a clock. Think of it as a sleek dashboard for your bike. When it’s not in use, the innovative design protects the screen and enables you to attach it to your keys or throw it in your bag or pocket.

Since bikes come in many shapes and sizes, BeeLine boasts a one-size-fits-all silicone strap that can go around any stem or handlebar. Its backlit e-paper display is visible under any conditions, and its tough casing makes it weather and shock proof. Housed within the BeeLine lies an Atmel | SMART SAM3X8E at its core, along with an accelerometer, digital compass, gyro, and a microUSB rechargeable battery that can run for a few months. This ultra low-powered unit harnesses the power of your phone, thus cutting down its costs and making it an affordable asset to your bike. (It should be noted that for its prototyping stage, the team used an Arduino and a Proto Shield connected to an Android phone.)

Ready to buzz through your commute? Head over to BeeLine’s Kickstarter campaign, where the team has raced right by its $92,118 goal. Delivery is expected to begin in August 2016.

This wearable device provides safety with one push of a button

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For when pepper spray won’t do the trick, Athena emits a loud alarm and messages loved ones with your location. 

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Did you know that a woman in the U.S. is attacked every two minutes? This is a startling statistic that inspired Philadelphia-based entrepreneur Yasmine Mustafa to launch ROAR for Good, a startup whose mission is to empower women, reduce assaults and transform society. Their first product, Athena, is a discreet piece of smart jewelry that will alert family, friends and nearby pedestrians in an emergency.

The pendant can be worn as a necklace or clipped onto any item of clothing. By holding down its recessed button for three seconds, a loud 85 decibel alarm will emit from the accessory (that’s louder than a freight train 50 feet away) and a text message will be immediately sent to a group of contacts listed in its accompanying app. These recipients will also receive a map showing your location, directions and the opportunity to call you or 911.

Athena also comes with a silent mode, which is particularly useful in situations where a wearer wouldn’t want the attacker to know that the device has been triggered. Using this SilentROAR feature, an alert message can be sent without the alarm being activated.

The wearable’s electronics are housed inside a water-resistant shell with a non-slip silicone front and a lightweight aluminum back, and boasts a three month battery life. It connects to your smartphone via Bluetooth in order to generate the GPS location and summon help via the companion app. Athena even has a distinctive raised texture to help guide your finger to the button in the middle of the gadget, making it super easy and intuitive to call for help.

Its creators have crafted the jewelry with modularity in mind, so that as they come out with new designs and colors, the face of Athena can be easily snapped out and replaced, providing maximum customization for even the biggest fashionistas. For its launch, the wearable will come with three differently-colored metal backings — antique silver, timeless black and rose gold.

Does this sound like a safety device that you or someone you know would like to have at all times? Head over to Athena’s Indiegogo campaign, where the ROAR for Good team has garnered over $65,000. Delivery is slated for June 2016.

ARM Keil ecosystem integrates the Atmel SAM ESV7

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Keil is part of the ARM wide ecosystem, enabling developers to speed up system release to the market. 

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Even the best System-on-Chip (SoC) is useless without software, as well as the best designed S/W needs H/W to flourish. The “old” embedded world has exploded into many emergent markets like the  IoT, wearables, and even automotive, which is no more restricted to motor control or airbags as innovative products from entertainment to ADAS are being developed. What is the common denominator with these emergent products? Each of these require more software functionality and fast memory algorithm with deterministic code execution, and consequently innovative hardware to support these requirements, such as the ARM Cortex-M7-based Atmel | SMART SAM ESV7.

ARM has released a complete software development environment for a range of ARM Cortex-M based MCU devices: Keil MDK. Keil is part of ARM wide ecosystem, enabling developers to speed up system release to the market. MDK includes the µVision IDE/Debugger and ARM C/C++ Compiler, along with the essential middleware components and software packs. If you’re familiar with Run-Time Environment stacked description, you’ll recognize the various stacks. Let’s focus on “CMSIS-Driver”. CMSIS is the standard software framework for Cortex-M MCUs, extending the SAM-ESV7 Chip Library with standardized drivers for middleware and generic component interfaces.

By definition, an MCU is designed to address multiple applications and the SAM ESV7 is dedicated to support performance demanding and DSP intensive systems. Thanks to its 300MHz clock, SAM ESV7 delivers up to 640 DMIPS and its DSP performance is double that available in the Cortex-M4. A double-precision floating-point unit and a double-issue instruction pipeline further position the Cortex-M7 for speed.

Let’s review some of these applications where SAM ESV7 is the best choice…

Finger Printer Module

The goal is to provide human bio authentication module for office or house access control. The key design requirements are:

• +300 MHz CPU performance to process recognition algorithms
• Image sensor interface to read raw finger image data from finger sensor array
• Low cost and smaller module size
• Flash/memory to reduce BOM cost and module size
• Memory interface to expand model with memory extension just in case.

The requirement for superior performance and an image sensor interface can be seen as essential needs, but which will make the difference will be to offer both cheaper BOM cost and smaller module size than the competitor? The SAM S70 integrates up to 2MB embedded Flash, which is twice more than the direct competitor and may allow reducing BOM and module size.

Automotive Radio System

Every cent counts in automotive design, and OEMs prefer using a MCU rather than MPU, at first for cost reasons. Building an attractive radio for tomorrow’s car requires developing very performing DSP algorithms. Such algorithms used to be developed on expansive DSP standard part, leading to large module size, including external Flash and MCU leading obviously to a heavy BOM. In a 65nm embedded Flash process device, the Cortex-M7 can achieve a 1500 CoreMark score while running at 300 MHz, and its DSP performance is double that available in the Cortex-M4. This DSP power can be used to manage eight channels of speaker processing, including six stages of biquads, delay, scaler, limiter and mute functions. The SAM S71 workload is only 63% of the CPU, leaving enough room to support Ethernet AVB stack — very popular in automotive.

One of the secret sauces of the Cortex-M7 architecture is to provide a way to bypass the standard execution mechanism using “tightly coupled memories,” or TCM. There is an excellent white paper describing TCM implementation in the SAM S70/E70 series, entitled “Run Blazingly Fast Algorithms with Cortex-M7 Tightly Coupled Memories” from Lionel Perdigon and Jacko Wilbrink, which you can find here.

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This post has been republished with permission from SemiWiki.com, where Eric Esteve is a principle blogger as well as one of the four founding members of the site. This blog first appeared on SemiWiki on October 23, 2015.

iKommunicate wants to keep the IoT afloat

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iKommunicate is a NMEA to Signal K gateway that connects your marine electronics to the Internet of Things. 

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Digital Yacht has unveiled a new interfacing technology for the marine electronics market. With hopes of enabling the Internet of Things while afloat, the team has unveiled an onboard sharing gateway called iKommunicate for use with the Signal K open source data exchange platform.

For those unfamiliar with the nautical world, NMEA is a plug-and-play communications standard commonly used for connecting marine sensors and display units within ships. The protocol has been around for decades, and while reliable and ubiquitous, struggles to adequately support today’s smart devices, not to mention all the data that it produces. However, the tide is a-turnin’ with the introduction of a new open source platform, Signal K, which has been quietly developing over the past few years and is now ready to set sail.

Signal K looks to become the next-gen solution for marine data exchange. Intended to not only be employed for communication between instruments and sensors onboard a single vessel, but also to enable the sharing of information between multiple boats, aids to navigation, ports, marinas or any marine asset. What’s more, it has been designed in such a way that it can be easily implemented by web-based and mobile applications, and can hook boats and ships up the Internet of Things while at sea.

This is where Digital Yacht comes into play. The Boston startup has created iKommunicate, a gateway that links NMEA 0183 and NMEA 2000 systems to Signal K. This allows existing marine electronics to integrate with the new standard by translating any old NMEA data that a user has onboard from their GPS, engine and equipment to the latest format.

“When you first install iKommunicate, you program the device through a simple web interface with your boat’s data — such as boat name, call sign, MMSI, photo and dimensions. This is a key part of the Signal K schema and allows this data to be used by apps and identifies you as a unique Signal K user,” its creators write.

Digital Yacht’s new device is based around the existing NMEA 2000 (CAN bus) interface along with an Atmel | SMART SAM4E16E Cortex-M4 MCU running at 120MHz with 1MB RAM and a SD slot for extended storage and firmware updates. What’s more, iKommunicate can act as a server so apps can run locally on a web browser for display or configuration, or a smartphone or tablet using a raw feed of data from the gateway.

Signal K will serve as a catalyst for developers to dream up new ideas and applications to make boating more fun, safe and affordable. For its Kickstarter launch, iKommunicate includes some built-in web apps to display navigation data and engine instruments in your browser, making it ready for use right out of the box.

Surely, the Signal K platform is exciting and can make a step change to the boating community. However, like any young protocol, it needs a catalyst of users to seed the interest for developers. The iKommunicate gateway looks to enables this by seamlessly integrating with existing systems, so that you to take advantage of this next generation of applications without changing your onboard electronics.

Interested? Head over to its Kickstarter campaign, where the Digital Yacht team has sailed right past its $20,000 goal. Delivery is expected to get underway in March 2016.

Flosstime is the world’s first smart floss dispenser

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What a flossome idea to improve oral hygiene!

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Did you know that nearly 80 percent of people don’t floss their teeth? Even though you’ve been told countless times how important it was to do so, you probably tune out the dentist whenever he or she starts lecturing about it. For some reason, it’s a task that’s difficult to incorporate into your morning and nighttime routine, whether that’s because it’s time-consuming or just one more thing you “have to do.” Fortunately, a smart gadget from one Palo Alto startup may have the solution.

Flosstime is an intelligent, elegantly-designed device that mounts to your bathroom mirror to help you establish a daily flossing regimen. Whereas more conventional dispensers are old, outdated and hard to remember, Flosstime is a habit-forming accessory that’ll help make the once-tedious activity fun, and more importantly, nearly impossible to forget.

The unit affixes to your mirror (either using micro suction tab or an adhesive strip) and dispenses the recommended 18 inches of floss every time you press its button, lighting up to show a smile. Once the floss has been provided, the device cues a 90-second timer in the form of blue-glowing quadrants that move clockwise around a circular light ring. When you go 24 hours without pressing the button, however, Flosstime will express its discontentment by turning orange and revealing a frown.

“Our research shows that the biggest problem with flossing is simply getting the floss into your hands. Once it’s there, almost everyone flosses properly! The automatic dispensing mechanism makes it easier for you to begin flossing and removes the worry of having too much or too little,” its creators note.

What’s more, Flosstime features both single and dual user mode so it can be shared by two people. After all, a couple that flosses together, stays together! While in dual user mode, the frown is split into two and each half is a separate reminder for each individual. If one doesn’t floss, the other will know. (It looks like leaving the toilet seat up won’t be the only argument pretty soon!)

When forming habits, why not start early? In order to make flossing a bit more enjoyable for the younger generation, Flosstime also comes with cute animal snap-ons. If not used everyday, the animal’s eyes glow warning lights to offer a child with a friendly reminder to floss their teeth.

One thing that we’re seeing an awful lot of with connected objects is the emergence of the so-called ‘Internet of Useless Things.’ Just because you can make something smart doesn’t always necessarily mean you have to. Cognizant of this, Flosstime has done an excellent job in enhancing one function. They explain, “We believe that the only time you need to be reminded to floss is when you’re in the bathroom! Getting a push notification on your phone to floss while you’re sitting on the couch enjoying a movie is not very effective.

Sound like a simple yet effective solution to improve your oral hygiene? Head over to Flosstime’s Kickstarter campaign, where the startup is currently seeking $15,000. Delivery is slated for August 2016.

Light up the night with this LED Burberry skirt

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Maker Guido Burger hacked a Burberry skirt with pico-Platinchen to give it a NeoPixels makeover.

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A while back, Guido Burger introduced us to his board, the pico-Platinchen. The super small (only 20mm in diameter), Arduino-compatible button features a built-in BNO055 sensor (SAM D20) along with an ATmega328P at its core. Since then, the Maker has found several new and innovative implementations of the technology, particularly around wearables. Remember this ring? How about these smart socks? Adding to that list of projects is his recent hack of a Burberry skirt for Maker Faire Berlin.

For this endeavor, Burger’s goal was to make the electronics easily removable, washable and expandable, while also dramatically reducing the necessary power to run 200 LEDs. He began the process with a CAD design of a fabric frame that would hold the NeoPixel strips in place. In the final project, the skirt’s top layer of fabric was comprised of a laser-cut repeating circle pattern, which allowed just enough light from the LEDs to seep through, giving it a nice blur effect.

The pico-Platinchen enabled the high-end skirt to react to motion with its 9DOF sensor. Aside from that, the Maker decided to add a last-minute BLE module to sense whenever a smartphone or beacon was in close proximity — surely a colorful way to keep an eye on those around you during a night on the town! Normally Berger would operate the controller with a coin-cell battery, but for this wearable chose to go with a pair of AAA batteries instead. This provided the necessary 3V, along with an estimated runtime of four to five hours.

Intrigued? Check it out!