sensor – Smart Home Geeks

Oval 1.0 vs Oval 2.0

Henry McLean-Low — Tue, 05 Jun 2018 12:00:23 +0000

If you haven’t heard of Oval it is a smart home sensor that monitors and detects changes in motion, temperature, humidity, light and water.

Recently Oval 2.0 has been launched on Kickstarter, if your wonder here are the key differences between Oval 1.0 and Oval 2.0.

Design
The unit has been redesigned, based on feedback and to improve functionality

Smart Home Connectivity
Oval 2.0 can talk to your other smart home tech, including Amazon Alex and Google Home. It can also connect to hundreds of other devices via IFTTT. This allows you to create your own applets.

Longer battery life
The new firmware uses Zigbee so power consumption is dramatically improved. Oval is now also shipped with higher capacity batteries.

Multiple Location Support
Control multiple Ovals in different locations on one account. Great for holiday home owners or keeping an eye on your lock up.

Included Water Sensor
You can now use the water sensor out of the box with no extra purchase required.

Wireless Gateway
Ovals gateway is now wireless, allowing it to be placed where you need it.

Mesh capabilities
Add multiple gateways to create a mesh network to improve performance and range

Oval 2.o is currently on Kickstarter with an aim to ship in November 2018.

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Oval 2.0 goes on pre-order

Henry McLean-Low — Thu, 17 May 2018 07:15:54 +0000

Oval digital today announced the launch of their latest smart sensor Oval 2.0

If you have not heard of Oval it’s a Smart Sensor startup from New York. They launched in 2017 with great reviews and have since been sold in 32 countries.

Their smart wireless sensor alerts you if it detects a range of triggers from motion to temperature. Making any area or object smarter.

Oval 2.0 has taken their smart sensor to the next level. Connecting it to the rest of the smart home, including Nest, Ring, Alexa and IFTTT. Allowing you to ask Alexa the temperature in the bedroom or use Oval as a trigger in IFTTT.

Mike Harry, CEO of OVAL Digital Inc, commented:

“No two homes, or people, are alike, and OVAL was created with this in mind. After our initial release, we spent the year speaking to our customers all over the world, learning how they were using OVAL around the home and asking how we could improve our smart sensor to provide even more value to our customers. OVAL 2.0 is the result of both customer feedback and the latest technology available.”

The Oval app has also been given a big overall and includes new features like real-time view and analytics to spot patterns.

Oval 2.0 is available for pre-order today via Kickstarter

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Foobot review

Henry McLean-Low — Fri, 01 Dec 2017 13:49:49 +0000

Foobot review

Real time air quality dataWell designed appLots of integrations

Needs update for iPhone X display

4.3Great addition to any Smart Home!

How it works

Cost

Setup

Reader Rating 0 Votes

This is a We Own It review of Foobot!

What does Foobot do?!

Foobot is a home air quality monitor, it also connects to your smart home tech to control it, adjust your room and alert you of any problems.

It monitors in real time:

Fine particles
Volatile compounds
Carbon Dioxide – eq
Humidity
Temperature

This then gives you an overall air quality score in the app as well as tips on how to improve each reading and the overall score.

Foobot itself is designed well and looks great, care has also been taken with the packaging – think Apple meets Innocent Smoothies, with text like:

“This Foobot likes you already” and “Don’t look at my bottom” printed on it.

Foobot Indoor Air Quality Monitor

Check the Price on Amazon UK Check the Price on Amazon US

How easy is it to setup?

Initial setup is quick and easy!

We set it up in our bedroom in under 5 minutes. This is done in a pretty unique way rotating the Foobot upside down until the Foobot changes colour.

You then follow the normal smart home tech process of connecting to its own ‘WiFi network’ and enter your WiFi password.

However after initial setup it does take 6 days to ‘settle’ into your room and start giving you notifications about the air quality.

A Foobot iWatch notification

Foobot is controlled by the app, it also has an Apple watch app – a nice touch and often missing from smart home tech.

What’s the connectivity?

Foobot works with an impressive range of smart home tech!

Nest – an official ‘works with nest’ integration
Amazon Echo
LuxGeo
Ecobe

This adds extra features like being able to ask Alexa what the room quality is like in a room. This is good for quickly checking before bed how the room is.

It also works with IFTTT allowing you to create rules and alerts.

For example we set up an IFTTT rule to change our room light red if the Carbon Dioxide levels were not in a good range.

Our Bedroom Hue light turned red via IFTTT

How much does Foobot cost?

£254 from Amazon, although at the time of writing it’s on special at £179!

What’s it like living with it?

Interesting – things we never thought about like how does spraying deodorant and hair spray impact air quality. The answer is it changes it a lot, something you can rectify by opening a window or turning on a fan.

We are also getting into a habit of checking air quality before sleep and making adjustments to ensure its good quality before bedtime. It could easily be psychosomatic but it does seem to be having a positive impact! We will update after 4 weeks of use.

The only annoying issue is on our iPhone X the week view in the app cannot easily be pressed as the buttons are now where you tap to go home, due to the new iPhone X UI design.

What are our final thoughts?

After only using it for a few weeks this is a very handy bit of smart home tech. Making us think about what we breathe in and what the air quality is actually like in the room we sleep in. Foobot marketing makes a very good point “you spend 9% of your time indoors” yet have never thought about what the air INSIDE is like.

Having it connected to Hue via IFTTT and giving us visual clues is very interesting, as is being able to quickly ask Alexa. If we had a baby this would be an addition to the baby’s room without question.

This is a great addition to any smart home,

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