Kickstarter spotlight: Sensordrone
Mobile devices contain a lot of tiny sensors these days, but what if you took those sensors, added a bunch more, and threw it all into an accessory? That’s what the Sensordrone is, a wireless sensor dongle that may just go down in history as the first commercial tricorder.
The Sensordrone looks like a somewhat large keychain and has a few openings on the face of it. Using its large arsenal of included sensors, it can sense all sorts of things and relay that information back to a connected mobile device, either a single report of the last data, a continuous stream of data, or by recording data over time. This then gets picked up by a growing number of specialized apps and shown to the user as more hand on information. The full list of included sensors is as follows:
- Precision Electrochemical Gas Sensor – Calibrated for Carbon Monoxide (Also can be used for precision measurements of Alcohol, Hydrogen, and others)
- Gas Sensor for Oxidizing Gases – MOS type for Chlorine, Ozone, Nitrogen Dioxide, etc.
- Gas Sensor for Reducing Gases – (MOS type for methane, Propane, alcohols, other hydrocarbons, etc.)
- Temperature – Simple resistance temperature sensor type
- Humidity
- Pressure – can be used for Barometer, Altimeter, Blood Pressure, etc.
- Non-Contact Thermometer – Infrared sensor for scanning object temperature
- Proximity Capacitance – fluid level, intrusion detection, stud finder & more applications
- Red Color Intensity
- Green Color Intensity
- Blue Color Intensity
- Illumination – combine RGB & illumination for color matching
- Digital & Analog Interface – Expansion connector for connecting anything you want to your mobile device through the Sensordrone
Using these sensors in various ways, the Sensordrone and its connected apps can give you a very wide array of data from your environment. You can also hook up external sensors using the expansion port.
The Sensordrone will support Android first and foremost, with iOS and Blackberry support coming later. $175 is the pledge you have to make on Kickstarter to make sure you get one of these as quickly as possible, with $199 being the retail price once released. That price should help convince people that this is absolutely not a toy, and such a device has a lot of real world applications aside from running around town pretending you’re Captain Picard. Personally, I can’t get over how awesome it is that something that was considered 24th century science fiction only a decade ago is now being released as a key chain.
[Kickstarter]
