A Kickstarter to consider if you're concerned about air quality
Plenty of high end smart home kit throws in air quality or humidity sensors as an add-on but the MicroBot Sense, on Kickstarter now, keeps things simple with an affordable, do-it-all smart sensor you stick around your home or take with you.
For $45 (or $41 if you bag an Early Bird reward), you get air quality (carbon dioxide levels), temperature, humidity, light, noise levels and motion sensing with push alerts to your smartphone – with info about your home or environment and recommendations.
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It works with Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant (under development) and IFTTT, so you can ask your voice assistant things like “Alexa, ask MicroBot to check the baby’s room”. Plus there’s a clickable button on the 38mm x 38mm device itself which starts up a Quick Check feature sending a summary alert to your phone.
The Sense is battery powered, charges via Micro USB but it does connect to your phone via Bluetooth Low Energy which you might find a pain. You can pay an extra $59 for a dedicated MicroBot hub which might be best if you want to dot these all around the house. It also looks like remote monitoring and IFTTT requires the hub.
That IFTTT integration could be pretty useful though – Nest just announced its own $39 Temperature Sensor which can feed back temperature info to its thermostats.
So with IFTTT, you could set up rules to turn on or tweak smart thermostats, air purifiers, fans, cameras etc when the Sense goes beyond your preset conditions.
There’s also a pesky subscription plan – Naran, the San Jose company behind this and the MicroBot Push button, says most features will be available in limited form with no sub. It’s $2.99 a month but you do at least get one year free as a Kickstarter backer and if you go for the MicroBot Hub, you get a lifetime sub.
The MicroBot Sense has already passed its modest $14,000 goal on the crowdfunding site with weeks to go – shipping is set for July 2018.