Ninja Blocks: Connect your world with the web

Seems similar in concept as <a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/supermechanical/twine-listen-to-your-world-talk-to-the-internet" rel="nofollow">http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/supermechanical/twine-li...</a> but offers a different UI/event-action model and few more integrated services. I wonder if these tiny-sensor-computer makers can come up with a standard so we can remotely control any of them without knowing the specific APIs.

This is a cool project, and I'm supporting it...<p>...however, <i>sigh</i> this is exactly what you should _not_ be using kickstarter for.<p>Kickstarter is not a shop, and I hope that anyone who pledges towards them realizes that they are supporting the project _not buying something_, and those $$$ have absolutely 1) no guarantee on receiving any product or 2) no recourse if anything is defective / wrong / whatever on it.<p>Kickstarter shouldn't be allowing this sort of project.

You could sadly do better with an Arduino Mini and a Zigbee, if you had "Hello World" level knowledge of electronics and microcontroller programming. One of the big ongoing issues in this field is that sensor nodes need to be cheap, as you ideally want to have a number of them around. Simultaneously, you need to not be changing batteries all the time.<p>Want to see some serious internet-of-things action? Put Bluetooth Low Energy radios in the next iPhone.

This is one of those great concepts that has a "this needs to happen" feeling, and it's a matter of who's going to do a great job with it. Looks like Ninja Blocks is on the right track.<p>However, as I think about the concept more, I'm having a difficult time finding a useful case for the concept. I think it's just because I'm not creative enough. So what would you, Hacker News reader, use Ninja Blocks for?

It's like a hardware version of IFTTT.

It's interesting to see an incubator-backed startup leveraging Kickstarter. Definitely a pretty cool concept though.

Pretty interesting and creative way to pitch the project: They created their main web site [1] as if the product already existed, giving the potential donor a good feeling about the end goal.<p>[1] <a href="http://ninjablocks.com" rel="nofollow">http://ninjablocks.com</a>

It seems to me that the hook.io project would make an ideal candidate for the software to connect these devices.<p><a href="https://github.com/hookio/hook.io" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/hookio/hook.io</a><p>hook.io is all about building the software for connecting devices together to do functionality like this. It would be amazing to see this coupled with actual custom hardware.

Very nice concept! And by making them very very easy to use &#38; pricing them accordingly high, they don't really compete with arduino+shields and the like. As they are "open", I wonder if it will be possible to only use their webservice with other devices (arduino etc) by paying a monthly fee.

Interesting. The official logo seems to have rounded eyes -- good intentions I suppose. However... <a href="http://50.57.81.138/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/new_ninja_block.png" rel="nofollow">http://50.57.81.138/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/new_ninja_blo...</a>

With tech like this, that can sense and communicate events that happen in the physical world, I'd imagine that the globe will become sentient in 100 years. Just adding more and more nodes to the ever increasing network.

There some other projects like these. But I do not believe they can break their "niche toys" market and became mainstream. They are expensive and meaningless toys for any other sane people except us, nerds.

You can't claim it's Open Hardware and then not publish the layout files.

You guys are awesome. Nice work!

Is that a raspberry pi in there?

Excellent work guys - looks rad

awesomeness with ifttt<p>I bow down before our new ninja block overlords.

Great, so now a cloud service will know when somebody is at my front door and all other sensors fire.<p>Privacy where are you...