Thingsee One - an interesting new gadget

[scubaman]

I know quite a few of us like our gadgets so I thought I'd post about a new one I just read about.

Have a looksee http://www.thingsee.com and



With all the sensors and communication methods (strangely only 2g in cellular) and a very long lasting battery, they claim up to a year, I could easily find many uses for it on a boat. Controllable with a smart phone and you can write your own software to take advantage of it's services.

It's not in mass production yet but should be available soon. Will be interesting to see what the 'reasonable' price is going to be.

 

[mlines]

Looks like a mobile phone that doesnt make voice calls but has all the standard data and apps capability.

 

[scubaman]

My mobile doesn't have the environmental sensors. For instance, during a cold spell i'd love to know the temp and humidity inside the boat. I find a self contained gadget that could be easily be configured to various purposes appealing.

I'm not connected to them in any way, btw.

 

[James L]

I think this will be a great gadget if they can keep the price down.

If it's cheap enough, I'll be getting one. Even as a simple boat tracker it would be great, and if you can add extra sensors I can think of loads of uses.
But I'm always wary when products are being advertised before they're ready for sale, lets hope it lives up to its promise.

 

[scubaman]

The gadget now seems to be available to order @ 299€. Not exactly cheap for occasional use but it would be nice to have something like that monitoring the boat. It seems to be targeted to those who are developing new ideas on the internet of things as the possibility to write your own code for it seems to be the thing. The standard App seems to offer all the basic data though.

I may get one, if I do, I'll report back.

 

[jimmy_the_builder]

Interesting idea, but for boaty applications it only delivers half of what you need ie monitoring. You also want to be able to control things remotely, like turning on lights, heating, generator, for example. For me the idea device would deliver both monitoring and control capabilities.

Edit: it also doesn't seem to be able to readily monitor external circuits eg your bilge alarm.

 

[jimmy_the_builder]

What this *would* be useful for however would be to measure the relative stability of the boat. The device has an iNemo accelerator/gyro sensor, so presumably you could therefore use it to measure how stable your boat is, and what sort of angular momentum the boat experiences (I've been reading jfm's comments on Magnum's p43 thread). This in turn would be useful when computing the forces required for stabilisation. A bit nerdy, I know, but interesting nonetheless.

 

[scubaman]

Interesting idea, but for boaty applications it only delivers half of what you need ie monitoring. You also want to be able to control things remotely, like turning on lights, heating, generator, for example. For me the idea device would deliver both monitoring and control capabilities.

Edit: it also doesn't seem to be able to readily monitor external circuits eg your bilge alarm.

Agreed, this probably isn't the solution for remotely controlling things, although it does seem to have the required methods of communication with the wired world of NMEA networks for instance. You can write your own firmware for it so in theory it could provide a way of controlling other devices onboard and respond to inputs from the physical environment.

None of this happens readily though as you said. I'm more interested in the easy package I could just chuck in the boat and use to monitor things remotely. I'd like to see the temperature/humidity in the winter, maybe see how much the boat is rocking while moored or if the engine room hatch is opened and such things.

 

[gsturgeon]

The Raspberry Pi is the cheap way to do this - if you are interested in programming

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi