Traditional dirt sensor vacuums resist the robotic onslaught
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Traditional dirt sensor vacuums resist the robotic onslaught
If you're new here, you may want to first register and subscribe to the RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!Rise of the machine … dirt sensor vacuums In an earlier post on the latest CES-announced robotic vacuums with airborne dust sensors and for people with allergies, we promised to do a post on traditional (manual) vacuums that incorporated dust sensors just like their robotic dirt sensor vacuum peers. We explained why this was necessary. If your carpet is relatively clean and is just getting a weekly maintenance vacuum, most people (and most cleaning services) will just do a single pass. As the robotic vacuums clearly show, that’s not enough. You still want to do multiple passes, and extra passes where there is extra dirt. Robotic dirt sensor vacuums can detect this extra dirt from footfalls and places near windows and doors where air currents deposit airborne pollution. Humans can’t see this (although they’ll notice the robotic vacuum has managed to get the carpet just a tiny shade lighter even if it’s vacuumed every week).… Read the restJoin us as a member! (Or, when content pirates attack!)
Behind the scenes we’ve had some run-ins with comment spammers and content scrappers. To make this harder, we’re requiring membership to get access to a few areas on the site. Show your support by joining as a free member. (Registering is trivial! Facebook users on the Desktop version of the site can do it in just one click! Just click on the “Login with Facebook” button in the right margin to gain immediate access to all of our premium features.) We’ve see some antidotal evidence that a bootlegged version of this website was really popular somewhere. We can make some funny remark about, say, Netflix thinking pirates have exquisite taste in discovering the ‘next big thing.’ Perhaps we should be flattered. Unfortunately, this sort of thing can cause major problems for a small site like ours. So we’d like to thank our piratical readers for their support and (not terribly helpful) free advertisement before firmly directing them to the legal note below.… Read the restRe-platformed website; check out our new mobile website
Serious new eye-candy on the mobile version of our newly revamped website! Some of you may have noticed the blog portion of our website was down Monday. Our previous hosting vendor and technology was not as customizable as we needed the site to be. Our vendor also experienced a number of other technical issues, including problems with the mobile of the site. (Most of our website visitors are mobile. We were redirecting mobile users to our desktop version as a work-around, which is less than an ideal experience for mobile users.) Our prior site, supposedly CDN-optimized, was also slow to load, typically taking 3 seconds or longer from within the U.S. Performance Tuning So we re-platformed everything to a heavily-customized version of WordPress with CloudFlare as our CDN. We saw load times of under 700 milliseconds in the day, although it slowed down somewhat later in the day during peak Internet usage times.… Read the restDesigner Dress That Changes Color in Response to Pollution?
In the publicity stunt section, as mentioned on CNN and others, Danish fashion house Diffus has created a designer dress (pictured; photo courtesy Diffus) that changes color in response to levels of pollution. (It actually changes color in response to CO2 levels. As this is fairly constant outdoors, it might not have been the most inspired pollutant to monitor — NO2, NO, CO and dust would all have been more interesting.) Interested readers with a fashion bent can build their own. You need an Arudino open-source hardware board (some sample projects for incorporating Arudino projects can be found here. Then, all you need is an Air Quality Egg Arudino shield kit, which can be purchased from WickedDevices. This can monitor CO, NO2, and NO, with add-ons available for dust, VOC, and Ozone pollutants. (Arudino shields for CO2 are avaiable from other suppliers.) Once you’ve completed your electronics prototype, it’s time to become a fashion designer: there are small “Arudino-like” boards that are designed to be woven into fabrics, like the Adafruit Gemma.… Read the restHome Automation and the Internet of Things; answers to readers comments
CES blog posts Our CES reports on new robotic vacuum cleaners, smart refrigerators, and environment-sensing scales were some of our most popular posts with our readers, as was our coverage of Cisco’s talks on the Internet of Things. There’ll probably be a few more CES reports to share. In future posts, we’re going to cover some of the new home automation gadgets coming out that will make the Internet of Things a reality. Trouble is, too many existing appliances weren’t designed to network. Let’s say you wanted to use our app to decide when to turn your gas dryer, fireplace, or furnace on or off based on airborne combustion levels. That’s hard to do right now. Home Automation and the Internet of Things But a number of small startups are tackling this problem with innovative gadgets that interact with legacy electric appliances like washing machines and dryers. Some feature cameras, optical sensors, outlet switches, and mechanical activators together with a WiFi connection and logic that’s designed to make it easier to let the dryer signal you (over the Internet) when it’s done or even let you control the dryer from a website.… Read the restRecent Comments
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