Something that may be pretty obvious by now is the fact that I love Kickstarter, but the matter of fact is that I love any crowdsourcing project, it’s just that Kickstarter is the go-to platform for most people who want to get funding now days, thus it’s my first go-to place to check out some awesome indie projects. Not only is it a place to see what cool things people are doing, but it’s a place to help out others and possibly bag some beta products.
Ninja Blocks is one of those products that I fell in love with the moment I read the pitch, sure, I can’t think of a practical use for one right this second, but with APIs for social services becoming more and more popular and, in turn, becoming more integrated with our lives, it’s easy to imagine that one day I might hook up a Ninja Block as a monitor for my kids or something.
The idea is that you can take one of these blocks and upload ‘rules’ to it using various add-on features and channels – this is of course all done in their own cloud service. Its a lot like IFTTT and if you are a user of that then their idea will be a familiar one. You define the rule to say IF a certain criteria is met, THEN perform an action. In this case, using the various sensors available, you might take a picture of your driveway every hour and upload it to your dropbox – why? – I don’t know, I couldn’t think of a better example.
At launch, the channels supported will be;
- Google Docs
- Dropbox
- SMS + Phone
- XBox Live
No doubt, as the project is open source, once some developers get their hands on devices and source code, APIs will be added all over the place. I’d certainly like to get the Spotify API playing with this toy, maybe playing a certain song anytime someone mentions me on twitter or something.
The blocks also have a built-in accelerometer and thermometer . With additional external sensors, Ninja Blocks can sense current, humidity, motion, distance, sound, light and even capture video.
The project has surpassed their goal on Kickstarter so they will certainly go into production, but there is still time to head over to the project, sponsor them, and maybe bag some T-Shirts, Stickers or if even a Block itself for $155.
So, what would you do with one?
I don’t know exactly what I would do with it but, I like the idea of turning on something like a light when something happens. Sort of like an on-air light for radio or tv, sometimes an audible alert just inst enough.
You could imagine how awesome and affordable this would be for deaf people.