Tag Archives: IOT

This minimalist wooden board offers a interior-friendly way to control your home with Alexa

Posted on by



The last thing you probably expected is for a beautiful piece of wood to be your control dashboard for your smart home.

The Internet of Things has slowly but surely invaded our homes in the guise of smart lighting, dynamic photo frames, and, of course, smart speakers. While many of these are designed to look stylish and handsome, most of them carry an aesthetic that often clashes with minimalist rooms or decor. Smart speakers are perhaps the biggest culprits in this regard, but a Japanese company has found a solution that lets you put Alexa-powered smart speakers out of sight.

Designer: mui Lab

mui looks like an unassuming block of wood, but it’s actually just as talented as a smart speaker. Actually, it can do more than what most voice-only speakers can, like the Amazon Echo, because it has a touch panel on its front surface. Unlike a busy and overwhelming touch screen, however, the mui board presents visual feedback as monochromatic icons and text in a dot-matrix style that matches the board’s minimalist aesthetic.

More than just being a novel way to present a smart home hub, mui offers an equally unique approach to mixing nature and technology. Rather than the usual cold elements of a tablet, a phone, or even a smart speaker, the wooden board adds a warm and almost human touch to interact with devices and appliances. Its designers want to evoke joy and calm, feelings that should be associated with the home in the first place.

Despite its minimalist appearance, the mui is by no means minimal in features. In addition to its own mobile app, mui Lab is introducing a new “calm” interface that turns the board into a visual interface for connected Amazon Alexa speakers. That’s in addition to the original mui Platform’s compatibility with the new Matter smart home platform.




Inspired by Taoist philosophy, the mui board offers a refreshing spin on how we interact with our smart homes, basically by doing or showing almost nothing. It’s not going to appeal to people who prefer seeing everything in one go, but this design will definitely go well with rooms and furniture that try to hide the tech behind soothing organic materials.

The post This minimalist wooden board offers a interior-friendly way to control your home with Alexa first appeared on Yanko Design.

This smart kitchen appliance replaces a busy control panel with a single interactive knob to easily weigh your food!

Posted on by

Hoto is a smart kitchen scale for the modern home that scales down its control panel to a single interactive knob and connects other Hoto users from across the world together via an accompanying social media channel.

Smart kitchen appliances have changed the game of cooking. With integrated social media channels, smartphone apps, and haptic sensors, smart technology catapults kitchen appliances into the future. From all-electric coffee brewers with built-in WiFi to Bluetooth-operated smart skillets, the limit does not exist for designers of modern kitchen appliances. Hoto, a smart kitchen scale designed by Lu Zheng, weaves together the best parts of smart technology including accompanied social media channels and interactive control panels.

The best home recipes usually have the most marked instructions, indicating every specificity to the half-ounce. To make sure we get the finished product on par with granny’s, kitchen scales come in handy. Guiding us through the weight of each ingredient, kitchen scales keep tabs on every ingredient in any given recipe and allow us to track what we consume on a daily basis.

Zheng’s smart kitchen scale, Hoto, is minimal by design, adorned with not much more than stainless steel controls and a polished, reflective sheen. The scale scales back on the number of controls and buttons, consolidating every control into one interactive knob that functions as the scale’s, power sensor, weight dial, and net-zero button.

In addition to the appliance’s interactive control switch, Hoto comes with an accompanying social media app that allows other Hoto users to share their recipes and pre-measured weight parameters.

Designer: Lu Zheng

The post This smart kitchen appliance replaces a busy control panel with a single interactive knob to easily weigh your food! first appeared on Yanko Design.

These IoT pet devices uses smart technology to allow owners to interact with their dogs while away from home!

Posted on by

Named after the Spanish and Portuguese nickname for ‘amigo,’ which means ‘friend,’ Migo’s IoT system consists of four main components: a collar, camera/speaker, door sensor, and smart socket.

Let’s face it–our separation anxiety is just as bad as our dogs. Closing the front door on our crying dog is possibly harder than coming home to a shredded couch and floor filled with ripped-up foam cushioning. What happens at home when the dog’s left alone remains a mystery until our return and then we wish it stayed that way. Created by Norway-based designer Lucas Couto, Migo is a kit of IoT devices that leans on smart technology to provide remote interaction between dogs and their owners while they’re away.

Migo is short for ‘amigo,’ which means ‘friend’ in Spanish. Each component of Migo communicates and connects to one another via Bluetooth, which allows for remote interaction between dogs and their owners. The system’s main appeal is the collar since it comes equipped with a tracking system, temperature sensor, heart rate monitor, audio output, and an LED flashlight. Owners can also have all eyes on their dog at home through the camera unit that functions as a traditional surveillance camera. The camera even comes with a speaker so that owners can speak to their dogs whenever anxiety levels seem to rise.

As soon as owners leave through their front door, Migo’s door sensor instantly sends a signal to another IoT device to turn it on and distract the dog. For example, once the door is opened and then closed, Migo sends a signal to the television to distract the dog. The chief component, however, would probably be the smart socket. The smart socket has audio output capabilities and receives signals from all the other devices to turn them on or off. The owner can keep tabs on their dog’s every movement from the convenience of an accompanying app that allows owners to watch and interact with their pups from anywhere.

Designer: Lucas Couto

The IoT system of smart devices is easy to assemble and comfortable for your dog to wear. Migo consists of four main components: a tracking collar, camera/speaker, smart socket, and door sensor. The devices have an inconspicuous design so they can be placed anywhere throughout the house.

Each component of Migo communicates via Bluetooth connectivity.

Owners can remotely control Migo’s appliances from anywhere, so when your pup feels anxious, a calming song can be broadcasted through the camera speakers.

As soon as the owner closes the front door, Migo sends a signal to the television to turn on and distract your pup from separation.

With built-in temperature sensors, the collar can remotely activate AC units to ensure your dog is always comfortable.

Owners are able to interact with each component of Migo while using the system’s accompanying app.

Migo’s smart collars come in an array of different colors to match your pup’s personality.

Embedded heart rate monitors also come with the smart collar to keep track of your dog’s anxiety levels. The tracking collar comes equipped with an LED flashlight that can either be manually or remotely controlled.

Owners can remove the smart aspect of the tracking collar to charge it between use.

The smart socket works as the chief operator for Migo, controlling and receiving signals from every other IoT device.

The camera can be turned on and off using remote technology so owners can always keep a watchful eye over their dogs no matter where they are.

This credit-card sized antenna harvests energy from 5G signals into wireless power for IoT devices!

Posted on by




Harvesting abundant sources of renewable energy and then converting them into something valuable has been the quest humankind has been on for decades. This makes even more sense in current times when we are on the brink of exhausting earth’s vital resources, causing unrepairable harm to the planet. As scouts of this very quest, the team at Georgia Tech’s ATHENA lab has created a 3D-printed energy harvesting antenna that’s capable of garnering electromagnetic energy of the 5G signals to juice modern-day gadgets. The technology is literally about putting the overcapacity 5G network bandwidth to judicious use – turning it into a wireless power grid that could shape the future of our relentless energy requirements for IoT devices or mobile devices.

They’ve created a flexible Rotman lens-based rectifying antenna (rectenna) that can collect the millimeter-wave in the 28-GHz band – the first of its kind. Previously there have been attempts to harvest the 24 or 35 GHz frequencies, but they were not practical since they only worked when they are in sight of the 5G base station. Emmanouil Tentzeris, Professor in Flexible Electronics in Georgia Tech’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, rightly summed it up by saying, “The fact is, 5G is going to be everywhere, especially in urban areas. You can replace millions, or tens of millions, of batteries of wireless sensors, especially for smart city and smart agricultural applications.”

This one is by far the most potent wireless power grid capable of powering devices at acute range – much better than any existing technology aimed at doing so. The credit card-sized iteration of the technology has a spiky plate around the center, which assimilates the 5G network’s millimeter waves. Just to compare, the rectenna design antenna developed by the team is almost 21 times more capable of sucking power from any direction – making it a viable bendable energy harvesting system capable of being employed in future technology implementations for the end-user.

It could be anything from an energy harvesting phone case, a credit card in your wallet that could charge your smartwatch at the end of the day, or a deck of cards that does more than its core intended purpose. For now, however, the innovation is only capable of powering low-energy IoT devices like sensors on your thermostat, but still, it the first step in the limitless possibilities that it promises.

Designer: Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology

The best smart lights for your bedroom

Posted on by
Waking up to the sound of a blaring alarm can be jarring, especially if you have to do so in pitch black. That’s why some people have turned to devices that mimic the arrival of daylight as a gentler way to stir from slumber. So-called sunrise or wak...

Amazon’s Sidewalk neighborhood WiFi will work with Echo and Tile devices

Posted on by
Last fall, Amazon announced Sidewalk, a way to keep low-power, low-bandwidth IoT devices connected even when they’re far from your WiFi router. Today, Amazon revealed a few new details, including the addition of Echo and Tile devices. The company pla...