Bag of Gadgets

We wanted to get over the various cheap Chinese weather stations that monitor the temperature, humidity and air pressure at home or in the office with not so good accuracy. There are quite a lot of various models designed to be cheap that you can buy under various brands, but what is common is that the level of accuraciy of these can vary a lot. Just an example as you can see on the photo above – two exact same devices bought together are showing 10% difference in the reported humidity in the same place. This is not 10% variance in accuracy, this is 10% diffectence in the actual value reported. The difference is that at 42% humidity level 10% variance means the device can report between 37.8% and 46.2%, but we are getting 52% instead on the other device… talk about accuracy. So we went on a quest to see what better alternatives are available out there, gadgets that can monitor the environment we live in more accurately and can do just more than reporting some numbers.

After a bit of reseaching what new smarter personal weather stations or home environment devices are available or are soon upcoming we have found out that there are actually quite a few projects. The one that seemed as a great solution for our needs that required the monitoring of multiple rooms simultaneously was the Sensor Cubes that allows the use of multiple sensors and you can get additional sensors for more rooms if you already got a kit. So we have ordered a 4-room Sensor Cubes kit and we are going to soon be sharing our feedback from the device, but meanwhile below you can find a list of all the interesting projects we have found. We have separated them in two categories, one for devices that are already available on the market and another one for devices that are coming soon and you can pre-order them.

Already available devices:
– Cube Sensors – indoor only, 2 room kit is priced at about $289 USD
– NetAtmo – 1 indoor and 1 outdoor sensors priced at about $208 USD
– Tempo Environment Monitor – single indoor sensor, available for $70 USD
– Prestigio Smart Weather Station – single indoor sensor priced at about $43 USD

Coming soon devices:
– BloomSky – single internal ($59 USD) or external sensor ($169 USD), available for preorder
– NinjaSphere – single indoor sensor, additional smarttag sensors, available fot pre-order for $329 USD
– Stormtag – avalable for pre-order, single indoor/outdoor sensor, priced at $59.90 USD
– WiMoto – avalable for pre-order, single indoor/outdoor sensor, priced at $49 USD
– Alima – Beta testing, single indoor sensor, no price listed

Home security and environment monitoring:
– Canary – single unit, available for pre-order, priced at $249 USD
– Withings Home – single unit, available for pre-order, priced at $199.95 USD

Smart air quality and fire alarms:
– Nest Protect – available for $99 USD
– Birdi – to be available for $119 USD

Sleep environment monitoring
– ResMed S+ – single non-contact unit, available for order for $149.99 USD
– Hello – base station plus a single tag, available for preorder for $129 USD