Want to monitor things and environments remotely without a nerd degree? Get a tweet when your laundry’s done, an email when AC breaks and your pets are at home, or a text message when you left the garage door open. Twine is the simplest way to get the objects in your life texting, tweeting or emailing.
A durable 2.7″ block provides internal temperature and orientation sensors, and runs on two AAA batteries and connects to the Internet via Wi-Fi. A simple web app lets you monitor your Twine and tell it when to alert you with human-friendly rules – no programming needed.
$ 139.95
Read the Twine Community Forum before purchase!,
Twine is a great idea and has potential however it is still very much in the alpha stage. Before purchasing scan through the forum and see if you can accept the issues others are having. For example threads such as this one: communitydotsupermechanicaldotcom
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|didn’t work, waiting for support UPDATED,
Although a clever idea mine would not set up when following the instructions provided with the unit and their website. The device is in a rubber sleeve that I am sure makes it more robust but it also makes it hard to change batteries.
It is tough to do a startup with just a few people and limited resources but this one needs some help.
Given that I ordered mine directly from supermechanical and just got it today I assume the reviews dated before this date (12/8/12) are from friend and family or early beta testers.
Hopefully they will get a solution out soon or us early adopters are out of luck.
I will post more on this review as things develop.
I got an email back the Monday afternoon after I sent my support request in (sent on Saturday). The suggested I make sure that I had not custom DNS settings on my computer but rather just let it get the DNS setting from the router. I removed my DNS domains and then everything worked just fine.
Update 2: After playing with this for awhile I have to say that if you are looking for remote sensing this is OK. I would suggest though that you also have a look at the Node sensor. The hardware is much more elegant than the Twine (Is this an example of the classic MIT vs Stanford design points?) . It also has an OK iPhone app. It does not have the nice alerting capabilities that the Twine has though. A better world would be the Node hardware with the Twine monitoring.
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|Twine, a big disappointment !!!,
Twine is unfortunately a big disappointment.
1. Battery lifetime is only some days, NOT weeks or months
2. The rules are very basic, and because of that useless
2.1. Only GET request with a very limited url length
2.2. No BASIC authentication possible, e.g. user:password@host …
3. Temperature monitoring is not possible, because you can’t create a rule, that send a message when the temperature change. You can only create rules when a threshold is reached, e.g. if temperature reached 70 °F
4. Vibration detection is currently not supported, Twine can only detect if the orientation changes
So Twine is a nice hobby project, but is it worth more than 100$? Absolutely NO. Better buy a Raspberry Pi to play around with external sensors.
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