Internet of Toys: DynePods

What is this?  Something that’s not directly robot related?  Why, yes it is!  I was contacted by Beth Winkowski, the PR person for Dynepic about an upcoming Kickstarter campaign.  It was a standard email and I wasn’t sure if the product, DynaPod, was something my readers would be interested in.  I decided to respond and tell her I’d pass it on to some of my friends to blog about.  However, we got talking and as she explained more and more about the product and platform, it began piquing my interest.

So what is it?

It’s a small, programmable unit with a multi colour 5 x 5 LED matrix display.  Using various click-on accessories that you can either buy or 3D print yourself, you can add the DynePod to pretty much anything you can imagine, including your LEGO creations. It can wireless communicate via BT LE (just iOS for now).  I like that through very simply programming interface, you can make it buzz, display something or vibrate, if it senses something through its movement sensor, or other external events.  It employs an “IF EVENT THEN ACTION” mechanism (which they call an Axiom), which looks like this:

That’s not all though, because it uses BT LE, it can detect when a friend’s DynePod is near, so you could do something like this:

The platform was designed with children’s safety in mind, of course, so only contacts that have been approved by the parents will be allowed to link up.  I really like the example they have on their site to create a “watch” that shows kids when they’re wandering too far away from the parent:

How cool is that?  I wonder if it could be “hacked” to allow you to automatically lock your desktop if you walk away from it, I think that would be super cool.

There’s a great video of Krissa Watry, the co-founder and CEO behind the project, where she explains some of the cool things you can do with it

They’re going to launch their Kickstarter campain on 15 November and I can’t wait to see it.  I will make sure to keep you posted when that happens.  Meanwhile, go check out their website: [LINK].