Jovan Stosic
Abstract:
Like virtually all New York City apartment dwellers, I am occasionally visited by a mouse looking for a new home. However, I was still surprised to hear a familiar scratching sound emanating from behind my desk late last year. This was because 12 months previously my unusually diligent landlord and I searched for every mouse-size gap in my newly renovated apartment and blocked them all with either metal plates or steel wool. . I put down poison and traps, but they were ignored. I started an increasingly frustrated search for the mouse’s entry point, until my suspicions fell on the gap between the bottom of our apartment’s front door and the sill. It looked just large enough for a small mouse to squeeze under, but I wasn’t sure. So, naturally, I set about building my own indoor wildlife camera system to catch the pest in the act of entering. . I could have tried hooking up our Nest Wi-Fienabled security camera, and set it for night vision and motion detection, but the Nest is really designed for monitoring rooms, not small areas like my doorsill. I also wondered if I could achieve my goals without sending a stream of live video from my home to some unknown data center. . Fortunately, I’d spotted what promised to be the ideal solution during the 2016 World Maker Faire in New York City last October. Singapore-based Annikken makes a line of shields that let Arduino microcontrollers communicate with a smartphone via Bluetooth. Previously, these shields worked with either Android or iOS mobile devices, but not both. At the Faire however, Annikken was demonstrating its latest product, the US $79 Annikken Andee U-AIO, which can communicate with both types of device (and the Apple Watch as well).
Published in: IEEE Spectrum ( Volume: 54, Issue: 2, February 2017 )
Page(s): 19 – 20
Date of Publication: 31 January 2017
Print ISSN: 0018-9235
DOI: 10.1109/MSPEC.2017.7833496
Publisher: IEEE
Sponsored by: IEEE