Smart Pen

This hit a nerve for me. The majority of the products I’ve designed have had multiple people asking about bluetooth during development, in situations that absolutely don’t call for it. I’m almost at the point where I feel I’m becoming biased about ever using bluetooth, period!

that made me think of this :slight_smile:

I bet they’ve been offered $8 million in funding to bring that pen to market. Brilliant!

How much does it cost?

While I share the general lack of disregard for the overall state of IoT connected objects (such as connected Juicers) - there are certainly a lot of great applications out there. I just added a We-mo outlet to my cat’s feeder, so now I can feed him automatically in the morning, or in emergency situations when I won’t be home from work on time to give him his can of food.

It’s also impressive how accessible the technology is to do what he did. It only takes a couple lines of code to get an Arduino to do what he did. For designers who are working in any type of converged space, these technologies are so accessible now that it should be viewed as an enabler of good design opportunities rather than a “spread this on anything” type of thought process. You used to need a team of engineers to get up and running what you can do with an Arduino or Raspberry Pi these days.

That still demonstrates the problem with IOT. The best real-world use scenarios I’ve seen are fairly individual and use only 1 of these products. I haven’t read of placing a Wemo on everything in their house.

I don’t think we’ll ever get to the sci-fi world where everything is smart. (We’ll probably have a multi-purpose robot maid like the jetson’s before then). Things that do 1 thing are less useful than things that do many. That’s why we use smartphones instead of an iCalculator, iNotepad, iPod, etc.

I just think that the commoditization and ease of accessibility is a good thing for designers who want to branch out beyond the traditional purely physical design aspects, especially for what it offers in experimentation and learning.

This is absolutely ingenious, where can I buy one? I bought a pen a few years back and up until now had no way to operate the clicker.


www.kelly3d.com