

Ninja Blocks: Connect your world with the web - DamonOehlman
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ninja/ninja-blocks-connect-your-world-with-the-web

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chime
Seems similar in concept as
[http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/supermechanical/twine-
li...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/supermechanical/twine-listen-to-
your-world-talk-to-the-internet) but offers a different UI/event-action model
and few more integrated services. I wonder if these tiny-sensor-computer
makers can come up with a standard so we can remotely control any of them
without knowing the specific APIs.

~~~
ychung
I agree, it's twine & ifttt combined into one. It's almost the next iteration
of twine in its UI and functionality.

~~~
jasonsack
it almost seems as if the demo web interface was lifted directly from IFTTT
too.

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shadowmint
This is a cool project, and I'm supporting it...

...however, _sigh_ this is exactly what you should _not_ be using kickstarter
for.

Kickstarter is not a shop, and I hope that anyone who pledges towards them
realizes that they are supporting the project _not buying something_, and
those $$$ have absolutely 1) no guarantee on receiving any product or 2) no
recourse if anything is defective / wrong / whatever on it.

Kickstarter shouldn't be allowing this sort of project.

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schappim
Hey Shadowmint,

I think you need to checkout
<http://www.kickstarter.com/help/faq/backing%20a%20project>

Cheers,

Marcus

~~~
shadowmint
Who is responsible for making sure project creators deliver what they promise?

Every creator is responsible for fulfilling the promises of their project.
Because projects are usually funded by the friends, fans, and communities
around its creator, there are powerful social forces that keep creators
accountable. Creators are also encouraged to post regular updates about the
progress of their project post-funding — communication goes a long way.

\--

Yes, I'm quite familiar with the Kickstarter FAQ and TOS.

As a project owner, you are not legally obliged to provide anything. It's
entirely up to you.

You earn negative karma and never-allowed-on-kickstarter-again status if you
mess it up, but that's about it.

Kickstarter is not an ecommerce site. If you're selling things, you should use
a shop. Wordpress and paypal will get you off the ground in about 20 minutes.

If you're doing a startup that needs funding to get off the ground, awesome,
use kickstarter...

...but not as a shop.

The only point I'm making is that it's deceptive practice to pretend that
Kickstarter is a shop, when none of the normal legal provisions apply.

Of course, what you do it entirely up to you, but people should be aware.

~~~
DamonOehlman
I think what the guys is done is fair enough, although I can definitely see
the point you are making. The thing for me about this that makes it more
kickstarter like than ready for an online store presence is the fact that it's
going to be a few months before I get my hands on some shiny Ninja Blocks.

For some reason I feel more comfortable with pledging money to a small
business on kickstarter than through an online store having them say "we'll
get it to you in four months time". I realise it's just a slight mental shift,
but it really changes the way I look at things.

Perhaps it's time for KickStarter to adapt to the growth in this area, by
spinning of a products and projects site (still kickstarted branded and
hosted) which does help folks bootstrap small companies that actually need to
buy stuff in quantities to make something viable.

~~~
shadowmint
Yup, totally agree, that'd be an great addition to Kickstarter.

Just shift the pre-sales out of the pledges and into 'we have some
accountability' area for people who want to buy something.

Some kind of phased release of the funds to the project if they meet certain
delivery milestones or something. I'm sure it could work~

(and you know, be ethical and legal at the same time...)

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glimcat
You could sadly do better with an Arduino Mini and a Zigbee, if you had "Hello
World" level knowledge of electronics and microcontroller programming. One of
the big ongoing issues in this field is that sensor nodes need to be cheap, as
you ideally want to have a number of them around. Simultaneously, you need to
not be changing batteries all the time.

Want to see some serious internet-of-things action? Put Bluetooth Low Energy
radios in the next iPhone.

~~~
RenaudLienhart
> Put Bluetooth Low Energy radios in the next iPhone.

Not sure this is what you meant, but the iPhone 4S already has a Bluetooth Low
Energy radio and an API to control it (CoreBluetooth).

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glimcat
Thanks. I knew they included Bluetooth 4.0, but Low Energy was left out of the
specs page. I actually still can't find any mention of it except in
CoreBluetooth - their site organization is a bit painful if you're not there
to buy.

There's also a demo implementation for Android by one of the radio
manufacturers - not great, but maybe usable for initial development. This is
much more significant on iPhone because it diffuses into the market more
rapidly than a single model of Android handheld usually will.

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dmvaldman
This is one of those great concepts that has a "this needs to happen" feeling,
and it's a matter of who's going to do a great job with it. Looks like Ninja
Blocks is on the right track.

However, as I think about the concept more, I'm having a difficult time
finding a useful case for the concept. I think it's just because I'm not
creative enough. So what would you, Hacker News reader, use Ninja Blocks for?

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redthrowaway
I'm just picturing all the contraptions from Honey I Shrunk the Kids.
Automatic pet feeding, for one.

On a more useful note, my uncle is a quadriplegic. He was fortunate, in a
sense, that he was working when he had his accident, so he has 24 hr
attendants. Most wouldn't be able to afford that. There are expensive,
proprietary systems that allow him to open doors, turn off lights, etc with a
remote, but you could jury-rig something with NinjaBox to get the job done
much cheaper.

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mwotton
yes, exactly. there are a heap of markets that are expensive to target because
they're so small - we're in talks with research labs to do experiment
automation,for instance, and their equipment is usually priced in the hundreds
of thousands. We're aiming at being the glue: geeks have always hacked their
own stuff, this just makes it possible for everyone else to do the same.

~~~
DamonOehlman
The attraction for me is that although I've always been able to hack
electronics and stuff (and did quite a bit when I was younger), I just don't
have the time.

I'm a software hacker through and through, and that's where I want to spend my
most limited resource. Having some hardware that takes care of most of the
heavy lifting in that space is very appealling.

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akavi
It's like a hardware version of IFTTT.

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nopassrecover
It's interesting to see an incubator-backed startup leveraging Kickstarter.
Definitely a pretty cool concept though.

~~~
thomasgerbe
I'm actually confused. I remember Kickstarter specifically saying that they
didn't fund startups back when I applied to them.

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mwotton
Hi - I'm one of the hackers behind Ninja Blocks. We're not actually getting
funding from Kickstarter - we're just pre-selling the product.

~~~
shadowmint
While I love what you guys are doing, it really troubles me to hear you say
that so blatantly...

~~~
schappim
What @mwotton means to say is that we've made a lot of progress. We could
probably eventually sell Ninja Blocks without Kickstarter, but certainly not
to the quality we want.

Unlike software projects, hardware requires tooling, parts and materials.
Kickstarter is allowing us to do this!

We're also open source hardware!

Cheers,

Marcus (I'm a developer on the Ninja Blocks project).

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felipe
Pretty interesting and creative way to pitch the project: They created their
main web site [1] as if the product already existed, giving the potential
donor a good feeling about the end goal.

[1] <http://ninjablocks.com>

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JohnConnor
It seems to me that the hook.io project would make an ideal candidate for the
software to connect these devices.

<https://github.com/hookio/hook.io>

hook.io is all about building the software for connecting devices together to
do functionality like this. It would be amazing to see this coupled with
actual custom hardware.

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schappim
Hook.io looks great! FYI we're actually using <http://www.zeromq.org/> and
getting 10,000 messages per second off the Ninja Block ;-)

Cheers,

Marcus

~~~
JohnConnor
You should consider ZeroMQ a messaging protocol.

hook.io supports multi-transport messaging protocols.

There has been lots of talk of ZeroMQ as a message transport in hook.io, it's
coming soon.

IMO, you shouldn't be worried about messages per second between devices right
now. You should be worried about how you are going to communicate between
1000s of 3rd party services. hook.io aims to solve that problem.

~~~
bryanh
Listen to this man! We're struggling with the same thing at my startup
(<https://zapier.com/>), and having a robust way to hit some of the crazy
API's out there is by far the most difficult thing we've come across.

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replax
Very nice concept! And by making them very very easy to use & pricing them
accordingly high, they don't really compete with arduino+shields and the like.
As they are "open", I wonder if it will be possible to only use their
webservice with other devices (arduino etc) by paying a monthly fee.

~~~
mwotton
yes, we're investigating this. arduinos are a bit tricky because the hardware
either needs a general-purpose interpreter which can load new code at runtime,
or needs to be able to reprogram itself wholesale over the net. It's doable, I
think, but it's a lot harder than uploading some new code to a full linux
machine.

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steele
Interesting. The official logo seems to have rounded eyes -- good intentions I
suppose. However... [http://50.57.81.138/wp-
content/uploads/2012/01/new_ninja_blo...](http://50.57.81.138/wp-
content/uploads/2012/01/new_ninja_block.png)

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willthefirst
With tech like this, that can sense and communicate events that happen in the
physical world, I'd imagine that the globe will become sentient in 100 years.
Just adding more and more nodes to the ever increasing network.

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yesbabyyes
Are you sure the globe is not sentient already? ;-)

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fsniper
There some other projects like these. But I do not believe they can break
their "niche toys" market and became mainstream. They are expensive and
meaningless toys for any other sane people except us, nerds.

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david_a_r_kemp
You can't claim it's Open Hardware and then not publish the layout files.

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schappim
Wait till after Ninja Blocks gets funded...

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dennislo
You guys are awesome. Nice work!

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GigabyteCoin
Is that a raspberry pi in there?

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mwotton
no, it's a beaglebone and an arduino. we looked at the raspberry pi, but
availability wasn't great.

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chrisrickard
Excellent work guys - looks rad

~~~
schappim
Thanks Chris!

Cheers,

Marcus

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mbaukes
awesomeness with ifttt

I bow down before our new ninja block overlords.

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ColdAsIce
Great, so now a cloud service will know when somebody is at my front door and
all other sensors fire.

Privacy where are you...

~~~
mwotton
Privacy is a legitimate concern, but there are useful things you can do that
you might feel comfortable sharing with our servers. Zero-information
computing is really hard, and we didn't feel it was worth the time it'd take
to give that kind of strong guarantee.

~~~
ColdAsIce
No I do not feel comfortable sharing with your servers.

Are you really free software? Give me the (server) software.

For $25 I can get a simple server and Ill use it.

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schappim
Hey Mate,

The hardware is open. If you want to run your own software on it you can. We
did have a big debate whether to go the zero knowledge route (we previously
worked on building a zero knowledge file service).

Cheers,

Marcus

~~~
ColdAsIce
What is this zero knowledge you mention?

Seems quite a marketing lie, zero knowledge, while you really want _all_ the
knowledge about all my sensors, and the way I use your product. While I get no
knowledge of how your servers work and what you do with it.

~~~
schappim
_We make no claims of being architected Zero Knowledge._

We're familiar with the concept from previous work, but decided it wasn't
worth creating an MVP with it.

One can architect a service to be zero knowledge like the terrific job
<http://www.tarsnap.com/> does. Unfortunately it's pretty hard for us to do
when the core value proposition of our product is that we connect your
hardware to other APIs (Dropbox, Facebook, Twitter etc) (which don't follow a
zero knowledge architecture).

Cheers,

Marcus

