The camera may be able to capture the scrolling smoothness if you hold the clock vertically. such that from our perspective the text looks like is going from the top to the bottom of our video player.
I agree, it is way too expensive at $200, but if youre spending that type of money, you should support a fellow enthusiast that makes a better product, the gameframe ledseq.com/product/game-frame/ (no affiliation). It's made by a guy named Jeremy Williams that is a rather cool dad dude that you'll often see on the Mythbusters website/show called Tested.
this is sooo coool cute and retro....i want it....the way it displays stuff reminds me of those digital pets back days. rip my dream. 200 US dollar...................my max is 20 dollar....
At that price I think it is problematic that it seems you have to subscribe to a service for the thing to work. The manufacturer can pull the plug anytime, and then you're left with a $200 paper weight.
i just like the font the display the design. i dont care all the function. all i want is time. i dont care the app...... rip dream. been looking for the perfect alarm for ages yet none...this gotta be a close call until all the cons show up....
ThatBulgarian still a stupid price for what it is, I would be willing to spend £50, not £160 - £200, was going to get one for brother for Christmas after watching video then saw the price...he can have a wall clock instead lol
They already sell those for far less. It's been several years since I've seen an ad for one, but if I recall, you can pre-set them with around 5 messages, and it might have been something you could purchase at Spencer's Gifts or similar outlets.
Ha ha, if you want to show people how freakin' difficult that would be to achieve with a Raspberry Pi I will send you one. I am a bit of a nerd and I don't think I would be up for trying to recreate that. Looks like a really cool device, bit pricey for me but I certainly like it. Thanks for the video as always.
If this was $20-35 this would be fine, people have said this before but for $200 I could set up the same kind of thing but with a real display and a r̶a̶s̶p̶b̶e̶r̶r̶y̶ ̶p̶i̶ beagle bone~4 times over. If you had more in depth programming skills I imagine you could do similar with one of those $100 led scroll signs you can get on amazon and an RPI or an Arduino, depending on how the sign works.
Bought one too. Forget about the apps that come with it. The majority of them are cool when trying out your new purchase but turn out to be pretty useless in everyday use. E.g. the mentioned app to show the next bus: Who doesn't just remember the bus schedule after a week? Another example is the news app: In everyday use, you aren't constantly watching the thing, so if a news item is displayed you most likely have missed the start and need to wait for the whole cycle of all apps for it to come back. Not very practical. IMHO only the apps that display stuff without scrolling text are useful for everyday use (like the youtube subscriber counter, weather, clock, etc.). But why did i buy it then? IMHO, where the thing really shines is when using it as a smarthome display. You can send JSON data to it to make it display everything you want. You don't need their cloud service to do that, so it works without internet as well (was really important to me). I generate the data within OpenHAB and use it for displaying the status and alerts of my house (e.g. i generate a notice if some plants are low on water, if the washing machine is done in the basement, if the phone rings the number of the caller is shown, etc.).
robehickmann There's a difference between bringing up a terminal via SSH and an SSH tunnel. SSH Tunnels allow you to route traffic from one box to your local machine on another or the same port.
$200.... that's just stupid. Who would want to spend that kind of money on an alarm clock from an unknown company that is useless as soon as someone decides to remove the app from the store? No thanks.If it was open platform and $70 i'd consider it.
I have bad experience with those rubberized surfaces. They will either get worn off with time or get gooey and sticky. I wish they would just use simple glossy plastic that lasts.
Arne Schmitz Yuuuuuuuuuuup. I can confirm that this happened with mine and the manufacturers were not very helpful or receptive about it. Although it was under warranty, they told me that it was my fault and that I was the first they have heard of it. Of course I had explained to them that the unit hadn't been exposed to anything out of the ordinary like direct sunlight or any sort of super high temperatures or excessive moisture. In the end, they told me that I could pay to have it shipped to them and pay to have it returned to me from Ukraine, without any guarantees that they would actually change the housing or replace the unit due to the stickiness issue. The functionality of the device itself is pretty good. It's just that coating that is an issue definitely, perhaps if you live in a super climate controlled environment you'll be totally fine, but if you live in a a place like Louisiana or Florida where temperates can get up in the 80s and 90s in the summer, I think you'll have a problem with stickiness. They could have made it right by just agreeing to assess the unit and replace the housing at their cost, since it's clearly a defect for it to do this after 10 months of use.
I quite like the idea of this. Let's have a shuffty at that Amazon link... WHAT??!? One hundred and sixty quid? Nah, I think I'll dig out my old Raspberry Pi and make that do stuff instead.
£159.00 is a little rich, I think that if you are going to charge a premium price then it really does need to be a premium product. feels a bit light with average speakers but my biggest problem is the cables poor positioning it restricts placement and no doubt will become damaged over time (Depending on use) I will wait until drops below £50 or an alternative becomes available! MM
If they released a new version with better speakers, stero speakers if you will, I might actually get one, not as an alarm clock, but to listen to music when I'm reading, whilst keeping track of something or other as I tend to lose track of time when reading.
You could buy all the modules to build it from ebay etc cheaply, but writing the software for the device and the control app will take you more than £150 in time to implement similar features. It does look like an excellent project for serially addressable LEDs.
Where using the esp8266 8€ and the ws2812 leds 50€ to make a big matrix and play pong on it using two smartphones to controll it. The code will be a challange but it could be done in a couple of days.
This thing's cute, but beyond the initial fascination of the black monolith's hidden display, it seems like a crappy form factor for all the stuff it's trying to achieve. All that distracting unnecessary motion would drive me nuts. I'd much rather have one with a decent-resolution LCD screen à la digital picture frames. Also, I won't use any alarm clock that doesn't have a battery backup and the ability to still sound the alarm while running off of it. Sucky that you have to plug this thing into a laptop with powered-on USB ports or else use a UPS to avoid missing your alarm due to a blackout. BTW, what was the weird all-in-one PC or point-of-sale terminal in the puppet segment? Also, "I think you'll find that" 😁 you should have horizontally flipped the shots of the elderly puppet to ameliorate the "crossing the line" problem with both him and the puppet at the computer looking to the left while talking to each other.
$200 for a digital clock? Feels like a LaMe tric(k). _(Sorry, I couldn't resist.)_ I hate that you have to make an account with their servers, although it sounds like they've released a version of the firmware that allows you to control it locally without using their cloud. If you can use it completely without their servers, it might be compelling to me at $100 or so.
Something like this in conjunction with an Amazon Echo would be really nice, especially if programming apps for this device allows push notifications to be sent, which it seems it does. Downside is the cost is outside my budget for these kind of nifty toys.
who would dislike this video?! or anything techmoan does for that matter. all his content is informative and entertaining and the skits at end of video are pure gold. love the new dad character too!
Too bad the clock isn't battery powered. This would have been an ideal accessory for the ham radio operator while operating remote. Price is sort of steep though. 73 AI4QT
Not one of the most interesting videos except for the puppets at the end - well worth the wait. btw that device needs a wider display to be really useful
The page title for (what I assume is meant to be) the most popular apps being titled "popupar" doesn't fill me with confidence...any idea how secure it is?
Hey techmoan. If you want screens to look good on camera (for scrolling text on this video) then keep making the shutter speed slower and slower until it looks smooth. (Probably 1/50 or 1/40 for hat device) You can get more technical with syncoscan. But slowing the shutter speed is the easiest and best way to control that sort of thing.
Nice clock, but price is high. Should make one with Arduino and wifi add-on board. Arduino can run LED displays. Search for RGB displays and you see it can show more pixels and full color display. Here is not full color, so it's a shame.
It's beautiful! Anyone else noticed that only the left size is displaying colour? Perhaps it has RGB LEDs there and white LEDs for the rest of it. Maybe a future model will have full RGB.
Cute, but... Given the choice of paying USD$169 for this or paying USD$50 for an 8" quad-core Android tablet (including postage costs from China), I think I'd go the latter considering it's capable of *far* more.
OK, I seriously need one: I have to swap the "radio controlled" LED desk clock ordered from UK that didn't say anywhere in description it was WORKING ONLY in UK (not like the most of the radio-controlled clocks that work perfectly here in Italy). It doesn't catch the radio signal (so it goes forward 2 mins in 6 months) but for very strange reasons (I think radio propagation) 1 or 2 times a year it catches the radio signal and switch the time to Greenwich time (-1 hour respect to italian time) so I have to reset it manually. I hate my clock. But this LaMetric Time costs so much :(
It seems OK for a totally out of the box solution, but I can't help but think even somebody with the most rudimentary making abilities could match it at a fraction of the price. (or to paraphrase 'You could do that with a raspberry pi) A hundred and sixty quid is insane for this.
