LittleBits' New Kit Lets You Create Your Own Smart-Home Gizmos

LittleBits' latest kit brings the company's DIY ethos to the smart home with a handful of new modules.
The LittleBits SmartHome Kit lets you hack together your own solutions.
The LittleBits Smart-Home Kit lets you hack together your own solutions.LittleBits

LittleBits has steadily expanded its Lego-like modular electronics platform this year, introducing new pieces that let users connect their creations to the internet and link them up to other hardware platforms like Arduino. Now, with its latest kit, LittleBits is bringing its DIY ethos to the smart home.

The company's Smart Home Kit is meant to let people build their own version of the internet of things. With six new pieces, users can hack together versions of familiar smart-home concepts---connected coffee pots and presence-aware lamps---or create solutions of their own devising. The idea, says LittleBits CEO Ayah Bdeir, is to give people an alternative to the prepackage solutions being "parachuted" into homes by companies like Belkin and Cisco.

Which Ideas Are Worth Your Time---And Money?

At $249, it's one of the company's biggest kits to date. It has 14 modules and 11 accessories, all of which can be snapped together without the need of a soldering iron or other tools. In addition to some of the company's familiar modules, like the recently-introduced one that connects projects to the cloud, the kit has five new "bits," including a temperature sensor, a simple LCD display that doubles as a counter, an MP3 player, and a "threshold" bit that will trigger actions in certain situations. An infrared module works with another new component, an AC switch, which users can deploy to bring any old appliances, like a lamps or coffee maker, into the fold.

Using a sound sensor and the counter, for example, you could rig up a little gadget to text your phone when your dog barks more than 20 times. Or you could stick the temperature sensor in your fridge and have it alert you in the event the door's left open. With the MP3 player and the speaker from the company's synth kit, you could play waiting music for the pizza delivery guy at the front door.

It may turn out that having dedicated gizmos for these situations isn't especially useful. But that's part of the appeal of the LittleBits kit. Instead of taking some company's word on what your smart home should be---accepting that the "problems" they're trying to solve are indeed problems, and shelling out for individual solutions to them---LittleBits wants to give people tools to feel out this new territory for themselves. "You can imagine that there might be a Kickstarter for a device that you put by your door, a 'dog bark tracker,'" says Krystal Persaud, the lead designer on the new product. "But the point is, should all these little ideas really be individual companies?" Or from a consumer's perspective, should they be individual products?

A few projects made possible by the new kit.

LittleBits
Letting People Create for Themselves

Of course, there's no way for LittleBits to give people access to the types sophisticated algorithms that power Nest, for example, or to let them build the sort of apps that coordinate Sonos across several rooms. And since the kit only comes with one CloudBit, it will only really let you build one internet-connected project at a time (additional Cloud Bits can be had at $60 a pop).

Still, Bdeir sees huge value in giving people tools to come up with new ideas for hardware solutions. As the platform has become more powerful, LittleBits has seen its user base expand from parents and educators to designers and engineers, who use it for quick and dirty prototyping. The point is that LittleBits isn't just useful for creating quirky little one-off projects but instead for helping ideas and concepts take real, functioning form.

Bdeir points to the way the App Store changed software. Who knew that people would want an app for making six-second-long videos, or sending self-destructing photo messages to friends? "There are many non-obvious apps that have emerged," she says, "and the whole industry started to gravitate toward these things that wouldn't be possible if it was just companies making software you purchase. We want to embrace this new wave of innovation that's a combination of companies having opinions but also people being able to create for themselves."