There is no question that the internet of things, or connected home, or whatever you want to call it, has the potential to drastacly change the world. The problem, however, is that of cost. For many of these setups or connected things, the cost is ofetn quite prohibitive. However, we are beginning to see some strides in lower-cost connected things. On Wednesday, we told you a little bit about the SAM Smart Power Strip. Today, we are going to take a look at the Sensibo.

Sensibo is “a tiny device that connects air conditioners to the internet.It can be used with any A/C that has a remote control…Sensibo uses IR commands to communicate with your existing A/C, just like your remote control. It works right out of the box and supports any remote controlled A/C: Window A/Cs, Split, central, standing, etc.”¹

What’s more, the app is incredibly robust. It can connect with your alarm clock to adjust the temperature based on the time of day, it can warm or cool incredibly fast, you can set it to sleep and power saving  modes. Further, you can control all of the standard features directly from your smartphone.

The device itself is surprisingly complex:

Each Sensibo pod is powered by two micro-processors. We chose to work with Texas Instrument’s CC2538 as the main MCU. It runs a 802.15.4 low power RF standard with 6LoWPAN protocol on top. The secondary MCU is Texas Instrument’s CC2541, running Bluetooth Low Energy and supports iBeacon. Sensibo runs on two powerful standard CR123A batteries…Sensibo is equipped with 6 tiny super strong Infra-red emitters pointed in all directions. This way it’s easy to place the pod on your A/C and it just works.²

The device also allows users to connect several different air conditioning units. The Sensibo has two main components: Sensibo Pods – which connect to the A/C unit – and the Smart Hub, which connects to users’ router.

You might have a Samsung in the living room, an LG in the bedroom and a Friedrich in the study and yet, Sensibo allows you to control all of them using one simple interface.³

On top of all these features and applications, the Sensibo is developer friendly. Sensibo has a robust API that allows for the easy incorporation into other apps and can easily work alongside other smart devices. The API gives developers access to:

• Control all your A/C settings
• Temperature input
• Relative humidity input
• Vibrations sensor input
• Ambient light sensor input
• iBeacon information
• Time to reach target temperature
• Efficiency of current A/C usage
• Send arbitrary IR commands (TV, A/V, etc.)
• Receive IR commands (from different remotes)⁴

Currently, you can pre-order the Single Kit – a Sensibo Pod and Smart Hub – for $79, the Duo Kit – 2 pods and the Smart Hub – for $169, or the developers kit for $300. Additional Pods are $69.