Puck.js

This is for anything related to the Puck.js Bluetooth Beacon that was just launched on KickStarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gfw/puckjs-the-ground-breaking-bluetooth-beacon

Is that "dot" a clone of Puck.js? http://doteverything.co/

I don't think so... It sounds like it's a pretty standard Bluetooth beacon, albeit with RGB LEDs.

Minewtech and others have been knocking stuff like that out of years - Dot's real selling point appears to be their app (as it looks like there is nothing clever in the beacon itself).

They show it next to a light, but as far as I can tell that's a little misleading. The app on your phone will detect proximity to the beacon, and will then contact IFTTT (or something similar) which will then contact your expensive net-connected light-bulb and turn it on.

I'd have to wait until they're made, but my guess is the LED and proximity are exposed in totally standard ways - in which case you could make Puck.js pretend to be a dot and then use their app... Or maybe more interesting you could make it do things like pretend to be a dot, but only when a door is open.

@Gordon, just curious about something you mentioned in your last KS update. What was the reasoning for the supplier doubling the cost for the casings?

I honestly don't know, as I'm hearing this through Seeed. I think perhaps the supplier had accidentally under-quoted the first time - we've moved to someone else now though.

What it could be is you need to make moulds in different parts that will separate to release the final part. As I understand it we're using a 3 or 4 part mould at the moment, and it's possible that they originally thought they could use just 2 parts and then realised they couldn't.

... so that would have meant much more machining, so more cost. It was the cost of making the moulds that doubled - from $3000 to $5700. The actual per-device cost is still around $0.3, but given I'm only doing 4500 of them for the KickStarter the cost of making the moulds kind of dwarfs the rest of the case's cost!

Web bluetooth now in mainline Chrome.

It's been there for a long time already - the only difference is now you don't have to enable it with chrome://flags (if whatever site has an Origin Trial token).

The gotcha is that the tokens run out every few months, so you need to keep updating your website (every webpage - it's not enough to have it in the one JS file that uses Web Bluetooth).