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Comment by chime | Hacker News Reader

Seems similar in concept as http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/supermechanical/twine-li... 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.

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Hey Chime,

I'm Marcus, one of the developers on Ninja Blocks. We're currently doing Ninja Blocks within Startmate (an Australian accelerator similar to YC).

To answer your question: We're open source so people could take what we've done and build a standard on it.

Cheers,

Marcus

Hey Marcus, I don't know if this helps but www.DonationTo.com enables you to keep 100% of all your fundraising dollars. NO 5% deduction. If you don't reach your goal you still keep your funds collected. Hope this helps the Ninja Blocks project, its a very cool product overall!

Thanks for the tip!

I agree it does seem similar, and I backed both projects because I think these lightweight data collection devices have a big future.

Definitely agree on getting some kind of standard API across the various devices, although I expect we are probably a couple of years away from having that. Still with both Ninja Blocks and Twine getting some traction I think it's something that will happen sooner rather than later...

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

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

very true...its "ifttt" in terms of hardware(sensor) triggers.

I'd like to see reviews and tests. One particular concern is battery. Twine is tiny and that's nice, but it doesn't seem to have any means of charging and frankly, having to change batteries for a number of devices regularly just kills the usability for many purposes off the top of my head. This one is bigger but it looks like it can be plugged.

yes, we're mainly focused on plugged-in hardware. there'll probably be a battery pack made at some point, but it's not our first priority.

The flow of video seems to be similar too. The concept, shape of the product looks heavily inspired.

Telecom (ETSI) has got standards for M2M APIs

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