These tiny gadgets can turn your dumb home smart, and it won’t cost much

Image by Ruocaled

One of the biggest appeals of having a smarthome is getting rid of all of the freaking remotes. The air conditioner, TV, speaker system, cable box, Blu-ray player; each one comes with a button-laden plastic stick, even the most elegantly designed of which still look like something coughed up from the 1990s.

Some smartphones have shipped with “IR-blasters,” the same kind of infrared-emitting technology found in old TV remotes. IR-equipped phones can go some distance in replacing remotes, but they’re not a perfect solution. In addition to being fairly rare on modern smartphones, the infrared-emitters on phones have the same limitations as conventional remotes: they must be pointed directly at the device in question, and are limited to simple single-button actions.

One Hong Kong startup is looking to bring our old IR-based devices into the 21st century – and make it possible to turn nearly any house into a smarthome.

Bringing old devices into the 21st century

One way to bring your home out of the creaky, IR-laden past would be to throw out all of your electronic devices and replace them with newer, wifi/bluetooth-enabled ones. But assuming you’re not in the mood to spend several thousand dollars in the pursuit of remote-less convenience, you might be interested in Klikr.

“We do not want to simply recreate the universal remote control on your smartphone,” says Klikr founder Antoine Vandenheste. “We want to reinvent the experience.”

Klikr takes a seemingly complicated problem – bringing many different types of IR-based analog devices onto a single network – and hits it with a staggeringly simple solution.

Each Klikr device is just a small plastic square. The user attaches the square to their devices’ IR receiver, and voila, the device is on the network.

That’s because each square contains its own IR-blaster and a bluetooth antenna. Using the Klikr app, the user can see all of the devices on their home network, and control them via bluetooth.

This video, a promo for their Kickstarter campaign, shows Klikr in action:

Click “volume up” on the TV app, for example, and the Klikr device attached to your TV fires an IR signal to turn up the volume.

That’s the basic scenario. But Klikr also supports a wide range of more modern smart home features. Get a phone call? Your stereo or movie can pause automatically. In a rush? Just give a voice command like “turn off the TV” or “set the air conditioner to 22 degrees.”

The company is also working on IFTTT support (If This This Then That, a web service that automates digital workflows) which could give the app the ability to, for example, turn on the TV when your phone’s morning alarm goes off.

From Lego to Kickstarter

Preparing for the first wave