Civilian primary radar in most places isn't that strong. It may or may not get a good skin paint depending on distance, size, and atmospheric conditions.
Primary radar is good enough to pickup a 2500# single engine airplane from 50+ miles away.
I flew from Detroit to Boston a few years back in a 4-seat, single engine airplane after an electrical failure. On a hand-held radio and with no electrics, ATC had a good primary target on me the entire way (at 5-9K feet). On controller handoffs, I would have to turn north for 1 mile for them to confirm the primary target they were looking at was me.
Up and down the Eastern seaboard, I pretty regularly get traffic called out as "primary target only" which also means ATC has no idea of the altitude. Those tend to be low, slow moving aircraft (often without electrical systems).
The code on the device will be open source. If you wrote something that made it easier to use when the internet was down (or you weren't connected at all) and sent a pull-request you'd have a good shot of it being accepted. When the backend is released as O/S too there will no doubt be some effort towards getting it running on the device itself.
Dan from Ninja here. That's what happens when you try and explain something geeky to a broad audience... but for the techies...
It's a powerful (same chip as beaglebone black) ARM computer with WiFi, BLE and ZigBee radios. Runs ubuntu. Everything open source. Almost all Node.JS.
It uses open source drivers to connect to devices and learns how they operate, building a model. If something is out of place, it notifies you and gives you context aware control. For example if nobody is at home and the heater is on, it will alert the last person to leave and give them the option to turn it off.
Key new tech is positioning with little USB powered dongles placed around your house and Leap-motion style (but simpler, no 3d hands) gestures for controlling lights, temp, etc.
Everything the NinjaBlock did, but all built-in (no more dongles for wifi etc).
You actually did a pretty good job with the copy right below the video, "Next generation control of your [home or office] with accurate in-home location data and a gesture control interface.". You should have focused on what it can do now and the vision of what it could become and then spent the second half on the open source aspects of it.
You could have also added a steady cam scene following someone around their home and watching their environment change with them. e.g.
Someone is sitting on the bed reading a book and the nightstand light is on. They get up and move to the door and lighting comes on in the hallway as they walk towards the kitcken lights turn on behind them until they get to the kitchen and get a snack. Then reserve the process until they get back to the bedroom.
This kind of stuff looks like the perfect application for Prolog. There are a lot of predicates to satisfy when determining when a nightlight should be turned on or the overhead light or whether to turn on music in the living room or not.
It's very important, and the first one I'd be asking if I wasn't a Ninja.
Right now, no. But it's something everyone wants. The main thing standing in the way at the moment is that the rules engine runs in only the cloud, but we will make it run locally as well. It's just a timing/effort thing.
(and open-source will mean others can work towards it too)
Dan. Would it be possible for you explain the gesture control more? I am confused as to where the sensor is located and what is the range and resolution of the gesture control.
I don't work for ninja blocks, but I'm familiar with this exact problem. It's not trivial to get the licensing right so that you maximize your economic potential, but still leave the option open for people to host their own setup.
They want to get rich and give the world maximal freedom. That's a hard problem.
Actually, Ninja Blocks' next iteration due toward the end of the year will have onboard RF433Mhz, which allows you to interface with a ton of things you might already have in your house (motion sensors, door bells, door sensors, etc). These devices are super cheap and use crazy small amounts of power.
We've tried to go to great lengths to make it possible for non-hackers to interface with us, for instance you can train the platform what devices are in your house, and then make rules that might trigger anything, such as RF devices like power sockets, Webhooks, SMS, and many more.
Right now we're focussed on getting the rest of our Kickstarter obligations out (we're currently waiting on RF433 dongle's, finally due next week), and are working hard on building a platform that other's can build apps on-top of.
Edit: Don't want to steal SmartThings' thunder here, it looks really cool and we welcome the competition. Just wanted to correct the inaccuracies of the above comment.
