Theres a new battle going on in tech, and the coveted prize is a spot in your home. Companies like Roomba and Nest, who put innovative spins on mundane gadgets, have spurred a new wave of smart in-home hardware. Intercoms, door locks, albino Grimaces, and egg trays are scrambling to squeeze in sensors and some sort of communication component, usually in the form of a mobile app.
Were currently in the frontier days of this next-gen hardware boom, which often means five pieces of hardware and five different apps to control our lightbulbs, our smoke detectors, our security cameras, our coffee machines, and our e-fireplaces. The hope is that convergence will eventually win the day, bringing with it less clutter, both on our phones and in our homes.
Thats the scenario Blacksumac is envisioning with its multifaceted Piper device. Indeed, its trying to win a spot in your home by being a few steps ahead of the competition. Piper is not just a security camera that streams live video to your iPhone on demand. Its also a weather station, a programmable motion- and sound-detecting device, a data-visualization tool for your in-home habits, a wireless hub for controlling other devices, and a futuristic way to pull pranks on people.
Its a good bargain for all it does, too. At $240 for the base package, it costs just a bit more than many of the single-purpose devices it might supplant things like the Dropcam Pro, Netatmo Weather Station, and Z-Wave hubs or gateways. Paying $360 gets you a bundle that might also replace a Belkin WeMo system. That higher-priced package includes the Piper base unit and three Z-Wave accessories, including your choice of a door/window sensor, a module that plugs into a power outlet to make connected items remote-controllable, and a range extender. The Piper only works with Z-Wave devices.
The hardware itself isnt all that exciting to look at, but its inoffensive and will generally blend in. It resembles a kinder, gentler, freestanding version of HAL 9000. Its about six inches tall and available in white or black, with a plastic main body housing its front-facing 180-degree camera and golf-ball-like motion sensor. The top and bottom offer speaker grilles, and around the back is a detachable aluminum stand that youll need to pop off to plug it in. You can leave the stand off if you want to wall-mount it.
Plugging Piper into a power source is all you need to do, because it doesnt have an Ethernet connection; it only connects via Wi-Fi. Once you plug it in and press the lone button on the back of the unit, it readies itself for about a minute. Then, a light on the front turns blue, and you hear a slightly creepy-sounding Piper is ready in a robotic female voice.
To complete the initial setup, you need to install Pipers free iOS or Android app on your mobile device. The Android version of the app is due out on February 14, but at the time this review was written, the app was only available for iOS. (Its a little hard to find; the best way to find it in the Apple App Store is to search for Blacksumac.) To finish setup, you connect to Piper as your Wi-Fi network from the app. The app then prompts you to enter your home network password. After about two to three minutes of configuration time, youre done.
From there, youll simply be using the app for everything. The apps main interface shows you a dashboard of the current indoor and outdoor temperatures, an events log, and a Simon-like wheel of main settings: Stay mode, Away mode, Vacation mode, and an off switch. The Stay mode is designed for use at home, where you may not want the motion-detection sensor enabled. The Away mode is designed for when youre at work or out for a few hours, when the motion- and sound-detection sensors might be more useful; like a home-security system, it beeps once you turn it on to give you a grace period for leaving the home. Vacation mode is designed for use when youre totally out of town, so the alerts are also sent to neighbors and other trusted friends that can check on your home.
Along the bottom of the app are a few tabs. Live Video streams footage directly to your phone from Pipers fish-eye lens. Theres about a one- to two-second lag between the live action being captured and when the video feed shows up on your device. Pipers lens has a crazy 180-degree field of view, so setting up one of these units along the wall of a room gives you an outstanding field of view. Video quality is less outstanding in fact, its the devices overall weak spot. The murkiness might make it hard to recognize any burglar you catch on camera.
Those video-quality shortcomings are mitigated by the viewing options. The video controls and navigation are great: You can finger-scroll around a scene in real time, pinch-and-zoom, and break the feed into four separate screens. That mosaic view lets you frame and zoom each video window independently, which makes the Pipers video feed seem like a multi-camera security setup. You also get a basic brightness adjustment for seeing things in the dark, as well as a light-bulb icon that lets you turn any Z-Wave-connected lamps on or off remotely while you watch live video.
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