Here Are 7 Affordable New Gadgets from Quirky That Reimagine the Everyday Home Appliance

Quirky CEO Ben Kaufman announced seven new products from Quirky Tuesday morning. (Darren Weaver/Yahoo Tech)

NEW YORK — Education can be expensive. But now your home can get smarter without lightening your wallet.

At least that’s the message that Quirky — the online community where amateur inventors can pitch their ideas and, if they’re popular enough, see them produced and sold online — put forward at a press conference Tuesday morning. The company unveiled seven new products, all under $100, and all packed with electronics that can help you control your home from your smartphone.

The smart products include a sensor that can tell you whenever a door or window in your home has been opened or closed; a thermostat that automatically adjusts the temperature in each room, based on the temperature in other rooms; and a gizmo that lets you operate your garage door via your smartphone from anywhere in the world. All seven products can be controlled via the newly updated Wink app, which is available via iOS and Android.

For the uninitiated, the Wink app is the main control center that can run connected devices from many different manufacturers, including Philips, Nest, and General Electric, which is one of Quirky’s partners. You can monitor and dictate the activity of each sensor separately and also have devices talk to each other for smart shortcuts. For instance, if your garage door opens, your lights can turn on, and your heater will activate.

Separately, the products Quirky announced today might appear to amount to a rather boring collection of plastic squares and spheres. Taken together, however, Quirky’s seven new gadgets speak to a larger goal: reinventing how the average person interacts with, learns from, and controls her home appliances.

“The problem with [smart home technology] is we don’t feel many people understand it yet,” Ben Kaufman, the company’s 26-year-old CEO, said at the presentation. “We can’t help but think that there’s a ton more work to do to make sure this is a technology everyone understands and is living with.”

Tripper. (Darren Weaver/Yahoo Tech)

The first of the haul is Tripper, a window and door sensor that comes in the form of a tiny white rectangle. Submitted through the Quirky community via independent inventor Robert Sweeney, the $40 gadget will alert you on your smartphone when your home’s windows and doors open. You can also connect it to other smart appliances in Wink to create customized triggers within your home. For instance, if you open a window, the heat can be programmed to automatically shut off.

Overflow. (Darren Weaver/Yahoo Tech)

Then we have Overflow, a $35 circular plastic plug that can be installed in any hard-to-reach spots. Invented by community contributor Michael Taylor, it can monitor the moisture levels in all the danger spots of your home: a leaky basement, your poorly insulated garage, or beneath an old water heater. You can set the moisture level to a certain maximum, and if you exceed it, you’ll receive an alert. Just like Tripper, it’s controlled by the unifying Wink app. Though it might not solve a leak itself, it’ll alert you to any problem areas before they become an expensive disaster to fix.

Outlink. (Quirky)

Taylor also came up with Outlink, a $50 smart wall outlet that allows you to monitor the energy usage of each of your appliances and turn them on and off remotely. The plugs that you use for a hair dryer, fan, or coffee maker will continue to suck energy from appliances, even if you’re not using them. This allows you to take control of that situation to regulate your use. It’s not an entirely new concept, and probably the least exciting of the products released, but it’s sleeker than most power-regulating adapters out there, which usually fit between the plug and your outlet. Here it’s built right in.

Tapt. (Darren Weaver/Yahoo Tech)

Taylor’s triple-threat of inventions ends with the $60 Tapt, a switch that’s meant to replace the main light switch in your home. It allows you to control the lights of every room in your home with the touch of a button or from your smartphone. So, for instance, you can dim the lights (if they’re made by GE) or — if you want to be cruel — turn on your daughter’s bedroom lights when she’s supposed to get up for school. You can also create shortcuts of how you want your appliances to behave when you’re away or asleep and apply them via the Wink app.

Ascend. (Darren Weaver/Yahoo Tech)

For anyone who is constantly losing his remote controls, Ascend — a device you can connect to your garage door to control it from your phone — is a super-handy device. Created by Quirky contributor Nathan Firth, the $90 gadget allows you to literally swipe your finger up on an image of a garage door on your phone, and then watch it move up. (I tried it at a demo after the presentation, and it made me feel incredibly powerful.) It can be controlled from anywhere around the world, so it doubles as an extra house key, if need be.

Norm. (Quirky)

Finally, there’s Norm, a device meant to control your heating, ventilation, and air conditioning system that Kaufman says is going to kill the traditional thermostat. The $80 device is designed to connect with a network of sensors (unfortunately not included in the price), so that it can tell which rooms you’re in and heat or cool that space accordingly. That requires the purchase of a few Wink hubs to sprinkle throughout your home, which go for $50 a pop. The community inventor behind Norm, optometrist Denny Fong, was inspired by the classic problem that most everyone runs into at home. “We’ve all experienced this moment of walking into one room and being hot, and another being cool,” Kaufman said, praising Fong’s invention. “What Denny said is, ‘You don’t need a thermostat, just a series of sensors in your home to keep the room you’re in the right temperature.’ ”

Kaufman said our society has come a long way in the realm of personal technology.

“We were promised a future of jetpacks and cool things like that,” he said. “Shouldn’t we be living with a robot butler?”

The Robot Butler. (Alyssa Bereznak/Yahoo Tech)

And that’s when a stout machine — the star of his company’s stealthy ads — emerged on the stage, as smoke filled the room. It looked at the crowd, and at him, and attendees laughed nervously.

“The future is here,” Kaufman said, “but is not that creepy.”

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