There are certain things an iPhone just can’t do. It can tell you the temperature outside, but it CAN’T tell you the actual temperature around you, because obviously, it doesn’t contain a thermometer, but one Danish company, is now looking to change all that. They’ve now built a tiny little device, that can be put on your keychain, or plugged into your iOS, or Android device. The company involved is called Robocat, and they’re already responsible for creating an App that tells people the temperature outside, by checking the weather and reporting it back to your phone.
Some people however, didn’t actually understand the App, and thought that the device was actually reporting the temperature around them. So they would go into their bathroom, and check the temperature in there, and then go next to their fireplace, and check the temperature, and they’d see the same thing, because obviously, it wasn’t actually checking the temperature around them, but reporting the temperature outside.
So they complained that the App didn’t work, simply because they didn’t understand how it worked. BUT, these ridiculous complaints got the guys at Robocat thinking; “What if we could actually design a device that would allow people to check the temperature immediately around them, just by using their phone?”. And so they did just that, and the resulting device is called: Thermodo.
According to founder Will Wu:
“The idea Thermodo is actually based on an indirect request from our users,” he said.” We received several one star reviews because our users wanted the feature of measuring the temperature themselves right where they are. Currently the iPhone does not support any access to any temperature reading within the phone nor is there a dedicated sensor for this purpose. We wanted to attack to this problem anyway and came up with the most simple solution we could imagine, Thermodo.”
How does it work? It fits right into your headphone jack, and transmits the temperature around you, which can be used in a variety of apps. Don’t worry about it getting in the way though, it only extends out about one quarter of an inch outside of your phone. It’s basically a small cylindrical device that you pop in, and it constantly measure the temperature around it.
It’s somehow able to pick up the temperature around you, and then transmit that data via an audio signal, which the app can then translate into real-time temperature data. This represents an interesting achievement, because it’s using the headphone jack for things that it was never originally even intended to be used for,, and then it transmits this “sound data” to the phone. In this case, that data is the temperature around the device. According to the founder:
“Thermodo is not translating sounds to data like Square or other softmodem-based products,”. “It turns out that we can apply this method to all kind of applications. What we do is converting the temperature into an electrical impedance and this impedance is determined by what we call the “Thermodo Principle. Now we can convert all kind of things into an electrical impedance, like for example wind speed, pressure, brightness and so on.”
What’s more, the developers devised a way that other people can take this technology, and translate it onto any number of other devices, such as Macs, or even the Rasberry Pi. Very cool.
Right now, they’re looking for only $35k in funding, and once they reach they’re goal, they’ll be able to continue development on the device. People can help support them by doing a pre-order pledge of only about $20.