Supermechanical began in 2011 from our work at the MIT Media Lab with fun and humane physical interfaces, manifesting in Twine, arguably the first consumer IoT device—or at least the first general-purpose one, boxing up WiFi, batteries, plug-in sensors, rules-based programming and a cloud.
Twine contained the seed of a good idea, that the world still hasn’t produced. A sensor power tool to capture data in the real world and do stuff with it. Something that’s approachable for non-engineers, but uses open standards to incorporate it into other systems. Something that lets normal people capture and explore how data can make our own work better, instead of being sold and used against us.
So we’re going to produce that power tool. Pickup improves on Twine with more commercial sensors (adding spectrometer, distance, CO2 and others), more visualization, more output options, more powerful rules (think network-centric programming that can aggregate a fleet of devices as one), and more. It’s robust, which means an outdoor-ready case, PLC-like runtime, and being able to feed data only to your own private systems.
Pickup is on Kickstarter. After delivering on three previous campaigns, we like the community we’ve grown there, and we hope more people join us, and support a different vision of tech products.