The engineers at Nest created the Nest Protect to protect homes from smoke and carbon monoxide in twenty first century style. Appliances are often intelligent, connected to smartphones and jammed with added features. The Nesters also wanted to remove one aspect of the smoke alarm - annoying beeps and buzzes.
The Nest Protect still uses sound but instead of a shrill sound meant to alert you that there is smoke in your house, the sound is a voice telling you where the smoke is. The voice can also alert you to carbon monoxide and give location information.
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Before the Nest Protect sounds the alarm it gives a warning - the ring of light in the middle of the unit will turn yellow. If the smoke is from cooking on the stove or an errant bag of microwave popcorn the alarm can be waved off and will go back to green. In the event of a true emergency from fire or carbon monoxide the ring will go red and send a digital notification.
Nest designers discuss airflow, the smoke chamber, and an array of sensors (motion, heat, carbon monoxide, light, and photoelectric) on the Inside & Out page of the corporate website. The batteries, alarm and voice chip are also featured without giving us the actual specifications for the components.
California State Fire Marshals and Underwriters Laboratories have given the Nest Protect safety standard approvals, along with Canadian and British agencies. In November 2013 the app that controls the Nest Protect and the company's other product, the Nest Thermostat, was upgraded.
This isn't the first time that ENGINEERING.com has discussed Nest and its products. Tom Lombardo wrote an article in February 2013 discussing the Nest Thermostat and Paul Boldt discussed the company's patent strategy in December 2011. The reason Nest is on the radar now is the announcement Monday that Nest had been purchased by Google for a whopping $3.2billion.
Unlike the recent robotic acquisitions made by Google, the Nest purchase is for a company that already has a product being sold to consumers. The product is highly intelligent and connected, and I would assume they have more smart redesigns waiting in the wings to be released. Right along with the robotics purchases, this is another place to question what Google's long term plan is for the technology that they're acquiring.
https://nest.com/press//#product-images
This is one of a series of recent entries about Google and Amazon’s different approaches to advanced robotics and electronics. Here are a few more articles you might want to read:
• Google's BigDog robot climbs and balances
• Amazon Prime Air - A Moonshot Project
• Google's SCHAFT robot wins DARPA Robotics Challenge Trials 2013
• Amazon's Robotic Order Fulfillment