Kickstarter

It’s that time of year. As they say, April showers bring May flowers (and flooded basements).

Moisture sensor special

Twine has already saved Rick and Ken’s basements from extensive damage — yours could be next! Rick sent us this tweet (you can check out how he set up his Twine in his blog):

Do you need a moisture sensor? For the rest of April only, get 10% off a moisture sensor or Twine + moisture sensor kit by entering coupon code SPIDERS at checkout.

A couple things we forgot to mention last week:

Long cable special

Did you know that we now sell longer cables for your sensors? At 10 feet long (3 meters for our overseas friends), these can reach places the standard cable can't. They're also shielded to ensure signal integrity (which can be a problem at long distances and low power). Keep your Twine high and dry in the basement while the sensor does the dirty work!

In honor of adding support for long URLs, we’re running a special on long cables in our store! We’ve dropped the price for everyone, and you’ll get free domestic shipping on long cables if you order by April 6 — this Saturday. Shhh... we're only telling Kickstarter backers.

Austin hardware love

We love living and working in Austin. Aside from the great food, weather and music, we like it here for the concentration of hardware makers. At SXSW Interactive last month, our pals at the brand new and already excellent ATXHW group put together a hardware Kickstarter Q&A, and John got to take part alongside some of Austin's finest. Read more at MakeBlog. We want to give a shout-out to them — if you like what they're making, get yourself some new gear and support small businesses doing something unique.

Cinetics raised $480K with their Cineskates slider tripod and another $114K with their CineMoco project. You can get these at http://store.cinetics.com/

Memoto (okay, they're Swedish, but the accent is similar) recently closed a $550K Kickstarter for their lifelogging wearable camera. You can order one at http://memoto.com

Lastly but most importantly, Ube's WiFi smart dimmer switch for your lights is still active on Kickstarter and is less than $10K away from their goal, with two days to go. Push them over the top here: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/702772580/ube-wifi-connected-smart-light-dimmer

-The Supermechanics

Twine’s got a few new tricks up its sleeve, and no, this isn’t an early April Fools joke!

Twine 1.3

Spring brings a new update for your Twine. Here’s what’s included:

- Twitter support. Now your Twine can tweet to your friends that the basement is flooding (or just @you that the laundry is done).
- Support for Cloud Shield ( http://supermechanical.com/cloudshield/ ). Get your Arduino project on the Internet and trolling forums in a few minutes.
- HTTP action improvements: We've been listening - you can now use POST, any port, and looooong URLs.
- Sensor values in all notifications! Previously, you could only include values in HTTP requests. Now your Twine can email you its temperature when triggered.

As always, to get the update, clear the cache on your browser, reload the site and resave the rules on your Twine.

Universal SMS and voice calls
That's not all we've been working on. We've always focused on making Twine simple — our original promise was "Connect your things to the Internet without a nerd degree." But you might have had an experience with sending text messages that didn't meet this promise. We relied on carriers to support their email gateways to send free SMS, but the fact that it's worked inconsistently for some people hasn't been acceptable.

So we've invested time into rewriting this, and now Twine can send text messages to virtually any number, regardless of carrier or country. Unfortunately, each message costs us money, so we're making this a paid option for Twine to cover these costs. But this allows us to add some new features, too: all texts and calls will come from one number so you can save your Twine as a contact; and your Twine can optionally call you and speak notifications with the new phone call action.

We're not taking away anything — the Twine account you have now will always be free, and as you read at the top of this email, continues to get new features. If the previous email-based SMS works for you, you can continue to use it through the email action.

Learn more about the SMS/voice call upgrade — it's pay-as-you-go and you can cancel anytime. Try it, and if you aren't happy with it, we'll refund the cost of the account — just let us know within the first month.

Please email us at help@supermechanical.com if you have any questions or feedback!

-Christina

Hello Backers–

As spring approaches (at least in the northern hemisphere), we hope your Twine is bringing reports of warmer temperatures! We’ve got an exciting new external sensor ready, and some some details about Twine’s battery life for you.

Announcing the Twine Cloud Shield 

Stack Cloud Shield on your Arduino, connect it to Twine, and get email, texting, calling, and more in a jiffy. With Cloud Shield, you can add the ability to trigger any Twine output from your Arduino sketch with three lines of code, so you can focus on your idea and not debugging networking code. Want to see how easy it is? Want to see how many bananas (spoiler alert!) we can fit in a minute long video? Check out the video.
What could make this even better? For a limited time only, if you get a Twine + Cloud Shield kit now, you’ll get $10 off! Already have a Twine, but want the Cloud Shield? Free shipping for you (domestic only)!

In the video, you get a special sneak preview of a soon-to-be released notification method, phone calls! Your Twine will call you with the text you type in the action. It will be available as a paid option.

Battery life update

First of all, don't worry! We're not done reducing power consumption and are continuing to invest development resources into improving Twine battery life. The Twine 1.2 release not only added new features like vibration support, but also reduced the power used by the accelerometer and external port. Here's the situation at the moment:

1. In fixed installations, you can use virtually any micro-USB power supply to run your Twine. Here's one on Amazon with free shipping. Twine will automatically fall back to batteries if external power is lost.

2. This pie chart below shows how much power each Twine component uses.

As you can see, the WiFi radio accounts for about 76% of Twine's power consumption. That's a big, but unfortunately very necessary chunk! To further improve battery life, we have started a major rework of the way that the radio subsystem works. This effort will take some time to complete, but should make very significant reductions in the amount of power that the radio uses. We'll keep you updated as we get closer to release.

We've gotten to meet some of you at SXSW, and we're happy that we have all of you as backers — of Twine and of our passion for making our world smaller and friendlier through connected objects. Our team continues to work on making Twine better. As always, please email us directly at help@supermechanical.com if you're having any sort of trouble or haven't yet gotten your Twine reward, and we'll help figure it out.

- The Supermechanics

Hello Backers,

We have good news and more good news for you.

Shipping Update:

The whole team worked hard (because we love our Kickstarter backers so much) to ship out all the Twines we had the information for in December, but we still have some lonely Twines to mail. If you haven’t gotten your Twine yet, we probably need you to confirm your shipping information or pay for international shipping. Check your account at https://spool.supermechanical.com or email us at transactions@supermechanical.com for the fastest response (we love Kickstarter comments, but we don’t want everyone to see your personal information).

Twine Update:
It’s been a great week for Twine! It's been reading self-improvement books and now it's got some new features to show you. Here’s what’s included in the Twine 1.2 update:

1. Vibration sensor functionality.
2. Several small reductions in power consumption.
3. Celsius temperature readings, for all our international friends.
4. UI improvements, including Wi-Fi signal and battery life bars and an improved fast mode switch.

To get the update, resave the rules on your Twine. For more information on what's new, check out our blog: Update 1.2

If you’re looking to expand your Twine’s repertoire, you can get 10’ cables and additional sensors in our store.

Looking for ideas on how to use your Twine? Check out our how-tos, and mingle with the Twine community (Where all the cool kids are hanging out these days — you should be there too.)

-Christina and the Supermechanics