With smartphone prices falling alarmingly over last few years, everyone is moving from basic phones to Smartphones and with it world of possibilities have opened up, especially when it comes to controlling various devices and gadgets directly from your smartphones.
Now, a Pune based startup has come up with an open source hardware called “Tah” that offers endless possibilities when it comes to controlling things from your smartphone. I say “things” because, it can connect to pretty much anything that has a USB port and allow interaction with your smartphone.
Let us look at Tah in more detail.
Tah is essentially a open source, Arduino-compatible Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) tiny USB device that can be used as a beacon, microcontroller or HID device.
What Tah does, is it makes your phone the primary ‘controller’ for anything around you. So it enables combining the power of your smartphone motion gestures with your surrounding to control electrical equipment (lights, fan) and other electronic components too! With its HID (power to emulate a keyboard and mouse) you can also control computer systems!
Uses of Tah are literally limitless, It could be remote control, a gesture based control device, a joy stick etc. Because of its smartphone connectivity, it can use your smartphone’s in-built accelerometer, gyroscope, and other sensors which can directly trigger events in the physical world!
Check out this introductory video to know more about Tah:
Tah has been built by Revealing Hour Creations, a company based out of Pune. It’s team of developers has a healthy mix of people coming from hardware as well as software background.
Some Use Cases for Tah:
- Smartphone as a PlayStation controller
- Smart home system to control lights and other electrical appliances from the smartphone
- Universal remote to control TV, music system, set top box, AC from the smartphone
- Indoor navigation like GPS
We spoke to Nishant Modak, one of founders of Revealing Hour Creations and asked him for a unique example where Tah can be used. In his own words, “Tah can be looked upon as a perfect ‘lego block‘ to connect your smartphones, and because of its open nature and availability of several GPIO pins, along with the 2 shields ( IR, Relay + Sensors) and all accompanying code being open source, it really opens up a lot of possibilities.”.
Talking about a use case, he said “Tah can be effectively provide additional accessibility to individuals who have physical or cognitive difficulties, impairments, and disabilities”.
Tah is currently running a crowdsourcing campaign to start commercial production. They have raised close to $18,000 out of their goal of $25,000. The Tah board is priced moderately at $39, and if you back the project, you will get the board shipped to you at less than $50.
grate article Arun Prabhudesai . thanks for your knowledge sharing……
Love it!