Tuesday, January 27, 2015

Piper Announces New Piper NV Home Monitoring System With Night Vision For $269

The home security industry once dominated by complicated, expensive systems is in for a rude awakening. Piper, Canary and Scout are all offering affordable options to keep an eye on your home’s safety, and Piper just announced a new system equipped with night vision called the Piper NV.
The Piper NV comes with all the standard features you’d find on the original Piper, which is an all-in-one home monitoring system that handles 180-degree HD video, two-way audio, home automation, and environmental sensors for things like temperature and humidity. But with the Piper NV, users will have new core functionality with the night vision feature as well as a more powerful device generally.
One of Piper’s differentiating features is its 180-degree video, offering an incredibly wide viewing angle for the user with a 3.4-megapixel camera. However, the Piper NV also includes automatic night vision which is kicked on once a room gets dark and allows the user to see everything in the room, night or day.
“The biggest challenge was definitely night vision,” said co-founder Russell Ure. “With a regular field of view it’s easy, but with 180-degree viewing you end up with a bright ring of light in the center and four dark corners. Infrared light is consumed evenly across the entire field of view, so we had to work with a plastic specialist to make sure that we could offer both 180-degree viewing and superb night vision.”
The Piper NV also upgrades to that 3.4-megapixel camera I mentioned, swapping it out for the 2-megapixel sensor on the original model.
Plus, the new Piper NV has a faster ARM processor to not only help with better home automation but also improve the security experience on the device. With the help of the ultra-fast processor, Piper NV can process and record motion-detected video snippets straight to the flash memory of the Piper itself. Many other services send your personal video straight to the cloud for processing, which doesn’t feel safe after a year of big digital hacks and leaks.
Piper was acquired by iControl in April and is using those resources to added functionality to their uses. Piper hooks into any Z Wave-compatible device for home automation, letting the Piper act as a smart hub for lights, locks, window shades, etc.
The new model is available today for $269.
If you want to learn more about the Piper NV, head over to the website or hold tight for a full review from TechCrunch.
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