Deciding to buy a new iPhone is always easier than figuring out what to do with the old smartphone its replacing. 280 million used smartphones are expected to be shoved back into closest and drawers by the end of 2014 rather than being recycled, but the folks at MindHelix have come up with a novel solution: turn it into a smart-home security robot named Rico.
Rico – a smarthome security device that tracks changes in your home – gives your old iClunker a second life by putting it’s processing power and sensors back to work, so that you can track all the data from various sources in your home, and make changes remotely.
The Rico Kickstarter project just launched this week, and while the little security bot can do a number of things on its own, like monitoring temperature, carbon monoxide, smoke, humidity and motion detection, the device becomes more powerful when you feed it your old smartphone eWaste.
Check out Rico in action in the video below:
Pre-orders are available now and the project has already ready 20% of it’s $100,000 funding goal in the first three days. For $100 you get one of the first Rico units off the line, plus one smartsocket that you can control remotely form the Rico app, but units aren’t expected to ship until Late 2015, just in time to replace your iPhone 6.
Source: Kickstarter
