Ninja Blocks Starts Pre-Orders For The Ninja Sphere Smart Home Hub

Ninja Blocks, the Australian startup that created Ninja Blocks to create physical triggers for IFTTT style recipes that can detect motion, temperature and humidity, a window and door sensor and more, successfully followed those up with the Ninja Sphere, a connected home smart hub which raised over $700,000 AUD back in January on Kickstarter. Now, the company is set to ship the Ninja Sphere, and is opening up pre-orders for the second production batch.

The Ninja Sphere offers the ability to monitor temperature, lighting, energy use, human and pet presence, and anything else you connect to it (via Bluetooth Smart and other technologies) to learn about your environment, be aware when something is out of place and send information to your smartphone to let you know and take action to resolve problems. You can set it up as a central hub for your smart home, as it connects to devices like the Belkin WeMo range, Philips Hue, Dropcam, Pebble, Squeezebox and much more.

Ninja Sphere’s powers can tell you where your pets are within your home when you’re away, for instance, or let you know when you’ve left a light on and allow you to turn it off. It can tell you if the heat is one back home and let you adjust it, play music when you get home, and even allow you to control your connected systems via gesture controls while at home and in sensor range of the Sphere itself.

While a lot of companies are getting into the smart home hub business, the Ninja Sphere has some pretty cool additional powers because of the hardware it has built in, beyond acting as simply a hub. It’s a sizeable investment, but if you’re looking for the hub with the most built-in smarts, this is probably it as of now.

The Ninja Sphere can be pre-ordered now and includes free shipping, for a total of $329. This is the first batch available beyond Kickstarter, and the expected ship date for this run is October 2014.