Meet Peeple, a connected peephole to screen who is knocking on your door. Whenever someone knocks on your door, Peeple snaps a picture and send it to your phone. This way, whether you are home or away, you can monitor who is passing by your home. Peeple is competing in our Hardware Battlefield at CES.
“Everyone has a different use case,” co-founder and CEO Chris Chuter told me in a phone interview before CES. “The big reason this is useful is that your front door is a blind spot. You have no idea what’s happening at your front door.”
[gallery ids="1101203,1101202,1101201,1101200,1101198,1101197"]
Some people will use the device for security purposes, others to track deliveries, and others will screen their doors like they screen calls with caller ID. Early users even suggested live tweeting their door activity, or monitoring when someone comes to clean your house. And of course, Peeple can be an invaluable asset when you host parties and it’s too loud to hear your doorbell.
In short, Peeple lets you keep a log of people who knock on your door. Chuter thought about this project when his two little boys left the house and played in the street without his consent. Even if your door opens from the inside, Peeple tracks these events.
Behind the scenes, the device is quite simple. It’s a small box that you attach to your door right in front of your existing peephole. It has a camera, an accelerator, a battery and a Wi-Fi chipset.
When someone knocks, the device wakes up, takes a picture and reconnects to your Wi-Fi network. It then sends a picture and a timestamp to Peeple’s servers. And you finally receive a push notification on your phone to check out who is at the door. Because the device only needs to wake up when someone is knocking, the battery is supposed to last six months on a single charge.
Based in Austin, the team of three just graduated from Highway1’s latest batch.
Peeple will launch a Kickstarter campaign around March. The price is not set in stone yet. But there is one thing for sure. When the company finally ships, you won’t ever say again “knock, knock – who’s there?”