Peeple is a small camera and sensor that attaches to the peephole on your front door. When someone knocks, Peeple takes a video and sends a mobile notification. With Peeple, co-founder Chris Chuter says, the front door is no longer a blind spot.
Unlike other similar front door cameras, Peeple sits behind the front door and is easy to install. It sits on top of the peephole, and through a clever mounting solution, pops right off when it’s more convenient to look through the hole rather than at a phone. There’s no fuss or mess. It’s easy and to the point and perfect for renters as nothing is permanently mounted.
Peeple just launched on Kickstarter and is looking to raise $50,000 to bring the clever device to market.
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 permission. 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 accelerometer, a battery and a Wi-Fi chipset.
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When someone knocks, the device wakes up, records a video 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.
TechCrunch met Chuter at its Austin meetup last year. He had just finished prototyping the device at a local hackathon and applied to pitch the device at our Meetup. Shortly after that he was accepted into the Highway1 hardware accelerator program and later participated in TechCrunch’s Hardware Battlefield.
Peeple’s Hardware Battlefield Presentation