This Little Bluetooth Sensor Shouts The Second Anyone Tries To Move Your Stuff

Uh oh. You’re three cups of coffee into a busy work day, and you’re starting to get the ol’ caffeine rumble gut. But you don’t want to give up your table at the coffee shop. It’s the good one.

“Hey, can you watch my stuff?” you say to the nearest complete stranger who doesn’t look like they’d love a shiny new laptop.

MetaSensor’s Sensor-1 is an itty-bitty box that watches your stuff for you. If it moves ever so slightly, it can fire off a siren or send a notification to your phone.

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But it’s not just for watching laptops.

Want to make sure room service at your hotel is respecting the “Do Not Disturb” sign? Pop the sensor onto your door. Even when your phone is out of range (it taps low-energy Bluetooth Smart for communication, though it can relay notifications to you through the Internet if you pair it with a nearby laptop or tablet), it’ll keep logging data.

How about a log of every time your garage door opens? Or an alert if anyone has opened your gun safe? Or to know within about a split second if someone is screwing with your chained-up bike?

That’s the core idea behind the Sensor-1: if you want to know when/how something moves, just stick this little 1″ sensor on it.

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MetaSensor has crammed a good amount of stuff into that 1″ package: a 3-axis accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer, a set of RGB LEDs, and a surprisingly loud siren. It’s all powered off of a standard (and user-swappable!) coin-cell battery, with an estimated battery life of up to a year depending on which mode it’s in.

It’s got a built-in 3M sticky pad for attaching it to most objects, and the company is working on other case attachment concepts — and they’ll give you a 3D printing template if you want to crank out your own.

Oh, and for the tinkerers: yeah, there’s an API. Hook it to your laptop, Raspberry Pi, or Bluetooth-enabled Arduino, and you’ll be able to tap into the raw stream of motion data for use in whatever crazy DIY projects your heart desires.

MetaSensor is currently at the beginning of a one-month IndieGogo campaign, where they’ve already blown past their $10,000 goal. $79 gets you one sensor, though the price drops a bit if you buy them in packs. If all goes well, they intend to ship the first units come October of this year.