LittleBits’ New Kit Lets You Create Your Own Smart-Home Gizmos

The LittleBits Smart-Home Kit lets you hack together your own solutions. LittleBits

LittleBits has steadily expanded its Lego-like modular electronics platform this year, introducing new pieces that let users connect their creations to the internet and link them up to other hardware platforms like Arduino. Now, with its latest kit, LittleBits is bringing its DIY ethos to the smart home.

The company’s Smart Home Kit is meant to let people build their own version of the internet of things. With six new pieces, users can hack together versions of familiar smart-home concepts—connected coffee pots and presence-aware lamps—or create solutions of their own devising. The idea, says LittleBits CEO Ayah Bdeir, is to give people an alternative to the prepackage solutions being “parachuted” into homes by companies like Belkin and Cisco.

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At $249, it’s one of the company’s biggest kits to date. It has 14 modules and 11 accessories, all of which can be snapped together without the need of a soldering iron or other tools. In addition to some of the company’s familiar modules, like the recently-introduced one that connects projects to the cloud, the kit has five new “bits,” including a temperature sensor, a simple LCD display that doubles as a counter, an MP3 player, and a “threshold” bit that will trigger actions in certain situations. An infrared module works with another new component, an AC switch, which users can deploy to bring any old appliances, like a lamps or coffee maker, into the fold.