The Smarter Spaces submissions are all in, and I want to take a moment to properly thank everyone who took part. Whether you pitched an idea, received a kit, or followed along from the sidelines, it’s been great working and interacting and creating with you! But especially to the builders: what you've produced has genuinely gone beyond anything we expected.
That's not something I say lightly. These projects were built on a Metis M.2 and an Orange Pi 5 Plus. Accessible, affordable, power-efficient hardware. And look what's possible with it!? Edge AI isn't some distant promise. It's here, it's real, and this community just proved it in eight different ways.
Here's the full lineup:
- 📚 A.B.C. (AI Book Cataloguer) —
@Denovo | A tabletop station that scans a book cover and extracts the title, author, and publisher using on-device OCR and object recognition — complete with a hand gesture to flag incorrect reads, which is a brilliant design choice that adds immense efficiency.
- 🌊 MotionFlow —
@FreezerJohn | A privacy-first activity sensor that classifies what people are doing from pose geometry and publishes events over MQTT, with zero video leaving the device — and it's been running 24/7 in Jonathan's home for days, which is the best kind of product validation.
- 🚨 FlowSentry-Wake —
@Enmin and @mm0806son | A security system that fuses optical flow with YOLOv8 to catch intruders even when they're physically camouflaged — the team literally tested it by crawling under a blanket, and Metis caught it anyway!
- 🏥 RehabVision —
@dilip.m | A physiotherapy assistant that tracks exercise form and counts reps in real time using pose estimation on Metis, keeping sensitive health data entirely on-device — the kind of thing that could genuinely help people recovering at home without clinical support.
- 🤖 Project GAIUS —
@David | Point at a device, make a gesture, control it — GAIUS is a full 3D spatial smart home engine with multi-camera triangulation, arm-based raycasting, and direct home auto integration. A whole new way to communicate with the tech around you. It’s fun and fascinating, but it could also be life changing.
- 🔐 SafeHaven —
@imprettychill_ | A home security system that answers the questions most NVRs still don't: is the door locked, the garage closed, the gate secured? It converts Metis-powered visual inference into semantic security events and pushes them into Frigate and Home Assistant, all offline. Not motion-based security, but context-based - and that’s unique!
- 🏥 NEMA MedBot —
@Vito | An on-device identity recognition pipeline targeting healthcare and posture analysis environments, with Metis acceleration on the roadmap and clinical validation already being planned with a medical partner in Italy.
- 🖥️ Smarter Desk —
@carlo | A gesture-controlled desk assistant that uses hand detection on Metis to trigger screenshots for feeding future AI agents — and Carlo somehow managed to tour Germany with his kit in a bag while building it, which deserves recognition on its own.
We're now sending all finalist projects over to the judges, and we'll be announcing the winners very soon. Keep an eye on this space.
And while you're waiting, we've got another community campaign coming up that we'll be announcing shortly. You're going to want to be here for it!