Conclusion:

Initially I thought the idea of this product was genius. I immediately thought of all those HGTV shows where people looking for their open concept home, tear down a wall only to find something that totally derails their plans or just stretches their budgets to the limit. The Walabot DIY could avoid all of that, or so I thought.



I had high hopes for this device after seeing the demo at a press event. After playing with the Walabot I was left wondering if I did something wrong or had a faulty device. But when I thought more about the demo I realized they never showed a multi target scenario and both targets used during the demo were the approximate size of the displayed “pipe.” So I am confident this is as good as it gets for this device, at least currently. I think it has a lot of potential, but is held back by a lack luster app. I think if they can manage to show dimensionally correct pipes for each obstruction, and be able to show multiple targets at once, this would be a great product. Unfortunately it just isn’t there yet, and based on the quick launch of this product line it could go either way. Either Walabot is committed to putting resources at this to make it work, or they are just trying to launch an app quickly that gives people some ideas on how to use their holding companies imaging sensors. For me, $200 is a lot to gamble on a device that won’t see a lot of use.

In the end the Walabot DIY earns the Bigbruin.com "Great Idea" award, and hopefully it continues to be developed in to the extremely useful tool I hoped it would be.



Pros:

» Fantastic idea

Cons:

» Needs pipe mode to represent actual obstruction size
» Needs to be able to track multiple targets
» App needs some debugging
» High price for current functionality

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