Crowdfunding Roundup: ‘Plug’ local personal cloud, ‘Range’ smart thermometer, more

As the success stories keep piling up, so do the number of projects filling up crowdfunding websites with, among other things, neat hardware- and software-related products. Some projects, like Pebble, gain thousands of supporters as well as millions of dollars in funding (and end up at Best Buy’s retail stores). Other projects flop and don’t reach their necessary funding amount.

Rather than make you sift through all of these projects, we’re rounding up the best or most notable projects from around the web and delivering them to you in a simple roundup.

• Plug, local personal cloud-creating device (Kickstarter project) – Connect a hard drive to Plug and all of your devices can sync and share files with those files. In short, Plug is a local Dropbox that you can control.
  
  
• Range smart thermometer (Kickstarter project) – I’m a huge fan of smart devices, and this fits very well into that category. Hook up the thermometer to your phone’s audio port and you can see the temperature of the food you are cooking. You can also choose to send notifications to other people when food has almost reached optimal temperature so others know dinner is almost ready.
• Fitbark (Kickstarter project) – Just as you’d expect, this is a FitBit for dogs. Combined with the associated app, you can learn all about your dog’s exercise levels over time. The battery lasts up to 10 days, which is a tad more than the human version’s 7 days.
• FilterWatch (Kickstarter project) – Sometimes these smart devices seem a bit ridiculous or unnecessary, but the $15 price point may tempt those who care deeply about the air quality in their homes. This device checks your air filter and notifies you (through wigwag or other systems) that it’s time to change out the filter.