This totally, completely, makes all other smart-boards feel a little absolute. My first encounter with a smart board was one of those Pana Board made by Panasonic where what ever we wrote on them, you could sort of print it out on a piece of paper directly. The ink smudges on it and sometimes it isn’t easy to read what was printed out.
Soon it evolved to slightly smarter boards where it is able to capture images and send it out as a PDF document. Now recently at the office we managed to get our hands on an Equil Smartmarker.
The Equil Smartmarker is a device which enables you to make any surface into a smart board. You just need to hang a device against a surface and then write on the surface using one of the 3 allowed marker pens (Sharpies are one of them).
Firstly, the item which looks like a pen is where the marker pen is inserted into. Yes, you write with actual marker pens. The device on the right is what you hang against the surface.
It has a magnetic portion to it so it sticks to white boards easily. On other surfaces, they provide metal pieces with double sided tape for you to mount the sensor. The sensor device covers both left and right side for a width of 8 feet and a heigh of 5 feet.
Insert the marker pen into the holder, notice that there is a black strip near my thumb. Changing those strips changes the colour, not of the pen itself, but of the colour which is recorded on your device.
You get a choice of 4 colours, black, red, blue and green. Of course it would be good if you had matching colour marker pens.
So as you write on the white board, whatever you write is captured in the app which you can download on your PC or Mac.
The good thing is that the app (Equil Note) is also available for mobile devices and tablets (iOS App Store & Play Store). Another plus point is that from my Mac, I could actually stream what was being written to other devices. The Equil reader is paired with my Mac via bluetooth. You can also pair it directly straight to your mobile device.
In order to erase what you have written on the board, you are given an eraser which you can physically erase what is on the whiteboard and it will also erase what it is on your computer screen.
After a meeting where you have scribbled all over the board, you get to choose to export it as an image or to export it as a PDF.
Still confused? Check out the video below then.
