Insights
Notes from building connected products
Hardware, firmware, connectivity and the compliance that comes with them. Written while doing the work, not as marketing.
-
Battery life is a design decision
Nobody sets out to build a device that dies in a year. They average the wrong numbers, believe the bench, and find out eighteen months later across a whole deployment.
Read → -
How to brief an embedded engineer
Most disappointing engineering engagements were mis-briefed, not badly executed. A page of the right information is worth more than a fifty-page specification.
Read → -
OTA updates without bricking the fleet
Every connected product now needs an update path. The mechanism is not hard; surviving a power cut at the wrong millisecond, on a thousand devices at once, is.
Read → -
Design for manufacture: the checks that stop a respin
A board that works on the bench and cannot be built, panelised or tested economically is not finished. Most of that is decided during layout.
Read → -
EMC pre-compliance: the cheapest day you will spend
A full EMC campaign that fails costs money and, worse, weeks. A pre-compliance day finds most of what would fail while fixing it is still a layout change.
Read → -
The Cyber Resilience Act lands on manufacturers
Reporting duties are live. If you sell a connected product into the EU, the clock starts when you become aware of an actively exploited vulnerability — not when you have a fix.
Read → -
CE and UKCA marking for a connected product
Most delays are not caused by failing a test. They are caused by nobody deciding, early enough, which directives apply and who is signing the declaration.
Read → -
LPWAN technologies: their uses and challenges
LoRaWAN, Sigfox and NB-IoT make applications viable that were not before. The difficulty is not the radio; it is energy, payload, coverage, security, interoperability and regulation.
Read → -
What is the difference between NB-IoT and LTE-M?
Two complementary 3GPP standards for massive IoT. Which one you want comes down to data rate, mobility, voice and how deep inside a building the device has to work.
Read → -
How to choose your IoT software platform
A platform can put a connected ecosystem within reach without hiring a development team — provided you go in knowing which problems it solves and which it hands back to you.
Read → -
Building blocks of an IoT thing
Lessons from developing IoT products: how the architecture stacks up, and the handful of choices — MCU, radio, frequency, power, security — that decide whether it works.
Read → -
How to develop successful IoT products
IoT projects rarely fail on the technology. They fail on a missing business case, a hobbyist platform that cannot scale, or regulation bolted on at the end.
Read → -
Wearables and MEMS: the perfect storm?
The forecast growth in wearables depends on collecting data from many sensors cheaply. MEMS is what makes that arithmetic work.
Read → -
The connected human
The public image of wearables is step counting. The more interesting application is a worker who is more aware of, and sensed by, a hazardous environment.
Read → -
Improving workplace safety with the connected worker
Detecting a gas leak and alarming is useful. Connecting that data to rostering, compliance and rescue is where the value actually sits.
Read →