Zeppylin (Product)
Zepplyin is a flexibly licensed, collaborative Web Of Things platform, designed to bridge the gap between purely cloud based offerings like Amazon Sidewalk and the (largely) fragmented mix of open and closed source offerings like chirpstack and tago.
It is designed to be equally comfortable in the cloud (running inside an EC2 Instance for example) or on the edge (inside a Raspberry Pi device).
Behavior-driven Development (BDD) for IOT (Project)
A large US Based manufacturer of sensors/actuator that uses both proprietary and open LPWAN protocols in the field needed a way to validate the firmware that was running on their devices in an end to end fashion. They had already standardized on the Behave Python Framework, as a way to add BDD to their existing CI/CD pipeline.
The team built and delivered a set of Behave Feature based Test Scenarios, that utilize both a client (which in turn connects to the hardware device via a USB/Serial Interface) and a server (which has both HTTP and Websocket interfaces).
Custom Lora implementation (Project)
The same US based manufacturer needed to move a custom LoRa implementation from an expensive 64-channel custom built by Tektelic, built using 8 parallel Sx1302 transceivers, and costing over USD 10K, to more cost effective solution.
The team refactored the legacy C code to run on a single Corecell device, bringing the cost down by a factor of at least 5X.
Firmware Lifecycle Management for Helium Gateways (Product)
This work was carried out in part while the team was fully employed at a large Helium Gateway Fleet Operator.
One of the largest private fleet operators of Helium Gateways in the US was looking for a better way to provision and deploy Helium LoRaWan Gateways.
The traditional model required that each device be unboxed, plugged in and then manually activated via a mobile app. This process was time consuming and error prone (not to mention expensive).
The team created a rust based low footprint client, which runs inside a balena container, which itself is part of a Balena firmware image. The image is set up to automatically connect and auto provision itself with a Balena Fleet.
The team also built a basic REST API (based on the python fastAPI framework) for (pre) provisioning the devices, as well as also a simple Command Line Interface (CLI) which would enable the manufacturing partners to quickly and easily download the latest fleet firmware from the repository.
Fleet Management for Building IOT Gateways (Project)
A successful building management solutions company needed a way to better manage the way their Building Management IOT Gateways were managed. The Gateways were custom built by phytec, and ran a custom distribution of linux known as phylinux.
The team created a yocto workbench, which was used to (re)build the custom firmware image from sources. A set of new layers (and patches) were added to the build tree (to enable additional opkg based packages to be added to the base image).
The team also leveraged the rauc firmware OTA update framework, to enable the devices to be updated in the field. The Bosch IOT Rollouts framework was set up to manage and deploy full OS updates (using an A/B partitioning scheme) and the barebox bootloader.
BLE Based Indoor Positioning System (Product)
A large steel pipe manufacturer needed a cost effective way to track employees on the factory floor. The system needed to be precise (sub 3 m accuracy), easy to deploy, unobtrusive and cost effective.
The team sourced BLE beacons from blueup a leading manufacturer of BLE beacons, and then built a custom Raspberry Pi based gateway, which was then deployed in the factory.
In addition, the team also deployed indoor BLE antennae from Quuppa, which were used to triangulate the position of the beacons.
The data was then sent to a custom AWS based cloud solution, which was then used to display the location of the employees on a custom React based dashboard.