Wireless Sensing:  Leave no one behind

I’ve had the pleasure of developing two proprietary wireless networking protocols.  The first was for a US based company that wanted to deliver large volumes of data at minimal power (approximately 3uA standby current), with low latency.  Our (myself and two others) creation was a star topology and had to contend with all the expected boundaries: interference, power, bandwidth, security, attenuation, distance, natural and unnatural objects.  To compound the issue, all these topics have a temporal variable.

Volumes of books have been written on these topics and committees have spent years creating specifications.  As you can imagine, prior to walking this path we read many a document on the various existing technologies: Zigbee, Thread, BLE, Wi-Fi, LoRaWAN, (CAT-M1 / NB-IOT were in their infancy).  We ordered many development boards and got down to the nitty gritty of testing network capacity, network linking, data throughput, range, etc.  We recognized existing technology was not going to get us where we needed to go.  Hence the creation.  This process took us about two years before we could honestly say that we had a reliable solution to introduce en masse.

Fast forward a few years.  In 2018, I was in a unique position to do something I’ve always wanted, start my own company.  My first official customer wanted to wirelessly control LEDs.  This customer (brace yourself) was no other than an individual from the Amish community.  Bringing a wireless network to the Amish poses a unique set of challenges that go beyond the technical realm.  For cultural and religious reasons, the Amish do not have internet access and many do not have cell phone access.  This gap in technology between our two communities was non-negotiable.  I had to deal with privacy concerns, addressing any conflicts with their way of life and ensuring that the wireless network remained unobtrusive.  Building trust and cooperation with the Amish community required mutual understanding and open dialogue.

My customer was a young, vibrant, intelligent business owner with a vision.  As a start-up, I of course jumped on the opportunity.  I looked forward to the new set of margins this frontier would thrust upon me.  With the current exponential technology trend, the Amish, along with the Mennonite communities, recognize they must keep a measured pace with ‘English’ automation, as many of their daily work lives rely on these external business relationships.  One of the unique challenges in the endeavor was the internet.  With respect to this, Amish communities can use intermediaries to relay information back and forth, but as you can imagine this happens at best once per day.  Certain factions of the newer Amish generation do work with a third-party emailing system that guards the community from internet access but allows email traffic for business purposes.  To overcome this, I had to take a step back, and lo and behold, my new best friend became the traditional POTS system.

One of the hurdles in the creation of a proprietary network is laying out the ground work for the Network and Data Link Layers.  This involves understanding of the customers product idea for their consumer as well as recognizing the harsh environment in which it will operate.  This goes beyond mechanical packaging and involves many ‘what if’ scenarios with respect to network creation, retransmissions, traffic management, etc.  In this instance my customer wanted a minimalist I/O interactive style router/base station with even less interaction on the sensors.  Although time consuming, to me this is one of the most enjoyable tasks.  It is not for the faint at heart and one has to have a very good understanding of the limitations and operations of existing technology.  I leveraged ideas and concepts from Zigbee, LoRaWAN, BLE and Wi-Fi, choosing those pieces which had value for our scenario and then iterating these for the given customer boundary conditions.

My counterpart and I worked tirelessly, both asking a lot of questions and documenting how the end product would work.  This wireless solution was a little different than the prior one I had worked on, in that here we wanted to control a sensor versus traditional data gathering.  Imagine a wireless remote control with a predefined set of functions that could network to many sensors up to a mile.  I also had no others to technically lean upon (recall there were three of us in the last development process), so I spent my own dime and time researching things that were out of my scope.  After about a year, we had our wireless embedded hardware solution.  The customer worked out the mechanical packaging details and I was able to facilitate external internet for purchasing, setting up accounts, etc.  The customer ended up with a successful product.  It is manufacturable, cost effective and selling very well.  We are now working together promoting wireless to a community that, not unlike the ‘English’ world, wants to use technology to solve problems.  We have since adapted the solution to work with actuators and pumps and are working on alert systems for agricultural needs.

For all your wireless needs and questions please feel free to reach out to Tezla LLC .