Headworx

It's been a long wait. My last Blackberry was the Torch in 2010 . I loved it and I loved every Blackberry before. I switched to Android for two reasons: I could not stand the philosophy of RIM playing against the users, ending up in frustrating user experience (more on this one here ) The selection and quality of Apps, compared with Android, was shrinking rapidly. But I was missing the Blackberry hardware ever since. And now it is back in an absolutely dream package. The Priv has the screen size identical to iPhone 6+, but in a smaller overall package. Yet it offers a physical keyboard. It is thinner than the LG-G3. The display is phenomenal. I had a Galaxy Note with AMOLED, then moved to LCD (LG-G3) and I'm so happy to have an AMOLED screen back again. I don't think anybody would go back from AMOLED to LCD and be happy. The LCD backlight is simply too aggressive on eyes and produces bleak colors. AMOLED is calm, almost matte, yet produces extremely vibrant color...

The news about the Bluetooth roadmap for 2016 are officially out so we can discuss them in public now. I've covered the Mesh many times already and the next thrilling (and many even say shocking) feature is the range increase. It will be four times what it is today. Which translates to extra 12dBm link budget (every 6 dBm increase in link budget results in a doubling of the possible distance that is achievable). Today, which means Bluetooth LE 4.0 A.D. 2015, the Bluetooth Smart modules we've designed at Silvair reach about 2000ft / 700m LoS (line-of-Sight) module-to-module range (using small omnidirectional λ/4 antennas). Our official figure is 1500ft / 500m, which is still shocking to many. The link budget we have is 108dB. In the near future we will be offering a new Bluetooth Smart module that can go up to 118dB link budget. 1500ft/500m will become 5000ft/1500m - almost a mile. And this is still WITHOUT the 4x range increase that will come later in 2016. Assuming every...

It is official now: Bluetooth Smart has reinforced the leading position among low power wireless protocols: It will offer 4x the range. Which means more than a mile line-of-sight with omnidirectional antennas and even more with directional antennas. Suddenly Bluetooth enters the turf of long range WAN technologies, not to mention its ability to cover entire buildings with a single hop. It will offer 2x the data rate. Bluetooth is already one of the fastest radios. Not for large transmissions but for many tiny transmissions. Today you can easily have 100 sensor nodes each sending a message to a gateway every second with very low collision rate. That is about 10x more than any 802.15.4 radio can do . With the upcoming speed increase, it will double that number. The double data rate also means the radio duty cycle is cut by half. Which means battery life is doubled. Yes, we are looking into battery powered devices that last 10+ years on a single coin cell. It will form a peer-to-p...

The common wisdom is the 7 OSI layers define everything in the communications link to make the two ends interoperable and able to talk. At Silvair we've been especially stressing the importance of the application layer that seems to be forgotten by the proponents of WiFi and IPv6. But OSI does not cover one very important prerequisite. The onboarding / provisioning process, which can be considered the "Layer 0". It simply assumes devices are already on the same network. Somehow "magically". Unfortunately for real products there is no magic. Devices have to be brought on a network before they can engage the full 7 layers to start a dialog. The onboarding process is a yet another elephant in the IoT room . Some seem to notice it. Both Thread and HomeKit focus on the onboarding part, enforcing numeric code labels on products. Others, like AllJoyn, ignore it completely. AllJoyn has just introduced the new Security 2.0 , which is great but simply ignores the f...

Silvair is running a series of blog posts discussing pros and cons of various communication protocols for the IoT/Smart/Connected World. Some of them are fresh and growing and some are more mature (to put it mildly). We've been playing on this field for many years and our ultimate answer is: Hybrid / Snowflake The main misconception we see is the organizations try to push their solutions to cover everything end-to-end. It is like a taxi company would try to persuade you they could drive you across the ocean. While taxi is just best for the leg to local airport. And then a propeller plane to an international hub and then transatlantic jet. Nobody flies their kids to school in jets and nobody crosses oceans by cars. But as I speak to all those wireless standard bodies, I see they want to be solution s for everything. WiFi wants to connect light bulbs and Bluetooth wants to provide Internet access. Even the best low power mesh network will saturate when forced to carry the ag...