Headworx

Sony confused us by launching a Bluetooth Mesh product at CES . They must had been to Las Vegas too many times before and having met Elvis' impersonators on the streets, come with the idea of launching an own look-alike. The word mesh is becoming hot now in wireless and Sony claims a trade mark to it. Are we going to see a trademarked Music product too? But product - wise it is as far from the mesh as could be. True it uses Bluetooth LE. But this is where the similarities end. The little Sony Mesh bricks connect in a hub-and-spoke topology to a central device (a tablet) and the tablet app has to be up and running for them to be able to talk to each other. Close the app and puff.... The magic is gone. Nothing no longer works. The central app that shuffles messages between the "Mesh" nodes defies the fundamental idea of a mesh network: peer to peer, redundant connectivity. It also makes the product barely usable (even for children). Yes it is a great idea to have an i...

At Silvair we've been working on wireless mesh networks for almost five years now. Started with proprietary radios, going through the pains of 6LoWPAN in the extremely slow and constrained sub-gigahertz band, until the relief of speedy Bluetooth LE. Routing is an inherent element of a mesh network. But the concept of routing, being quite useful itself, can be very misleading in wireless reality. Routing looks beautiful on paper. A message sent by A to Z travels via routing relays, occupying only a few links between intermediate nodes. It all works almost like in the Internet. Except it does not. Internet is built of routers. Routers have ports. Ports have dedicated links (copper or fiber or point-to-point wireless) to ports on other routers. Simplifying the picture a bit we may assume routing is deciding which link (outgoing port) the message should go next. And it is sent down that link. Which is not possible in low power wireless. Because there is only one antenna. A...

Milky Ways of sensors hanging above our heads are rising above our heads in offices and public spaces. They control the environment by sending signals to neighboring lights and HVAC systems that  adjust their output based on local conditions and presence of people. Sensor packed smart buildings become natural elements of our everyday life. To the point we simply do not see them nor we see the light or cooling air that help counterbalance sunshine (or lack of it). The evident trend is to have even more sensors per square foot and have each of them reporting more frequently. They usually report to middleware gateways that create a local processing Fog and then send aggregated data to the Cloud. The challenge is to collect information from all the nodes, via wireless links. The messages sent by the sensors are small, just a few bytes, including the security overhead (yes, these days every bit of information has to be authenticated and encrypted). So why is it a challenge, when the...

The Smart Home adoption is slower than anticipated. So says the report from BI Intelligence . And it is hard to argue. After all 3 years since Philips Hue launched there are hardly any winners. Early adopters are either satisfied or bored and fed up. Mass market is still not picking up. Of course the technological fragmentation is one of the reasons. This will start changing significantly this year when Bluetooth rolls out the Smart Mesh standard. But there is yet another factor. The economy. In a post-(cold)-war era everything has to make business sense, otherwise it will cease to exist. We no longer fly to the Moon neither can book a supersonic Concorde to London, Paris or New York. At the same time fleets of incredibly cramped Dreamliners cross the skies burning less fuel per passenger than ever. And SpaceX lands back their empty rockets to cut down the cost of space travel. Technological fragmentation when removed, alone will not help the mass market adoption of Smart Home sy...

Judging just by a bunch of products around me right now I can clearly see their value, performance and rating is owed to software that powers them. Now, in the middle of the 2nd decade of the 3rd millennium we've crossed the pivotal point of software vs hardware. The trend started some time ago with personal computers and later was reinforced by mobile phones but today it is everywhere, opening a chasm between companies that manage to master software and the ones that don't. In automotive it is Tesla and Google vs Detroit and Japan. In personal computing it is Google vs Apple and Microsoft. In photography it seems to be Sony vs Nikon and Canon and even the recent winners like GoPro seem to be vulnerable to DJI taking the market of video enthusiasts with the Phantom drones and the Osmo . But software is difficult. More difficult than most people think. Take TV. Apple is very careful with the steps. Google is trying hard but failed already twice. Now the third time the Andro...