Headworx

There are signs of maturing technologies for wireless power delivery. And I don't mean proximity power delivery like Qi, which is present in many Android phones and the latest iPhones. We're talking of wireless power delivery at a distance. 2018 should bring the first products to the market, and I'd expect some announcements as early as at the 2018 CES. What has so far come to my attention: Pi says it has already delivered. It uses resonant receivers. Energous has just received an FCC certification for their power-at-a distance wireless charging systems Power by Proxi (I saw their working demo in 2016) was acquired by Apple . Again, this is based on resonance. One thing that keeps me still a bit skeptical is influence of these power transfer technologies on human health. And here I'm speaking from my own experience. About 30 years ago (mid 1980's) I built my first stereo wireless headset (yes this had been 15 years earlier than the first version of Blueto...

2017 has definitely been a year of maturing technologies. From a road warrior perspective this means the gear is less bulky and more dependable. And the gadget bag getting lighter. Here is my personal hall of fame, which also reflects what I carry in my bag on every business trip. Blackberry KeyOne . This is the phone that ended the era of power banks. Depending on usage I charge it every 2 or 3 days and it has never run out of juice. 10.5 inch iPad. Serves as reading, research and entertainment device. I tried the 12.9 inch version which proved to be too bulky to fit in a seat pocket or on an economy class table. But I still use the same self-made kickstand. It also serves as a 2nd monitor for my windows laptop. 512GB memory is the key, as I can carry with me all my music, photos, books, research documents as well as several movies. Offline experience matters when you average 15k miles in the air every month. Logitech MX Anywhere 2S mouse. Ultra responsive and precise on any ...

One of the promises of the Internet of Things (IoT) is that it allows things to speak. Or even more precisely enables products and services that listen to things. Product maintenance is a great example of a such service. Imagine a lighting system on an airport. There's probably 50 thousand lights installed and statistically around 10 of them may be failing every day. Now having a service that precisely pinpoints the 10 that have just failed (or a single one as it fails) is clearly a value. But this is passive, reactive, poll-type device monitoring. Ping it periodically and once it stops responding, assume it needs to be checked, as it has probably failed. But actually if things can speak, we can shift from passive and reactive to proactive monitoring. A thing may be able to indicate that it will fail. If it is a lamp, it may report it has worked for a given number of hours at full power, so the performance has significantly degraded. If it is a power supply, it may report it ...

Silicon Labs is buying Sigma Designs , practically the only vendor offering chips and stacks for Z-Wave, the established home automation standard. It is an interesting move and watching what happens next will be even more interesting. Contrary to what the press release says and what other people are saying, I think it is the end of the game for Z-Wave. Z-Wave has been the longest standing and most complete home automation standard. Mainly due to the fact it has been tightly held by a single company (Sigma Designs) who has been defacto the only supplier of silicon and stacks for Z-Wave devices. Achieving interoperability among a family of devices coming from a single vendor is easy. And that is why Z-Wave has been so far the only option for interoperable smart homes. But Z-Wave as a technology has been ageing quickly. It does not scale to cover a home full of smart devices. It has very weak or no security. Majority of Z-Wave devices on the market today speak clear text to each other...

The whole concept of mirrorless cameras is they are smaller (and presumably lighter). Which probably is not the case IRL. Yes, theoretically, they can get smaller and lighter but practically they don't. At least in certain configurations. I've been experimenting with window seat photography for some time. Initially I thought a phone camera would do, but quickly realized a telephoto lens was essential. Trying to stay as light as possible, I tried the Sony DSC-HX90V . Beautiful 30x zoom lens in a tiny package, completely useless. Autofocus never worked and manual (software - controlled by the lens ring) was way too slow. On an airplane everything moves. Fast. I ended up with zero "keeps" with the Sony. The next was Panasonic DC-ZS70 . About twice as big as the Sony, but reportedly good and fast autofocus. Did not work either. With the lens extended it was too difficult to keep it steady trying to shoot a plane passing by in an opposite direction. Last week I borr...

My music library is organized with iTunes. And it has nothing to do with iPhones. The roots of this reach deep to the early 2000's - exactly to the year when the first iPod was released. This was when I started digitizing my library, which involved setting up variety of playlists. The playlists are a significant investment of time and effort over many years and since the very beginning I was struggling to make the portable to several non-Apple environments. The first was the Squeezebox , powered by the Slimserver software running on a Slug . Hey those were the days! My entire multiroom audio is still organized with the Slimserver at the center and a number of Squeezeboxes around it. The magic of the fluorescent displays is one of the kind. Slimserver has been designed with iTunes compatibility built in, but it was not always a smooth integration although recently it's been working flawlessly. The second non-Apple environment has been Android. And here the experience was e...

The concept of the ICN (Information Centric Networking) keeps gaining popularity. It is seen as an evolution of the Internet, away from a host - centric paradigm, to a network architecture with named information as a focal point (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information-centric_networking ). While this is a very scientific definition, it all is very applicable to building automation. Building automation is all information centric. Yes, many systems today depend on unicast device addresses to (a) interpret what is reported by sensor nodes and (b) send commands to actor nodes. But the ICN approach will allow them to walk away from this unnecessary level of complexity, driven primarily by the old networking paradigms. Named information is what matters. The underlying messaging paradigm is publish-subscribe. Users (Internet of Humans - IoH) or things (Internet of Things - IoT) interested in receiving specific content subscribe to it, while content owners advertise their content ...

EMV (Europay, MasterCard, Visa) has standardized the usage of crypto processeors embedded in credit cards to authenticate and secure transactions. In short: it defines how a chip card works. Before EMV a card was passive. It carried a set of numbers and strings: the cardholder's name, the card's number, etc. All the values could be read from the magnetic stripe are by just looking at the card. EMV has changed that by transforming cards from being passive storage of characters and numbers into active computers equipped with secure electronic memory. Without going into the details, EMV makes sure the actual card is used for a transaction (as opposed to a set of data associated with the card being used). This essentially means you cannot create a copy of an EMV card and use it, while this was perfectly possible with pre - EMV cards. EMV has essentially made card fraud impossible. And there are no known hacks against EMV cards. It is a great example of how properly architecte...

Smartphones continue grabbing the digital photography land. With an exception of some extreme / niche requirements (and yes, there are still many), it is very irrational today to have (or - especially - buy) a digital camera. As I said, there are many exceptions: I want to photograph a night sky (-> buy a full frame sensor camera); I want to have the best possible image quality (-> buy a full frame or even a medium format sensor camera); I want to use specialty lens: wide angle or telephoto (-> buy an interchangeable lens camera); I want my photographs to have a shallow depth of field (-> buy a large sensor camera). Etc. You can spot the common theme here: it is either a smartphone or a full frame camera (DSLR or mirror-less). Nothing in between (with very few but notable exceptions like the Sony RX-100V that still produces better photos than the latest iPhone and that includes the panorama mode and extremely fast autofocus). The digital photography business is being...

Every couple of days I'm asked about the future of wireless standards. How is the landscape going to look like  a couple of years from now? Companies are placing their bets. The conventional wisdom has been the number of wireless standards would never be reduced. I strongly disagree with this view. Actually within a few years we may be down to just four. While there are always niche applications requiring some specific radio features, the majority of applications will converge around these radio families: LTE / 5G for anything outdoor. Mobile telephony, mobile wide area data (high speed and low speed). WiFi for generic purpose indoor Internet access for high power devices (such as phones or personal computers). WiGig for ultra high bandwidth applications such as wireless displays and wireless storage (this may include digital cameras if the industry gets together and defines application profiles, which it should have done 15 years ago). Bluetooth for anything that is defin...

What a week! WPA2 has been proven vulnerable to nonce reuse : reinstall and old key as a new key and it starts using the old nonces again. Nonce (a number used only once) is a key concept in the AES cipher. I think most issues implementations have with AES are related to handling nonces and making sure they never are used twice. Nonce has also been central to the Bluetooth mesh architecture and the way it is designed makes the mesh stand apart from other low power communication systems - we have a nonce that is never reset and still occupies effectively only 3 octets in a message. See Section 3.8.5 for details. But that nonce problem in WiFi is not really a serious problem... Because who cares today if a WiFi network is secure or not? Airports, cafes, public hotspots... do we ever really rely on security of these? The answer is no. We rely on the security of our devices and on end-to-end protocols. We've reached the LAN's end. WiFi should not bother about security anymor...

The iPad has found a permanent place in my computer bag. After experimenting with the 12" model, I finally settled with the 10.5" one. It fits better on a crowded hotel conference room table as well as on a airplane coach seat table. During conference calls and committee meetings it serves me perfectly as a 2nd screen for the Lenovo Windows laptop. I can move a WebEx window to it or use it as an auxiliary screen when sharing the main one. This is a very convenient setup. Living almost permanently on a road it is also important to organize connectivity, and while WiFi is prevalent in many places, there are situations when it is not. Such as recently on a high speed train from Switzerland to France. I used to use the WiFi tethering option an Android phone offers, but that has one significant drawback: it consumes a lot of power, draining the phone battery fast. Even the ultra long lasting Blackberry KeyOne is affected. But Android offers another tethering option - using ...

A year ago I was lamenting on the rumors on the 3.5mm audio jack being dropped from iPhones . Now it is no longer available on the latest Android devices either. And guess what? It does not seem to be affecting us at all. The void, if created, is immediately filled. This time the most prevalent wired personal audio connectivity standard, 3.5mm jack, has been complete replaced with the most prevalent wireless personal audio connectivity standard, Bluetooth. And fear not - it just works. I have the Apple AirPods paired with my iPad AND the BlackBerry KeyOne at the same time. Despite all the marketing pitch behind the "W1", Apple has done a great job sticking to the standard specifications, as defined by the Bluetooth SIG. The AirPods not only play music, but they also properly pause / resume when touched. And of course I can use them (or just one of them) to have hands free calls - all using a stock Android phone. Switching back and forth between the BlackBerry and the iP...

Lighting Control Models (Sections 6.2 and 6.5 of the Mesh Model Specification) are the cream of the crop in Bluetooth mesh. Let me explain why I think so. Most of the time when I discuss smart lights, people tend to think they are lights you can control with a phone app or lights that can be controlled by another device, such as a switch or a dimming slider on the other end of a room. To be honest there is almost no "smart" in such scenarios. There is wireless connectivity involved, but the light itself, apart from being connected and responding to incoming messages, is not smart at all. It is a dumb slave server reacting humbly to whatever a client may want it to do. This is how many connected (and called smart) lighting systems are designed. There are client devices, usually in a form of a controller box, that have the smarts built in. The controllers have sensors connected and they run their own clocks and determine what they wat the lights to do. There is software r...

It is hard not to be a fan of USB. The standard keeps evolving at a great pace, maintaining compatibility with the early devices created some 20 years ago. It has also grown to become the standard for power delivery to all sorts of devices. It takes some juggling to be able to interconnect the ultra wide selection of things equipped with USB interfaces, although with careful approach the number of plug adapters can fit in a match box. Here is - what I believe - the USB-of-all-trades set for road warriors, enabling connecting anything to anything in (almost) any direction. It starts with a tiny Type-C to micro-B cable. This cable is extremely versatile, even allows using a (Type-C) phone to charge an accessory such as a smart watch (hey iPhone, can you do this?). The cable of course can be used to connect a Type-C host to any peripheral with a number of simple adapters Lacking a Type-C port on your laptop? Use this USB 3.1 A to Type-C converter. micro USB to 30-pin Apple adapte...

The Samsung T5 is a beast. 2TB in a matchbox. And you can fill it i about 2 hours. This relationship does not sound shocking, as there were times in history of computing when you were able to fill a hard drive in 2 hours. It does not until you realize how much 2TB is. It is 250 DVDs. It takes 10 seconds to back up a dual layer DVD with this drive, or around 1.5 second for a CD. It maintains continuous write throughput north of 400 MB/s. The only thing I don't quite like is the drive's form factor. It requires a cable and the cable supplied by Samsung is bulky - bigger than the drive itself. But USB cables are universal and it is a piece of cake to find a slimmer alternative, right? Wrong! Expecting some issues I ordered three different USB 3.1 A - to - Type-C SuperSpeed cables on Amazon. They arrived yesterday and I found them all not working as expected. While slimmer and nicer than the original one, and while the T5 never reported any errors, the transfer speed dropp...

I have just returned back from the 3-week trek to Upper Mustang and this is a great moment to revisit the A-Z list of gadgets published last week. Actually the post with gadgets was written a month ago, as I did not have access to the Internet while crossing the Kingdom of Lo. Honestly, this was my longest OTG experience since the Internet was invented :) The absolute gold award goes to the Sawyer water filter (W). Drinking water is at the very bottom of the hierarchy of needs and the Sawyer works like a miracle, delivering an abundance of purified drinking water. It does not require any energy source either, other than squeezing a bladder (X). The silver award goes to the Garmin smartwatch (O). It proved extremely useful, tracking our progress every second and providing many useful statistics such as altitude and distance. It is also very helpful during long ascends and descends to control the pace and remaining distance. As our schedule was typically around 10 hours of walking...

A: Nikon D750 Camera. The workhorse since 2015. Now with the Sigma 24-80 f/2.8 Lens. B: Laowa 12mm rectalinear wide angle lens. Amazing for wide angle. Kickstarter. C: Spare Nikon batteries (2). The good thing about a DSLR is batteries last quite long. D: μUSB Nikon battery charger. I still don't understand why batteries DSLRs bodies cannot charge batteries...? E: ND and CIR-POL filters, 82mm. F: Lens cleaning kit. G: Nikon wireless remote. Helps getting steady shots on a tripod. H: Trailpix tripod (uses trekking poles as legs) with Gitzo GT1550T mini head and Neewer FXC-25 Arca-Swiss adapter. The lightest combo I could find. I: Sony RX-100-V. Backup camera and great panoramas with no effort. Almost makes the D750+Sigma obsolete. Maybe they should have stayed at home? J: Magnetic filter ring adapter for the Sony Rx-100, with C-POL filter. Essential for high altitude. K: Spare battery in a convenient Sony μUSB charger. L: Aple SD-Card reader. To browse photos on somebody's iP...

After falling in love with the Blackberry Priv almost two years ago I had almost no intention to look elsewhere for a new phone. Unfortunately the Priv has started showing some signs of ageing: apps, especially the newer ones, have become sluggish. Especially the Android platform common features such as content sharing have become annoyingly slow. And the battery life has been far from perfect. Living with a power bank has become my daily habit. Blackberry KeyOne , the successor of the Priv, never looked as the greatest phone on the Planet, at least on paper. Smaller screen, a processor not from the cutting edge top line available now... But it turns out, the Blackberry KeyOne is probably the phone that should be occupying the headlines and be desired by everybody. Because it is an engineering marvel, and especially product - wise it demonstrates how a very careful evaluation of requirements and engineering choices delivers an absolutely winning package. Than winning combination ...

Scalability was the initial reason for us at Silvair to turn to Bluetooth Low Energy when looking for a low power mesh networking technology. I posted this story in The Launch episode. We knew it would be good. Better than anything else available. Primarily due to the extremely compact packet structure which flies over the fastest low energy radio. Mesh packets are like bullets flying through the air. Imagine what would be the density of the fire required for bullets to collide in air? OK I admit every solution has limits. So what are the limits of Bluetooth Mesh? The answer is - as always - it depends. It depends what the network is doing (how many and what messages it keeps sending around) and how it is set up. Mesh has many parameters that may be fine tuned to make it perform even better. As a general rule of thumb you may say at 200 devices (or less) you should not worry about any tuning at all. It is like 200 guns shooting in the same area. The likelihood that any two bull...

When designing the application layer for Bluetooth Mesh (materialized as the Mesh Model Specification), we of course wanted to go as deep as possible to address particular application domains, like lighting. But at the same time we realized the concept of Generics (binary on/off, analog level with level / transactional delta / move control options) has been really powerful. Capable of fulfilling the needs of 80% of non-lighting applications. I was pitching the Generics since it's conception, arguing they are applicable to all sorts of use cases and device types. After all most things that can be controlled are either on/off or analog-level type and 16-bit resolution is more than enough for most applications. Then I was asked about a door open/close sensor: is "open" 0 or 1? What is the convention? Well... ain't it rather obvious? Open is 1. Want a proof? Open your fridge. You'll see the light inside is on, and we've already defined light on as 1. So o...

When working on the architecture of the Bluetooth Mesh system, we kept on diving deep into the roots of problems we were aiming to solve. Smart lighting is one such area, which has been the focus of the team of contributors. There are many reasons to treat lighting as the primary application for a mesh system: Lights are everywhere and they are powered. So depending how you look at it, a lighting control system may be the goal itself or may just be the initial step to develop more services that are based on the mesh - connected infrastructure. Imagine an airport. Or a hospital. Or a high rise, multi-tenant office building. Or a company campus. Now imagine you want to roll out a service that requires a dense infrastructure of radio nodes. Thousands of nodes. Rolling out that hardware would be very expensive, as each would require a mount point and power supply. Now imagine each light that is already mounted and powered is capable of supporting your wireless application. Suddenly you...

As the Bluetooth mesh networking specifications are now public, we can start dissecting and discussing various building blocks of this - I do not hesitate to say - revolutionary system. There are many novel and unique concepts in mesh, but in my opinion the key asset and differentiator is the packet. It is extremely compact. This compactness contributes to the spectral efficiency (and throughput) of Bluetooth mesh networks. Radio is a shared medium and collisions are one of the key problem to combat (or avoid). The math is simple: a shorter packet means less collisions. But how short can it be? The answer is: up to 29 bytes, as described in the section 3.4.4 of the Mesh Profile specification. Of course you start such design with the basics: compressed binary payload instead of a text representation. Covering a really broad set of use cases (building automation, sensors), 11 bytes for the application payload seems appropriate. 1-2 bytes for an opcode and up to 10 bytes for para...

There has been no event anticipated more than the public launch of Bluetooth Mesh . It all started back in 2013 when Google rolled our Android 4.3 with API level 18 , introducing support for Bluetooth LE. AT that time I knew (almost) nothing about Bluetooth, but I knew IPv6 over 802.15.4 was a pipe dream. IPv6, even with the 6Lo compression has simply been too heavy too fly and 802.15.4 has been too slow to give it a lift. Yes, back in 2012-2013, at Silvair we tried something very similar to what Thread is today, and unfortunately we found this combination incapable of addressing the needs of wireless lighting. Hence looking for a new radio. Google's announcement of support for Bluetooth LE in Android sparked hopes. BLE was already supported by iOS, so with Android on board it seemed like a good candidate to try. It did not fly either. We quickly found out the single-hop range was really limited and the hub-and-spoke topology offered was far from anything usable for our nee...

It is funny how on a daily basis we still keep on applying the common wisdom to the world we aim to change (and are actually succeeding in changing...). Last week my co-founder was shopping for a pair of wireless headphones. Bose has always been his preferred brand and he owns a wired Bose headset. The wired one comes in two variants: Apple and Android. There is a slight difference in how the fwd / rev buttons work on each platform. After finding the wireless (Bluetooth) equivalent, he wanted to make sure he was picking the appropriate variant, so asked the lady behind the counter if they have an appropriate variant. The answer was obvious: "Sir, this is Bluetooth. It works with everything!". I really regret we did not record that answer. It was so obvious to her. Really the way it should be. Yes. The most important thing Bluetooth really succeeded in is interoperability. Not many standards come close...

The common wisdom about startups is they are roller coasters. Especially for investors and founders. I offer to challenge this opinion. A startup is the most secure guarantee of a success. Both on a personal development and an investment front. The reason is a startup is the most effective learning environment you can imagine. Through deep personal involvement and through an extremely broad and complex problems that need to be solved. Running a startup is probably more effective (in terms of a learning curve) than Stanford, MIT, or any other top rated university. You just have to be open to learn. And if you are, there is this continuous supply of knowledge every day, every hour, almost every second. Guaranteed. No other environment creates so many opportunities for creative problem solving, trials, testing hypothesis, and iterating all of that in rapidly spinning cycles. Of course it will not only be smiley and lazy days. There will be a lot of rain and ice. And it will t...

Multicast has always been our fundamental requirement when designing low power wireless networks. It brings enormous efficiency into a system. A single message, such as a sensor reading or a dimmer setting action is sent out in the air and picked up by multiple receivers, which act upon such message. The key problem here is reliability. Usually (and this is a human nature) we want to hear a confirmation. But that can be very costly and slow. Up to a point of not serving the initial purpose at all. Like in a lighting system. A typical ceiling in a commercial building today has dozens of lights. Often more than a hundred. But even with small rooms equipped with as few as 20 lights, multicast is orders of magnitude more reliable, compared to acknowledged unicast traffic. After all it is all very simple. Let's assume a probability of delivering a single message to a destination is 90%. Meaning there is 10% chance the message will not be received (for many reasons: interference,...

It seems we are on the verge of shifting manufacturing back from China. Labor cost won't matter anymore. A month ago I had a very interesting conversation with an owner of a factory in Germany. His factory is fully automated and the work is done by robots. One of the products they make are smart light bulbs for IKEA. He says his costs are lower compared to Chinese factories and quality is much higher (the failure rate of finished products is an order of magnitude lower). On another note Elon Musk says he can increase the speed of the Tesla production line in Fremont, California, from the current five centimeters per second to one meter per second. Assuming 6 meters per car, it is 5 million cars per year, per a single production line.  Almost what all Ford factories globally could do in 2016 ( 6.5M ). It seems with robots and automated assembly lines, there is no more issue of labor costs and scale. For some products (such as our own smart lighting), manufacturing is one co...