Headworx

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...