Headworx

This week a good friend of mine decided to shut down his factory and close the business. After 27 years. It was a great factory manufacturing super nice glassware for tier-1 customers and also providing employment for many workers in the town. What killed it were the high energy proces, in particular the natural gas which skyrocketed in Europe, especially after the Russian invasion on Ukraine. Glassworks are super dependent on energy, as it takes a lot of it to melt glass. So this is not unexpected they struggle to survive where energy proces are high and thrive where energy is cheap. It probably makes much more sense to craft a glass bowl somewhere in, say, Kazakhstan, and ship it over to Europe, than pay Kazakhstan (or Russia) for the energy to manufacture the same bowl in Europe. At the same time the lighting control software business has accelerated significantly during the same period of time, with energy savings being the key feature driving sales. It turns out that adding a smal

CNN featured an article with an interesting (and honest) perspective on Bluetooth: " Why Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades ". The short story is: we love Bluetooth when it works and we hate it when it does not. Unfortunately still after 20 years we often have reasons to hate it. And this is almost entirely due to bad implementations. People tend to blame the overarching technology and the brand when a particular product does not work. While the issues are typically with the product itself. And yes, bad implementations have plagued Bluetooth since the very beginning. It all probably started with Microsoft simply ignoring the existence of Bluetooth, until (if I remember correctly) Windows 7, when it finally offered native Bluetooth support. Before that Windows users were forced to use 3rd party Bluetooth drivers with varying quality. Android only recently has made a serious bet on Bluetooth, finally realizing this is one of the featur

Things always look clearer in perspective. And at the same time we typically do not see when something moves on continuously at what seems to be a very slow speed. Living in a city you basically wake up everyday and the city everyday is the same. No change, no progress. But move out for a bit longer and come back. Then the changes are clear. If there are changes. Since the pandemic eased out this Spring, I have returned to fairly frequent business travel. I know, I know, this is bad for the environment, but to my excuse the result of that travel is makin much more good for the environment - through the massive energy savings our software enables. So I feel absolved to some extent. And yes, the pandemic has done a loot of good for the environment too, by enabling videoconferencing as the primary means of doing business. But still some things work a lot better when you meet face to face. Especially conventions and trade shows when you meet new people. It is still hard to meet new people

It is not often in real life that technology (governed by the underlying laws of physics) makes a perfect fit for an application. But it just happens to be this way when Bluetooth mesh is used for commercial / industrial sensor - based lighting control. Light fixtures (be it office - type "troffers" or industrial "high-bay" fixtures) are organized in a grid layout. The spacing of the grid is in the range of 10x10 ft in offices and up to several times that in warehouses and over factory floors. These grid configurations result from lighting - related requirements. Now each light fixture becomes a radio mesh node. And when we apply the radio propagation principles for a given type of space (use the Bluetooth Range Estimator ), it turns out we arrive at the magic number of 200, which is the typical number of mesh nodes within a single-hop radio range. IOW on average there are 200 nodes able to receive a radio transmission from any other node. So why is the 200 number i

I do not believe in electric cars. In fact they are one of the biggest lies out there today. They have very little in common with protecting the environment. The life-time carbon footprint of an electric car is more or less equal to a traditional car. So switching from an ICE vehicle to an EV does not move the needle. And speaking of mobility in the context of the climate: there are many super easy things which could move the needle: stopping buying new cars would be the first. Some people do that every 2-3 years. That is completely irrational, in particular considering they often complain how bad the new car is compared to the old one. Or simply driving less. 3 weeks ago attending an industry convention in Bellevue, WA, I was the only passenger on a public bus to the Airport. The bus is $3.25 and the ride takes 50 minutes. Comparing to $35 and 40 minutes by Uber. It must be a monumental effort to take this bus, as clearly nobody was able to do do that. Or nobody cared. Back to EVs - t