Headworx

I've had a chance to test Starlink (the "mini" variant) over the last week during the trip to Cabo Verde - a remote archipelago in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. This was originally planned as a remote work week (no, AI does not make us less busy). And for that, Internet connectivity is fundamental. Before the trip we checked various internet forums for the quality of WiFi (and cellular) services there, and the opinions were very mixed. The first location we stayed at (close to Porto Novo) actually had upgraded to their own Starlink, and in our hut there was even the Starlink Mini Router Node installed. In the other location (the Paul valley) there was LTE coverage (not very fast), and the house had WiFi at around 4Mb down / 0.5Mb up - fine for basic browsing but not for video conferencing. I ordered the Starlink Mini dish via the Starlink.com site before the trip. It comes with a 30-day return policy. Probably I will keep it though, as generally it worked and it may j...

The Karlsson Nixie clock (by Peter van der Jagt 1997) is very stylish. One of the first of the kind and definitely setting the trend. Unfortunately it does not hold the time after a power outage. For quite some time I was thinking of adding a time synchronization module. Initially the idea was to use the long wave radio receiving the DCF77 signal. DCF77 is increasingly more problematic as the 77kHz frequency is impacted by the totality of high frequency digital power supplies that generate lots of radio noise. The alternative is of course fully digital, relying on an Internet time source, based on the NTP protocol. Surprisingly (or not) the NTP-based module has proven to be super easy to build these days (...with the help of AI). Actually I wanted to kill two birds with one stone: have the bloody clock display the right time and also test Claude's capabilities as a junior embedded software / electronics coworker. Both goals have been achieved. I found it entertaining, educating, ...

July was not travel-heavy. A week in Trondheim, Norway (a great place to be in Summer) and then the rest of the month at home / Krakow. Ah if you don't count a weekend trip to Spa, Belgium for the F1 GP race. But it was busy preparing for the intense 2nd half of the year. It starts just now, with the Korea Build in Seoul this week followed by the IES26 in Denver, CO, so another RTW trip. And three presentations to deliver over the next two weeks - the keynote in Seoul, the Bluetooth NLC roadmap in Denver and a joint webinar with US DoE / PNNL / IES on lighting systems integrations. Three different venues and events, three different topics, so plenty of preparatory work on my end. Add to that the Embedded World America (that is in September) and my days were busy compiling PowerPoint slides. I like doing that, but always the tedious part were illustrations. Text-only slides are boring. Visuals help. But when doing them on my own the results were not that great. And working with a gr...

Sustainability discussions have become mainstream now. And the theme is very broad, touching essentially every aspect of our lives. Cars have however always occupied the center stage, especially now as electric vehicles (EVs) take over traditional internal combustion engine (ICE) based - mostly in China and Europe. Feeling a bit guilty here - as an owner of a 20+ years old Subaru Forester, I did some math (seeking some absolution). I don't drive much with this car though, maybe a bit over 5000km per year, so the initial feeling was that my contribution to the global carbon footprint would not be super high. For comparison I took the additional footprint of flying intercontinental in business class vs economy (more floor space, heavier seat etc., and all those bottles of champagne on board) and the global reduction impact of the lighting control software my company makes. So here is my math: The car: 5000km is about 600 liters of fuel. Burning 1 liter produces roughly 2.3kg of CO2. ...

As a follow up to the last week's story about car dashboards - an addendum from my rental experience. It was a 2-day trip to Germany. My company has a rental agreement with SIXT, with some preferential rebates and integrated invoicing, so I went there without thinking too much. I liked SIXT in the past for their quite seamless "skip the line" online check-in (scan the driver's license and an ID, get a code to open a lockbox with the car keys). And it went OK like that this time too. But there were several things that were not OK.  During the booking process I got a number of really silly-looking options. Like "get Bluetooth for 5 EUR/day". And then "get Apple CarPlay" for additional 5 EUR/day. CarPlay requires Bluetooth so technically selecting it should select the Bluetooth option too... "Get parking sensors for 5 EUR/day".... the list was long. SIXT are you serious? There is no way to enable / disable these options remotely (or maybe th...

I've had a number of very interesting (private) discussions following the last week's post on The Wall Of Money . One important take away has been to also mention the shadow banking system as the key contributor to the wall of money. If traditional central bank money printing is the visible high tide, the shadow banking system is the massive underwater current that amplifies that tide. It plays an enormous, often hidden role in inflating and sustaining asset valuations. A fund can take $100 million in Treasury bonds, pledge them in and borrow $95 million in cash, and immediately use that cash to buy equities. The lender who took those Treasury bonds as collateral can turn around and use those same bonds to back a different loan for someone else. Rehypothecation - rinse and repeat. This generates an immense amount of purchasing power that flows directly into financial markets. But it is a liquidity mirage. [Traditional Central Bank] → Creates Visible Money Supply [Shadow Banking...

I'm in the middle of a yet another round-the-world trip. Started two weeks ago in Europe for the Milan Bluetooth Member Summit , followed by the ultra dense in meeting Guangzhou International Lighting Exhibition in China. Next week I'll have a number of customer meetings in the USA. Luckily there is a short weekend pause in between, which I decided to spend in the "TikTok city" of Chongqing. It is a 6-hour high speed rail ride from the coast (the CR400 "Fuxing" at 350 km/h ), which I spent almost entirely glued to the window, with my brain working in the background to aggregate and generalize the inrush of information of the past 14 days. One of the puzzles I was trying to solve was the explosive SpaceX IPO, which, on the surface, has never made any sense to me. Everything I know about SpaceX, plus what I read in the S-1 filling, is a pure fiction (with the exception to the Falcon rockets that represent the solid part of the business). That is on the surface...

No, I cannot tell the details. Development of Bluetooth ®  specifications is governed by the confidentiality rules. So the only way to learn more is to be a Bluetooth SIG member and join the Working Groups. As I write this, the June Members' Summit in Milan, Italy is getting to the end. The week has been really packed. And as I have been excited about the progress on many fronts since I joined the SIG in 2012 (and then started to lead the Mesh Working Group in 2015), the excitement this week has reached all time highs. These things are complex and may seem to move slowly for casual observers "when will Bluetooth finally do X,Y,Z?", I've been super happy with the progress. To be honest, the progress is the one thing, but entirely more important is the spectrum of opportunities and the roadmap ahead. For the last couple of years, in parallel to development of Mesh / NLC - specific features (like the HVAC Integration Profile) , we have been doing a lot of ground work on ...

This one is generally nothing new. I think I get quite a lot of things done. Am I always motivated? No. Discipline is the other factor and there are - I think - three aspects of it that help: Imagining the results. This itself kicks in the right chemistry (literally) - dopamine - the needed neurotransmitter. Dopamine is sometimes confused with endorphins and incorrectly considered the satisfaction molecule. People thought dopamine shot up because you got something good (like winning a game). But dopamine actually spikes before you get the prize. It is the fuel for motivation: it drives the internal incentive processing. It creates the craving, the focus, and the energy required to go get the thing. Making lists. Richard Branson's favorite: " I have always lived my life by making lists ". I too make lists all the time. To help my aging memory and remember important things in the exploding galaxy of interests and distractions. I don't use paper lists but several electro...

2025 was very travel - intensive for me. Needless to say I managed to ern the 1K status flying only in (often deeply discounted) economy class.  This can be nicely seen in the Flighty app . The app that I called useless (because all it offers is already possible in the native airline apps). But on the other hand Flighty is really pretty and the visualization of flights overlayed on top of Apple Maps is cool :) Travel is the inherent part of my job and I do it by choice. Honestly speaking I do not understand many people that I meet who "feel for me" and do not like to travel at all. Yet they still either do international business or actively participate in global standardization efforts through different standards committee memberships. My response in such case is almost always in the lines of "have you been sentenced to do this job?", which of course may be rude, but ultimately I believe that everyone is the architect of their own fate. And in most fee / democratic ...

Another year behind us - time flies. Steps - wise I more or less matched the 2024 numbers, which I called "definitely below expectations". Now the expectations were trimmed and I am quite happy with the outcome. Yes, lowering expectations is the easiest path to happiness! The knee and ankle injuries took longer to heal than I expected and affected my walking distances at the beginning of the year. 2025 was also very travel - intensive (if not the most!). And especially considering the long distance nature of my business trips, I am quite happy with the amount of physical exercise I was able to put. This physical exercise is BTW the best way to fight jetlag and quickly accommodate to new time zones. So no real downs in 2025 and my total is now about a half of the Earth's circumference: 19667 kilometers (with the watch on). Some TZ changes were quite brutal. In late August I flew from Poland to California (9 hours shift) for the 3-day IES Annual Conference and then overnigh...

The energy crisis was the leading theme throughout the 2025 COSM conference. And people were really crying rivers about it. With the two most severe loses articulated: We will not be able to scale the AI infrastructure sufficiently enough China will overtake us Both are - I would say - purely "American" worries. First of all, nobody knows if AI progress is really limited by energy. Dwarkesh Patel has recently discussed this with Ilya Sutskever - and the headline is "We're moving from the age of scaling to the age of research". Returns from scaling out the AI infrastructure have been diminishing. Ilya argues we need to do other things than just building more capacity. And I could not agree more. The existing LLMs have already swallowed all that was ever written. And probably more. And they still remain language models, increasingly more sophisticated statistical engines, not having a clue what they are talking about. I'm not saying that LLMs are totally usel...

Out of curiosity I compared the highlights and features of iPhone 17 with the Pro 15 (the one I use). They are (almost) identical. The only difference is the telephoto lens - offering 4x magnification (vs 3x in the 15 Pro) and 48 megapixels (vs 12 in the Pro 15). The higher resolution allows for a quite effective crop, which results in the 8x option advertised by Apple. I primarily bought the iPhone for the photography features . And they are great. The long exposure low light is something not achievable by real cameras. I mean, considering the pocketable nature of the phone and the fact it can shoot steady 3s exposures handheld, 10s with a simple support (say, resting your hand on a tree while holding the phone), and 30s when really steady (a simple lightweight tripod is fine for that). There is a great sensor fusion at work plus it stacks multiple exposures into one, with the result being fairly low noise ultra low light photo. The unfortunate thing is, that despite all the advances...

The IES Annual conference has always been the temple of light. Stunning designs, beautifully illuminated spaces, and the role of light in human wellbeing. In 2025 this has changed. The Gala and the Awards were still about illumination, but the technical sessions started to boldly drift away, to discuss - surprise, surprise - heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning. All with connection to light of course. Or - to be precise - to occupancy sensors brought to buildings en masse thanks to lighting. HVAC is shaping up to be the first significant beyond-lighting application. Forget wayfinding beacons. Forget asset tracking. Forget space utilization heatmaps. It is still all about energy savings. The lighting folks realized the HVAC crowd was unable to pull it on their own. So have come to offer the helping hand: the Lighting-HVAC Integration. As I cried almost 10 years ago - for the connected products to get really connected, we need cross-domain industry experts. And this has been happ...

I've been using iTunes for 25 years. It is a terribly bad piece of software, but one of only a few options to manage a local library of music files with somewhat universal interoperability. In particular the playlists created on an iPod transfer to other Apple (and Windows) computers as well as are recognized by independent local media management and streaming systems like the Sqeezebox Logitech Lyrion . Over the years iTunes has undergone some minor changes (the latest one is nearly as bad as the original), and some of them have somehow (in my case) resulted in the music database becoming corrupted. Long story short, the only way out was to restore the backed-up mp3 files and let iTunes rescan the entire library. The playlists were unfortunately lost this way, as neither the mp3s nor the file folder structure have any information about the playlist metadata. iTunes itself have since moved the root library folder from iTunes Music to iTunes Media (and also some other changes), so...

The post on  Bluetooth NLC vs DALI+: Capacity and Performance has generated very valuable feedback. I promised to shed some more light on my network capacity calculations, so here they are. The key assumptions are: - The Thread network operates at 2.4GHz using IEEE 802.15.4 data links at 250kbps; - Transmitting nodes use Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance (CSMA/CA) method to manage the shared communication channel; - Each unicast transmission is acknowledged - There are two hops (say: sensor → router and router → lighting controller) - The minimum data frame at PHY is 50 octets (+6: preamble + SFD), so ~1.8ms - The ACK frame (including the SIFS time) is ~0.5ms - The average CSMA/CA overhead is ~1.4ms That gives us 3.7ms per hop total. So with two hops we have the channel occupancy of 7.5ms. At full 100% channel occupancy that would give us capacity of 135 end-to-end messages per second (one way). But... 100% would simply kill the network. Thread is very fr...

Whenever I come across a discussion that involves wireless communications over the Thread protocol (such as this one ), there is almost 100% chance people don't understand the underlying physics and traffic patterns. This is the result of Thread marketing since 2014, highlighting the IPv6 protocol as its key strength. And typically it goes like that: "Thread is based on IPv6 and there are more IPv6 addresses that grains of sand in the Universe". And people read this "because Thread is based on IPv6, it is a highly scalable wireless protocol". Treating the potential number of static addresses equally to the dynamic situation when these devices actually send data. If we consider the networked lighting control domain, the most prevalent pattern today is to have a motion sensor in every luminaire. The motion sensor usually has multiple functions: it is a motion sensor of course. But it also is a light level sensor enabling daylight harvesting (or dimming lights down...

I really liked the Lex Fridman's recent interview with David Heinemeier Hansson (aka DHH) - the 37signals / Ruby on Rails guy. Many topics, but the small teams theme has really resonated with me. I was a solo programmer for about 20 years, starting with Sinclair ZX Spectrum in 1983 and going through several jobs including the company I cocreated in 1992, which grew up to around 300 people ten years later. This solo experience has spoiled me. I was the product manager, the ux designer, the architect and the coder. And that was extremely efficient. Of course the solo approach has limits to the scalability, as there are only 2 hands and 24 hours in a day, no matter how much money you throw in. So at some point I had to give up and cede the tasks to the team. And that was so immensely frustrating. Despite the team being many developers (I still tried to keep the architect role), things started going super slow. I was spending countless hours teaching, explaining, then explaining again ...

It has been almost 6 full months since (after long procrastination) I finally completed the home energy monitoring project . In short: Home Assistant + Circuit Setup energy meter based on ESPHome. Long story short: all has been working flawlessly. There have been multiple routine firmware updates (they are released ~monthly). To be honest I have not paid (almost) any attention to them. Luckily nothing got broken, but equally Home Assistant could be releasing one update per year. This is a side observation, but generally people are fed up with software updates. Even if they go flawlessly, there is always the risk of something getting broken. I've been hearing the same from our customers: you release too frequently (we used to every 6 months, but now there is the pressure to release at most once a year). Ove the 6 months I have learned quite a lot about my usage patterns. Daily hot bath is an energy hog, but I can easily run the boiler when the energy is least expensive (=middle of ...

High speed trains in China are phenomenal. I could sit by the window for hours watching the passing landscape. They do not run on ground. They either soar high on concrete bridges and piers or pierce through tunnels. It is thousands of kilometers of piers and tunnels. And the landscape mostly flips from agricultural fields to endless seas of industrial buildings - factories. It is totally unlike anywhere else. When the train enters an industrial zone, there are thousands and thousands factories. It probably takes such a train ride to understand the hypothetical effort of moving manufacturing to the West. The factories form a unique and super efficient industrial supply chain. It is not about the iPhone. While a flagship symbol of Western dominance, we could do without iPhones. But probably we could not do without lights, linen, pots, just about every daily used item is made in China. And then there are basic components to make them: wires, bolts, glue, paint. And then the raw materials...