Low-power radio, advertising, provisioning and scanning, debugged in a real building full of metal shelving, not only on a desk.
It demos beautifully on a desk. The engineering is in everything after that.
Interference, metal and concrete change everything. Placement and power settings are decided by measurement on site.
Advertising interval is the main lever on battery life. We tune it against how quickly you need to see a device.
Scanning and filtering that hold up with a room full of tags, rather than falling over past a few dozen.
Provisioning that proves a device is yours, so anything can be seen but only your hardware is trusted.
Advertising, scanning, connection and reconnection, tuned for a real building rather than a bench.
Getting a device onto the network without a manual. This is mostly interface design informed by what the radio can actually promise.
Our own app pairs and reads the tags we built. Bluetooth on iOS and Android differ more than the specification suggests, and that difference is the work.
Why a device drops out in one corner of one building. Usually answerable with measurement rather than opinion.
Advertising intervals, connection parameters and payload size, which together decide battery life more than the battery does.
Written for someone deciding, not for someone who already knows. Skip it if you do.
A short-range radio designed for devices that run on a coin cell for years. It's not the Bluetooth that streams audio; it's a different protocol under the same name, built for small, occasional messages rather than a continuous stream.
A device advertises — broadcasts a short packet saying it exists — and something scanning nearby hears it. Most of what feels like magic in tracking products is this, repeated: the tag says nothing but its identity, and whatever hears it reports where it was heard.
Published figures are open-field with a clear line of sight. Real buildings have walls, metal, water and people, all of which absorb 2.4GHz. Ten metres through two plasterboard walls is a more honest expectation than the hundred on a datasheet, and designing for the honest number is the difference between a product that works and one that gets returned.
A device broadcasting a fixed identifier can be followed by anyone listening. Rotating, resolvable addresses solve it, and they have to be designed in from the beginning because the whole pairing model depends on them.
Almost always the environment rather than the firmware. A survey finds it faster than more code will.
The advertising interval is the first place to look, and small changes there have large effects.
It makes them trackable by anyone in range, and it's a question your enterprise customers will eventually ask.
Tens of metres in open space and much less through walls and metal. Any figure quoted without describing the building is marketing.
From months to several years, decided mostly by how often a device advertises. It's a trade against how quickly you want to see it.
Yes for nearby finding, and hubs cover the rest. A phone only sees what is in range of that phone, which is why fixed hubs exist.
Ten to thirty metres indoors depending on what is in the way, not the hundred on the datasheet. We design to the honest figure and measure it in the building rather than promising a number.
Off-the-shelf tags are cheaper and faster if the behaviour you need is standard. Custom is worth it when battery life, form factor or the protocol itself has to be yours, and we'll tell you which you're.
A few lines are enough to start. You get a reply within two working days.
