IoT, industrial sensors & Maketronics first product

It's been a busy year, so I've not written much about ongoing projects, but a lot has happened. I've worked on electronics for roadside safetly, robotics, museeum exhibits, IoT audio as well as some of my regular customers.

Roadguard

The most exciting project in 2024 has been working on a product to detect tire track depths. The startup Roadguard have been working to solve this problem for some time and I was temporarily brought on to help with electronics development. Due to strict NDAs, I cannot tell much about the project but it's been fun to work with a project that has the potential to remove up to 10% of all road fatailities every year. They have a great team and I'm sure this product will have big success - also outside of Norway.

Foreningen !les & the red phone booth audio experience

In 2022 and 2023 I worked on a fun “popup event” with Foreningen !les, Brillefilm and Lyder produksjoner. We made an audio experience for kids where they would run around between Phone booths to uncover an exciting story. We've now taken this one step further into a full IoT system for streaming audio. The last 9 months, we've had a beta kiosk up and running and we now have hardware ready to roll out across the country.

I've built the hardware, firmware and backend that let you administer the content of each kiosk. The system allows full remote control of the devices, including updates, remote file system, automatic volume control, audio playback and much more. It's a very complete IoT system that can work either via Wifi or Cellular. Our Cellular provider Com4 recently made a nice video case study for the IoT project showing how the system works with interviews with both Vibeke from ForeningenLes! and myself.

RadSense 1

Most of my work is for clients in industry, but as mentioned in my March update, I'm now developing my own products as well. The first of these were soft-launched before the summer holidays - the millimeter wave radar sensor called RadSense 1. It's a small box that can make or break a connection based on the presence of a human. As opposed to PIR, Ultrasound and other distance sensors - this sensor won't fail to detect someone standing still since it can see even millimeter movements such as a person breathing. This solves a niche problem, but the use of radar also makes it possible to hide the radar sensor itself. You could easily make a window display showing a video that would turn on sound if a person walks in front of the window. All the parts would be inside the shop, but you can communicate to those outside. No programming is required - just a simple wire connection.

Making the product actually isn't the most time consuming part. It's the part of getting the product to market with distribution, approvals, marketing, documentation and all the other things around the product. The product is now for sale via Amazon. For now it's only available in the US market due to the prohibitive cost of CE approval for products using a 24Ghz radio, but if the product does well in the US, I will do the process for EU as well.

The project is by no means break even at this stage, but sales are going fine despite close to no marketing having been done. I'm working on marketing, but it does take time to get these things ready when you're also doing consulting full time. I'm constantly adding to and improving the RadSense product pages at maketronics.no. This also means that my consultancy now has a decent website where I'm listing major client projects over the years.

Roest Coffee & the P3000

Roest is one of my long time clients and I've worked with them since their first product. They've made money every year since the start and the last four years they've doubled their revenue year over year. The first product was a highly advanced Sample Roaster called S100 and since the start, they've grown into an 18 person strong team. I still do the electronics, but they have full time employees handling all other aspects now. Røst recently celebrated their 10 year anniversary where they also showed off their second product: the P3000 coffee roaster which I've also done the electronics for.

This machine will change the firm from a specialty provider with a single niche product to competing head on in a huge market. Having looked at the competition, I have great faith in this product. It's far ahead of the competition and yet again it looks great! Ín the coffee business, this really matters. There's many making machines that can roast large amounts of coffee beans, so your product have to stand out against the competition. With a 3 Kg capacity, this product will fit right in for anyone wanting to do their own roasting at a small scale. The machine has the features and looks required to be the centerpiece of stylish coffee shops, so I think they'll do well this time around as well.

Other

As usual, I've done a few projects for marketing and museeums. These provide fun challenges in making extremely solid installations and "that just work". With these being in a public space, they've tought me a lot about what works and not. The RadSense product has great potential to help installations like these since you can hide the millimeter radar sensor behind anything (except metal), making it really hard to destroy. I've also made a few smaller robotics controllers for various industries, some large lighting solutions as well as consulting. A good variety over all and many fun challenges!

In other news - I'm no longer lecturing for Kristiania University. This frees up time, so I can spend time on my own products or get more involved with client projects. I can now work full time if the project is right and requires this. Every month I get requests from headhunters that want me to start fulltime positions. My current consultancy offers so much freedom that I have no interest in a fulltime position, but I'm always looking for new challenges and projects, so feel free to get in touch if you're in need of an EE with solid experience. I love projects that break new ground where you have to innovate to solve hard problems!