IoT & Connected Hardware
Connected Hardware is changing the way businesses make money and people live their lives. In the mass market, the Apple Watch, Fitbit, and Nest represent the best that Connected Hardware has to offer. At Ten Mile Square, we believe that purpose-built Connected Hardware for targeting very specialized use cases represent a much bigger opportunity. Some examples include:
- Portable heart monitors that provide detailed data to physicians and more freedom to patients.
- Necklaces and bracelets that enable caregivers to track patients in assisted living facilities.
- 3D printers that enable users to download designs and print custom parts on demand.
- Sensor-equipped vehicles that enable trucking fleets to optimize usage, routing, and maintenance.
Most Connected Hardware has a few things in common:
- Built using powerful, but inexpensive, hardware such as microcontrollers, sensors, and radios for Bluetooth, WiFi, and cellular connection.
- Sophisticated firmware and scaled-down operating systems – such as Linux – to connect the hardware and manage the devices.
- 3D printers that enable users to download designs and print custom parts on demand.
Services
Ten Mile Square brings years of expertise to the creation and delivery of Connected Hardware. We develop full-stack applications that incorporate all layers of the necessary hardware and software to provide complete applications from device-to-cloud. We provide a spectrum of Connected Hardware services including:
- Review and Assessment – We examine the design, costs, manufacturing, and quality for Connected Hardware products. We can assess the feasibility of a new product or suggest remediation or improvement of an existing product designed by your company or a third party. We can also assess the applications and cloud infrastructure that ride above the device layer.
- Design Consulting – We will work with your team or partner in any or all aspects of the design process. We can also perform component selection and sourcing for US, Chinese, and other supply options.
- Advanced Prototyping – Based on your proposed design, we create one or more iterations of a prototype product, which will provide you an idea of how your finished product will perform in operation and gives you the opportunity to make design changes to improve performance or fix quality-related issues.
- Complete Product Design and Manufacturing – We assume the responsibility for designing and managing the manufacturing for your Connected Hardware application, including:
- Board Design and Prototyping – We perform iterated design cycles including schematics and layout; power, communications, enclosures, and other hardware components; test harnesses, testing, and qualification; bill-of-materials (BOM), and other aspects of a complete board design.
- Firmware Development – Our skilled firmware engineers perform rapid firmware development by working from our libraries of C/C++ and from off-the-shelf open source and commercial components
- Application Development – We develop on-board and hosted (cloud) application code to tie the devices into a complete application. We are fluent in many modern application languages and use continuous delivery practices and tools for ultimate reliability and repeatability.
- Certification Support – We work with certification specialists and manage US domestic and international product safety and radio emissions certification processes.
- Selection and Management of Contract Manufacturers and other Product Services – based on a number of factors, including cost, experience, availability, and other business terms.
- Application Expertise – We have developed specific expertise in several application and technology domains:
- Motion Control Systems – We have developed advanced firmware for coordinated multi-access motor control for manufacturing and other machine applications
- Desktop Manufacturing and Small Robotics – We have extensive experience in light industrial systems including Computer Numerically Controlled machines (CNC), 3D printing, pick and place, and similar applications.
- Hardware Abstraction – We have developed libraries that enable firmware to work across multiple processor architectures with minimal changes. Our abstraction layer has zero performance penalty and generates code as tight as hand-coded assembly for the target processor architecture.
Featured IoT & Connected Hardware Articles
Designing an Intelligent IoT Ventilator From Home, Pt. 1
This is part one of a series. In this post we talk about what we’ve done and why, and in
Part 2: Industrial IoT CI/CD – An update killed my coffeemaker
This post in the Enterprise IoT series is about applying CI/CD and Serverless techniques to IoT.
Part 1: An Intro to Industrial IoT
This is the first of a series of articles about how IoT infrastructure provides solutions to very difficult business situations, and how to take advantage of them.