The inspiration behind SimpleSensor.

In late 2008 I was asked to help architect and build an online marketplace for electronic components. It was an amazing challenge for me at the time because not only was it going to require me to step into a leadership role but it was also in an industry (Electronic Components) I knew nothing about. Our team would build the MVP and launch the online marketplace within 3 months of my start date. That startup company would go on to to be acquired by a Fortune 120 distributor of electronic components a few years later. And that’s really where the SimpleSensor journey began.

I find learning new industries, technologies and businesses to be fascinating and thought provoking. How well do certain software platforms translate to different industries? What are the methods of business and KPIs for each type of business? What tools exist in one industry that would fill a gap in another? So much to discover and learn.

As our online marketplace was integrated into the Fortune 120 Distributor, I wanted to learn more about electronics. Millions of electronic components float around in our lives to make communication, business and entertainment possible in our modern world. What is a capacitor, how do you string components together to make something? How does an electronic design actually make it to an assembly line? All of these questions were questions I wanted to learn answers to but unfortunately that was not the job. My job was to build and grow the eCommerce technical group and business. Answers to those questions would have to wait.

Fast forward several years and I was quickly approaching the end of my career at the electronics distributor. I had that burning desire, like a lot of people do, to start fresh, start new and start a new business.

After a well earned few months away from the keyboard, I decided to figure out what that new business was. I had 4 requirements, (1) it had to involve hardware that I was given over the course of my career, things like raspberry pi’s, Arduino boards and LED’s, (2) it had to have an app component because that’s how things work these days (3) it had to use serverless technology, something I had been itching to learn and (4) it had to solve an actual real world problem so that it could be a viable business.

Naturally I’m attracted to the technology. So even though I couldn’t satisfy the requirement of solving a real world problem, I just had to know how the technologies worked and more importantly how they worked together. After a few months of understanding and working with the new tech, I had a platform. A sensor (TI SensorTag) sent data to a RaspberryPi Zero W which sent data to the serverless cloud platform where it was persisted so that it could be retrieved by the iPhone or Android app and shown to the user. It was in essence a way to track a sensor from anywhere in the world.

What was this sensor capable of? What could it detect? These were what I felt were the key questions for figuring out how to translate this technology to solve a real world problem. Well the original sensor could detect temperature and humidity, it had a luxometer and also an accelerometer. Tracking temperature and humidity remotely is a big market and in fact there were some solutions already available online that were making large dents in that market but they were doing so with suboptimal technology. The accelerometer was also interesting because it meant that if something moved the measurements from that movement could be sent and analyzed through the platform I had already built.

Now, I know what you’re thinking, shouldn’t you start with a real world problem to solve and THEN build something to solve it instead of the other way around? How many ways are there to skin a cat?

2 of my biggest pet peeves are (1) when I forget to take my laundry out of the dryer which either causes me to have to run the dryer again or requires me to iron. I could use the technology to monitor the dryer so that when it stops vibrating, I could receive a notification that my laundry was done. My other big pet peeve (2) is when the garage door is either left open or doesn’t close. Its pretty easy to steal stuff out of a left open garage and my personal policy is to not give criminals any easy opportunities simply because they will take them. The technology could be used to tell me when the garage door opens and closes or when its been left open for a period of time. After modifying the detection and notification logic I was solving 2 of my biggest pet peeves.

It was time for some user testing. How many other people found my problems to also be their problems? It was split, basically nobody cared about wrinkled laundry as much as I did, I guess there is a lot of people out there that like to iron. On the other hand, notification that a door or window was left open or is open was super helpful to a lot of people.

We had a little direction but there were also products on the market that solved the door open/close problem pretty well. How could we make ours different and better? Well, the hub, in my case a RaspberryPi, was an eyesore and also complicated the troubleshooting and made the technology harder in general to support. Is it possible to have a sensor that could send messages directly to the cloud? Would it have to be LTE or Wifi? What about battery life?

It was time to find a real Electronics Engineer. Enter Nick Powers, Master of Electrical Engineering amongst other things.