Challenges in Hardware Development | HARDWARIO's Pavel Hübner
you are listening to the iot for all media network hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the iot fraud podcast the number one resource and publication for all things iot i'm your host ryan chacon and on today's episode we have pavel hibner the cto and co-founder of hardware they are a company with extensive know-how in the development and production of electronic devices and they focus a lot of their time and effort in very low power consumption devices particularly aimed and better suited for iot projects um a lot of a lot of topics here uh discussed in this conversation we talked about iot and lpwan networks and how they work together um development of products best practices process for those kind of out there looking to better understand the device uh and the development of the development of products and devices themselves and then we jump into challenges we talk about the chip shortage for hardware products talk about life cycle of of different solutions and things like that so a lot of good value here um one thing i do ask if you're watching this on youtube to please like and subscribe to the uh to the channel and then if you're listening to us on a podcast directory please subscribe so you get the latest episodes to become available so hope you get a lot of value in this but before we jump into it if any of you out there are looking to enter the fast growing and profitable iot market but don't know where to start check out our sponsor leverage leverage's iot solutions development platform provides everything you need to create turnkey iot products that you can white label and resell under your own brand to learn more go to iot changes everything.com that's iot changeseverything.com and without further ado please enjoy this episode of the iot for all podcast welcome to the iot for all podcast pavel thanks for being here this week hello ryan thank you for having me absolutely yeah this is going to be a great conversation uh i think it'd be great if you could just kick it off by telling us a little bit more about yourself and your background sure so my name is paul hitner and i'm the cto and co-founder of hardware um the background is that i'm electronics engineer emirate firmware developer and i've been doing electronics pretty much all my life so i started in the age of like 7 or 8 years old and the story was that my father started to work for big security system company and my journey i would say was pretty much connected to this event because i have seen all the amazing electronics and how smart people develop security systems so when i started high school i would say in third second or third grade i was actually employee of this company and learned a lot i was developing first some internal tools and later on even got into product development and i basically started full time electronics designing when i was 20. and i've been with the company for like 12 years and at the time i met alan who is the co-founder of hardware back then he was a sales director of this company i was head of one development department and we got together and after some cooperation uh he decided that we should start doing something together so this is where the story of our company started we established a company back then its name was big clown labs long story short the the company name was established in las vegas at ces in 2016 and our mission was to bring to the world open source the ir diy kit for enthusiasts for i.t engineers because we felt that especially in iot space there was a gap for electronics that is modular that is low power that communicates over radio frequency for a long range and this is where we had lots of experience so we have created this kit called big clown very strange name it expresses our personalities but it was basically a spin-off of this company where we met and one year later we simply bought our shares and rename the company to hud value and we are all into iot hardware development and helping our partners and companies to through our platforms to create comprehensive iot solutions hardware solutions that's fantastic that's a really cool story very very cool to kind of hear the process you went through to get to where you are now but tell us tell us a little bit more about the company itself now and today uh and the role you all play in iot i know you mentioned you already talked about kind of the development of the hardware side but targets that you know verticals that you're in kind of you talk about low power um focus but just just high level a little bit more for our audience so they understand a little bit more what you do all right so uh in hardware we create platforms that enable our internet of things projects we do hardware devices of course from the idea to productions and integration we really focus in more or less an industrial iot segment so we don't do consumer stuff b2c none of that and through the network of our technological partners we target various segments various interesting projects so just to give you some examples we have created a product called chester which is iot gateway featuring lp1 connectivity and i believe you will get to it later and with this with this platform uh people can actually create a comprehensive hardware solution a gateway which interfaces various peripherals and so some problem so back to the example we have partner companies total tests and they are monitoring bridges they have high-end accelerometers and incline meters and they are monitoring the such civil structures over a long period of time and through the data they have interesting insights and they can predict when something will go wrong so this is like nice example that will hopefully save some lives in the future definitely yeah um um tell us about some other use cases i'd love it if you could take us through the kind of customer journey that companies go through when they engage with you and and kind of understand what the process is like going from an idea or a problem looking to be solved to the process that happens in order to bring a piece of hardware to market to kind of that is aimed at a particular uh problem okay so um as you know the discipline of developing and designing hardware can be pretty comprehensive task and our mission is to actually simplify the process uh because we have been to harvard manufacturing for decades and we know that there is a big difference having some prototype on the table maybe built with some popular platform right and having the product well tested and ready for production so this is why today we mainly focus on these platforms and i always repeat the platforms because it is what it actually is it uh it is a mix of experience of communication channels and interfaces the peripherals that we know that will help the customers who have the vision to solve some particular problem and this uh this is this mix will help them to get the story of having their own hardware product faster in the market so um yeah there are a lot of challenges uh and uh we bring the expertise of uh designing products that are not only easy to configure which are modular and easy to program but also easy to install and here we see really big opportunity that is enabled by lp1 technology so uh actually when we started our company in 2016 it was the time when all these technologies started to appear we started with sick fox nowadays it's future we will see how it goes but uh we basically explored all three lp one technology which are popular today starting from sigfox lorawan and nbiot and also recently ltem which is getting more and more widespread around the world tell us about those he hasn't asked you tell me about those technologies a bit more um kind of in your process of of exploring them um what have you kind of found about their kind of fit within the iot space so these technologies are amazing because they change and push the boundaries of what is really possible lp1 essentially can remove the vote or gateway from your system which simplifies the deployment and at the same time it lowers it lowers the communication speed increases the possible communication distance and through radio technology you are able to communicate from devices with batteries for years so i would say that's the biggest highlight reliable communication over long distances and with sigfox and lorawan the situation is fairly similar you are operating in license free band and either 868 megahertz in europe 950 923 in in the us and you have some limited payload you can use to transmit your data or receive back to or from your devices with licensed bands in or through carrier operators which provide technology like nb iot and ltm through these mobile carriers you have i would say bigger options in terms of payload and there is slightly more higher integration cost on the other hand there are way bigger opportunities because through carriers you you have the possibility to scale your product much faster you have usually nationwide coverage in some particular territory when the career decides to enable the connectivity on the other hand we have lots of customers who want to build their own lorawan network so this is perfect use case for auravan and we are even helping them to create their own lorawan infrastructure or utilize networks like the things network etc well and that was i was going to ask you is um not all companies seem to focus on one type of connectivity or some pick you know more of the cellular side of versus the lpwan side what has it been about and you've kind of already alluded to it but what has it been about the success that you've seen with these technologies the maturity of these technologies and the implementation of them in the iot space that's kind of pushed you down the path of really focusing on these lpwn technologies as connectivity options for the hardware that you build and you focus on so uh fairly fairly comprehensive question we usually try to listen what is the application need what is the target idea and we talk to customer what would be the best possible option uh very often uh the customers they don't actually care about the way how you get the data from a sensor out to their system and it is our role to come up with a solution so we have the chain of the solution from uh actually the sensor through the gateways through the infrastructure connected with a back-end and integration so we basically project all these all these parts of the chain and schedule the most optimal solution for for the customer and [Music] speaking radio technology it's uh it really depends on on the required uh payload okay on the on the update and or real-time requirements of the given application and what what is the expected battery lifetime is it battery-operated devices or do they need just some sort of battery as a power backup right so we got all these options and then we decide this might be the best technology for your use case or we don't have any of these but maybe if you train on some of your requirements we are able to meet it with this technology and are these all run on like your own operating system or how are the devices kind of set up so uh historically we have used various approaches but i have mentioned this iot gateway chester okay and this one we started designing actually three years back and back then it was only running three rtos but since we have based our technology on nordic semiconductor we know that nordic has gone all into zafir os so we have adopted this technology in the second generation of the product and uh we can see this is like breakthrough technology in uh embedded uh development space and uh there is definitely some learning curve i've even written article about it but we see that this is like great investment because zephyr as an artist well it's more like a framework is guiding you how to write proper modular uh firmware how to design your software in a way that it will be portable it will be future proof and we see that a lot of uh effort is going into it even from major brands like intel and xp nordic like one of the most active uh contributor it is all open source uh and uh yes you need at least 32 bits or uh they don't support like very small 8-bit or 16-bit micros on the other hand this is like this was like one of our design principles when we started hardware that we don't use these uh 8-bit or 16-bit micro so we can use it for our portfolio and it's very very scalable and zephyr rtos has been actually designed for iot projects so there are lots of comprehensive libraries and stacks that help you to build products faster and in a very secure manner still with a nice focus on low power features so we are pretty happy about that and i definitely recommend everybody who is serious about uh real-time operating systems to look into it absolutely one of the last questions i wanted to ask you before we wrap up around the challenges that you've seen in the hardware space so anytime i've talked to people about the hardware component of an iot solution there's always very interesting questions that are asked and there are a lot of challenges that they've come at least with the preconceived notion that these challenges exist in hardware development um and i wanted to get your opinion on what some of the bigger challenges that you're seeing in the hardware side of iot is so um speaking of today's situation one of the biggest challenges i perceive is is sourcing so component availability since kubit we have seen a sharp decline of stock availability in many verticals and we i can say openly that we are kind of struggling with this okay uh on the other hand uh we took some precautions and uh started sourcing uh uh insourcing the components for our main products right and today today we have tick stock so we are kind of safe in this in this matter still we have to uh develop and design some boards here and there and today the situation is that sometimes we really have to bend our decisions based on the availability of the components and we take really various precautions like how do we get the components for our design products when there is poor availability so as an example texas instruments is offering their own e-store where you can purchase the components directly okay and it was almost like a race between the companies so what we started doing we have implemented our own scraper or crawler if you like that is automatically checking the website right and when there was a component available in the stock we received automated call from twilio service and receiving sms's and all sorts of measures and uh it felt like we were running uh two computers with credit cards and immediately started purchasing components and you had typically very narrow period like one or two minutes when you could make the purchase and you were racing with with other people around the globe um so this was helping us actually a lot such automated approach um and we have been able to get a lot of components because ti is one of our key supplier right on the other hand recently they have introduced uh api services for such easter because they have seen that multiple people are doing the same thing sure so um this is basically end of the race uh but uh we take also other measures like dealing with uh dealing with brokers uh we also source components from verified companies but sometimes you have to buy our chips for multiples sometimes magnitude of multiples of the basic price so uh this is the situation we have to deal with it we have to be really flexible which is our advantage as a small company we can make really quick adjustments uh and uh we have to cope and hope that the situation over the course right better i completely agree with you and and one thing i wanted to ask you is obviously the sourcing thing is very unique given the chip shortages and stuff but as a company that you know i'm assuming has different companies coming to them asking to build devices and work on solutions with them how do you handle that decision-making process on which projects you take on and i think this is good advice for our audience in general is when you have a decent amount of leads or you have just kind of any amount of leads that you have to from a resource perspective or component availability perspective have to decide on which projects you take on versus others how do you uh kind of advise or would you recommend companies think about that kind of decision making yeah this is this is very difficult and i will admit that we always learn along the way um and especially as a startup you have to you have to fight for survival and it is difficult because in a hardware startup you have fairly difficult cash flow management you have components on stock you have products on stock you have bills to pay people to pay and everything all together you have to be really careful to choose to which project you will commit yourself right so my colleague calls that uh as a tether of opportunities there are lots of them and um you have to be really really strict and you have to set up the rules into which project you will go and talk to your customer really verify that they can provide reasonable commitment that you will be kind of on a safe side of course in business uh guarantees are kind of uh foggy world words sometimes yet uh this is i would say the most important message to anybody who wants to create hardware startup really wait for the proper opportunity to make sure that you will not go negative totally agree yeah great advice i really appreciate that um it's an interesting space for sure um you know the supply chain issues with the components the chips and stuff is really kind of complicated things at times but you know with the companies that are handling it strategically the right way i think are going to come out on top throughout all of this um and i think the approach you all have and the advice you share today is fantastic so for our audience out there who wants to learn more and get a better sense of what you all do follow up with any questions that sort of thing what's the best way they can reach out of course go to our website www.harvario.com
this is where you will find all information about uh about our product all contact information don't hesitate to approach us with any question uh we can help you with uh designing uh your next iot project uh we haven't spoken about many areas what we can offer in your iot journey uh but we can basically provide uh end-to-end solution from the idea to the data uh end up in your in your endpoint and uh yeah you will find lots of use cases on the website and we are looking forward to hearing from you and let me ask when you um kind of focus on the end to end aspect of this are you working with partners to help with kind of the software pieces and and the stuff once the data comes in or are you all handling all of that so uh yeah we have various models and one of the model is that people who want to solve some problems as i said before you can approach us and we will come to a very simple partnership agreement we will provide them with uh training and uh testing products that we usually try to iterate so with the work we have done previously to get really uh quickly to to some useful data feeds uh for the system and then we sketch like what would be the next uh phase to deliver the final final product right also we have our e-store where we offer this kit this is the product we have started with our company and these are of the shelf available components so you can buy it by their direct directly and also because we have this network of partners we we can connect people and see all right these problems we always solve or these people are good to the suspect so we can connect connect them and get them faster on track fantastic well well pablo this has been a fantastic conversation thanks so much for doing this um really excited that i was able to get you on on the show to to talk to our audience about this hardware is a very interesting area and very important area for us so the more experts i can have come on and kind of share their expertise the better and i think what you all have going on is super interesting um and and sounds like you have a lot of success on your end which is fantastic to see so thanks again for your time really appreciate it thank you that's very nice talking to you and uh take care you too all right everyone thanks again for watching that episode of the i2 for all podcast if you enjoyed the episode please click the thumbs up button subscribe to our channel and be sure to hit the bell notifications so you get the latest episodes as soon as they become available other than that thanks again for watching and we'll see you next time
2022-06-26 23:23
