- 4 min readproduct
The machine that left at 2am
Presence and last-seen won't paint a live dot on a map — and shouldn't pretend to. But the moment a tag stops being heard, and the last hub that heard it, is a record worth having. Here's what that boundary honestly catches, and what it doesn't.
Read → - 5 min readmobile
Building Fleet for the field
The office runs Fleet in a browser tab. The field runs on a phone — in the sun, in gloves, in a dead zone — and that's a different app. Notes from building the mobile half of the platform, and the Bluetooth trick that turns every phone into a roaming hub.
Read → - 5 min readfield
Tagging the whole yard
The PO is signed and a box of forty tags shows up. Between that box and a dashboard that means anything sits the least glamorous step of the whole deployment — giving every machine an identity the system can trust. Do it wrong once and you'll chase phantom assets for months. Here's how to do it right, and why it isn't the six-month project everyone fears.
Read → - 5 min readfield
The first 30 days of a deployment
Signing the PO is the start, not the finish. The first month decides whether a deployment becomes infrastructure the site forgets it has, or a support ticket that never closes. Here's the arc — a composite of the ones that went well.
Read → - 6 min readfield
Designing for the dead zone
We've written about picking a good cellular link. This is the other half of the problem — what the system does when there's no link at all, for a minute, an hour, or a whole shift. Off-highway, that isn't an edge case. It's Tuesday.
Read → - 5 min readhardware
What a BLE tag's battery actually lasts
The datasheet says five years. The tag on the excavator went dark in fourteen months. Neither number is a lie — they're answers to different questions. Here's what actually drains a coin cell in the field, and why tags die all at once instead of slowly.
Read → - 4 min readfield
Rental hours and the return-day argument
The rental house's invoice says the machine ran 180 hours. Your operator swears it was closer to 140. Both of you are reading a meter — only one of you was watching it the whole time. Here's how telemetry settles it without starting a second fight.
Read → - 6 min readfield
Why off-highway equipment is its own IoT problem
A connected forklift is a known problem. A haul truck on a mine bench, an excavator on a remote easement, or a tractor halfway across a section — those are different problems wearing the same name.
Read → - 6 min readfield
Solar and battery sizing for remote sites: the math nobody does
Two panels and a deep-cycle battery is not a power system. It's a power system that works in May. Here's how we actually size off-grid IoT installs so they survive February.
Read → - 5 min readfield
Site surveys: the things you measure that aren't on the spec sheet
A spec sheet tells you what the hardware can do. A site survey tells you whether it will. Two hours on a roof saves a six-week return-trip story.
Read → - 3 min readfield
Cellular backhaul, the unglamorous part of IoT
Everyone wants to talk about sensors and dashboards. The thing that decides whether your deployment works is the cellular link, and almost nobody designs it carefully enough.
Read → - 3 min readfield
LoRaWAN in the wild: notes from a few real deployments
Datasheets talk about 10-mile range and decade-long battery life. Fish farms, remote sites, and metal-heavy yards tell a different story. What we actually see in the field.
Read → - 2 min readfield
What BLE tracking in a heavy-equipment yard actually looks like
A field note from a gateway install. Rust, forklifts, unexpected RF geometry, and what a 12km datasheet range means in a building made of steel.
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