IoT product development
We design the electronics, firmware, apps and cloud services of a connected product as one team in Cape Town. You own the IP in your product. We build it on BMEC DeepCore™, our software libraries and hardware designs, so it reaches the field quickly and with proven stability.
Core technology
Proven libraries and hardware for IoT
A portfolio of pre-written software libraries and hardware designs that we maintain and reuse across projects. Wireless connectivity, device communication and device management are already written and validated in thousands of deployments around the world, so a custom IoT product starts from proven parts and development time goes into what is specific to the product.
Everything we design for your product is yours. Because DeepCore's development and maintenance are shared across every project that uses it, your product receives its fixes and improvements.
Custom boards built around Espressif chips
Schematics, PCB layout, firmware and board assembly in our own workshop. Much of our IoT hardware runs on Espressif ESP32 chips, and the radio is chosen for each product from Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, LoRa and GSM, on range, power and running cost. Each design is matched to where the device is installed, from potted electronics for wet locations to boards with configurable I/O for machinery.
What the user and the operator see
Mobile apps for iOS and Android, web dashboards, and the cloud services that link devices to their users. Once devices are in the field, over-the-air updates and remote diagnostics let us fix and improve them without a site visit, and the apps keep working offline where the signal is poor.
Applications
Our connected products run in agriculture, water, hospitality, food safety, consumer products and industrial automation, among others. GPS and RTK positioning and remote infrastructure monitoring are two of the many areas where we have built experience, and more are in our IoT portfolio.
From standard GNSS to centimetre-level RTK
GNSS positioning built into products and machines, from standard receivers to bespoke RTK deployments. Our RTK hardware uses u-blox receivers with correction data delivered over NTRIP, for centimetre-level accuracy where the corrections and the view of the sky allow.
Sensing and alerts from sites that are hard to reach
Monitoring systems for infrastructure that is large, outdoors or hard to reach: sensors on the structure, telemetry back to a dashboard, and alerts when a reading moves outside its normal range.
IoT work
A nine-year relationship across five product generations. What began as a GPS speed-control brief became a precision-agriculture platform spanning electronics, firmware, mobile, web and cloud, which BMEC continues to develop and maintain.
Brought in to recover a failing vendor relationship, then contracted to design ArcAqua's flagship industrial ozone sanitation system. CE certified on the first attempt, with hundreds of units deployed and still in service more than ten years later.
A beer-tap monitoring startup asked us for a modest hardware revision. We recommended a new architecture instead, which removed the most expensive component and reduced unit cost by roughly a factor of ten.
A digital hourglass for the neurodiverse community, developed end to end: cloud services, mobile app, electronics, firmware, manufacturing, assembly and distribution. Three years in market.
An early IoT water-tank monitoring product. Our scope covered electronic design, PCB layout, production and assembly, industrial design and enclosure prototyping. It was our first product on Espressif chips.
Where to start
A Risk Review suits a project about to commit to a large build, a Rescue suits one where a vendor has stalled, and the Discovery Phase suits a product ready to be scoped. Each is a bounded engagement at a fixed price that ends in a written document.
For a project about to get expensive. An independent techno-commercial read on what could go wrong, with a recommendation against each risk and a view on whether deeper work is warranted.
Read more →For a project that has already gone wrong. A vendor who stopped delivering, IP you cannot trace, a funder milestone about to be missed, a unit cost the market will not carry. We establish what happened and what can be saved.
Read more →The full definition exercise. Requirements, functional specification, system architecture and a development plan, ending in a fixed-price statement of work you can sign.
Read more →Start a conversation
The founders take the first call themselves. We will give you a clear view of what the project involves, including whether it is feasible.
