This morning (25 March, 2021) I was at Reekoh IOT’s Industry 4.0 breakfast “Digital Transformation: A Leadership Perspective”. The TL;DR from this event is is: don’t wait for government; as business leaders you should ask “what is the missing piece?”. Embrace risk to discover opportunity. As someone who mostly, at Accelerando Consulting, helps smaller businesses create innovative solutions, I agree that big business could learn a thing or to from the small fish about Making Shit Happen.

Privacy by Profession To mangle the old bon mot: “Every problem has a solution that is Obvious, Simple and an Utter Privacy Disaster“ Today (Mid-March, 2021) in Australia, the internet is abuzz with pointing-and-laughing at a police official who mused that creating a smartphone application to record sexual consent is a laudable solution to recent public concern around Rape Culture and in particular several very high-profile sexual assault allegations. Of course, this is a terrible idea.

Workshops at Accelerando Accelerando Consulting is a working Tech Prototyping Lab - at any one time we might be building mobile apps, 3D printing prototypes, taking glamour shots of your robot, or just evaluating whether widget A is better than gadget B. If you imagine “Mythbusters” but with fewer explosions (most days) you are not far from the mark. Accelerando founder Christopher Biggs is also the host of the Brisbane Internet of Things Interest group, and the Accelerando “Nerd Lab” is the venue for our monthly “Sunday (mad) Science” workshops.

IocTober Day 31 - “Enhance 57 to 19” We’re creating an IoT solution for every day of “IocTober”. November 2019 is the setting of Ridley Scott’s seminal 1982 motion picture Blade Runner. We didn’t get undetectable humanoid robots (or, perhaps, that’s what they want you to think), but it is remarkable how much of Scott’s dark future we did get. Have you notied we can now speak to our appliances without a second thought?

IocTober Day 30 - Mortal Peril We’re creating an IoT solution for every day of “IocTober”. We’re excited by the potential of ePaper at Accelerando. These screens retain their information even when switched off, so allow you to create information displays that run on just a whiff of power. Who doesn’t love the Weasley Family Clock from the Harry Potter universe. This device, realised so charmingly in the movies, shows the location in real time of each member of the household, with pointers which indicate words inscribed around the periphery such as “home”, “school”, “dentist” and even “mortal peril” (where I spend a lot of my own time these days).

IocTober Day 29 - bluetooth environmental satisfaction survey “Is it cold in here? It always feels cold in here”. Arguments over the thermostat are endemic in some offices. It doesn’t help that most heating venting and air conditioning (HVAC) technology is largely unchanged since the stone age. Let’s settle the matter. Here’s a temperature/humidity sensor that also offers two touch buttons to answer the subjective questions “are you too hot” and “are you too cold”.

IocTober Day 28 - Package tracking and monitoring We’re creating an IoT solution for every day of “IocTober”. IoT democratises technology. You hand a delicate package over a to a courier. They might know where their trucks are at all time, but the most you know is “somewhere between Brisbane and Melbourne”. Has your precious item been brutalised? Let’s find out. We’ll take a low-power high-penetration narrow-band-IoT cellular (NBIoT) module, a battery (Lithium, or safer NiMH if going by air) and slip the whole lot into a prepaid satchel.

IocTober Day 27 - Wireless rain gauge We’re creating an IoT solution for every day of “IocTober”. I love the design of the “tipping bucket” rain gauge. A funnel magnifies the area of the gauge, dropping water into one of two buckets, which tips as the weight of water increases. A magnetic sensor notices the tip, and thus a single moving part measures each unit of rain (0.3mm per tip event).

IocTober Day 26 - Sad Roomboid reborn as taco truck We’re creating an IoT solution for every day of “IocTober”. This time we are repurposing a cleaning robot for snack delivery. The robot cleaning appliance genre started by the iRobot Roomba has inspired a number of very terrible low-cost imitators, some of which are entirely unfit for purpose. The cheapest of them suck so much they do not even suck—a product advertised as a “vacuum cleaner” that is no such thing, being merely a motorised sponge.

IocTober Day 25 - Illumniated door sign We’re creating an IoT solution for every day of “IocTober”. Open plan offices stink. All the so-called benefits of “collaboration” are, if you ask me, a smokescreen for cramming more people into a surveillance fishtank. Creative work often needs concentration, and for a large segment of the working population, open spaces destroy concentration. Look at the vast market for headphones if you doubt.