So, you’re thinking of adding a wireless to your product. Maybe you’re considering direct Wi-Fi or cellular but, because of power usage, cost or other reasons, those are just not practical solutions and so you’re evaluating local wireless data networks.

Your next decision is typically:  “use an off-the-shelf standard or module ( like Zigbee, Bluetooth, ANT, Z-wave or one of dozens of other standards) or design a proprietary system?”

The ease of implementation of standards or modules is alluring, but the product cost and design/performance compromises are not.  Ask yourself “why are there so many wireless data network standards?”  Because standard are necessarily compromises, and therein lies the rub:  you will not achieve a truly optimized solution.  And the problem is that this leaves the door open for a competitor to do a better job.  There are only two good reasons to use a module or standard: interoperability  (though it’s often better attain this through  a gateway); or that high product cost and performance shortfalls are acceptable (e.g. low volumes).

In all other cases you should consider a proprietary design.

Venture Technologies’ RFOS addresses the gap between off-the-shelf and fully custom by offering the best of both worlds.  Starting with your application requirements and RFOS’ library of building blocks, we design a solution that uses the right existing parts for the solution and then custom design only the new parts that are novel to your application.  We do this right on your product’s microprocessor.  You get the market beating performance and low cost that you need without the development overhead of a full custom design.  And because our building blocks have been FCC approved on multiple products, certification is a breeze.

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• Donald E. Stephens Convention Center, Rosemont, IL
• June 4-6, 2013

We will be located Booth #1130 in the Wireless Pavilion on the main expo floor.

We look forward to seeing you there.  If you would like arrange to meet us there, or just to let us know that you will be attending, please let us know by email or through the contact page

Expo Website

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By now of course we’re all familiar with GPS and location-aware personal phones and devices.  In principal, the same functionality can be built into any device that has a radio link.

While this has been known for many years, the costs reserved this functionality for special applications.  What is about to happen is that this functionality will be bundled with the radio that you embed for communications, and almost free.

Our New Year challenge to you: What could you do with “location-aware” devices?

Very simplistic RF location systems try to use RSSI – received signal strength – to triangulate a position, but this technique is notoriously unreliable, because signal strength is dependent upon so many factors. More sophisticated systems use encoded data trains and /or analysis of the phase of the RF carrier itself. Indeed, GPS itself uses variations on these techniques. Over the years the implementation of these techniques has evolved from “a big box of breadboards” (in fact, one member of Venture’s team was involved with a pre-GPS system in the 90s that tracked car location from AM radio towers. This technology went on to be used to track horses during a race) to chip level integration. In tomorrow’s world every radio device will have this capability built in at the lowest level. Today, certain silicon vendors are already delivering the first devices with this level of integration.

Venture Technologies is able to provide tomorrow’s built in location capabilities today!

We are privileged to be at the leading edge of this trend, on account of our advanced development status with several chip manufacturers. Venture has been working on building location positioning into the same low-cost, low power radio systems that we are renowned for developing with our RFOS platform. We are currently prototyping systems and achieving performance of a few inches in some applications. We will eventually be implementing the capability as a standard RFOS block, but it is available right now for custom development.

New products built around core position and location capability

Well, at one level, we can all imagine products where location is explicit core functionality. Maybe you have mobile assets that you want to track and monitor – animals, tools or equipment, parts bins, plants, key fobs, building infrastructure, etc. Or maybe you need to know the distance between you and the other device. These make for really interesting product possibilities in their own right and Venture is able to deliver such product designs for you.

The Real Breakthrough may be in network auto-configuration

We are just as, if not more, excited by using location for automatic network configuration. Imagine that you have a transportation or agricultural multi-node control system, or that you have an urban monitoring application with dozens of wirelessly networked nodes, each monitoring or controlling some specific element. Today, each time you assemble or modify your system, you have to identify which node is which radio, maybe using a bar code, or an RFID tag, or even manual entry. Now imagine that you set out your installation, hit the “configure” button, and it is all done for you. The added capabilities and reduced system deployment costs of automatically configuring networks will be a breakthrough in many applications.

So think about it: what could you do with “location-aware” devices?  Call and find out if it’s possible .

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Click here for details: Product Development and Prototype Strategies in a Startup | ENET | IEEE Boston Entrepreneurs’ Network.

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Many interesting challenges addressed in the process, including

• Ultra low power, miniature radio
• Very low voltage source with energy harvester accumulating charge over 40seconds.
• Kick-starting the power management controller with an external RF field (once started, it runs from it’s own output)

Medical devices powered by the ear itself – MIT News Office.

Energy harvesting from in-vivo bio-chemical sources. Congratulations to the team.

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Wireless capabilities are at the heart of smart city buzz. You will hear about sensors and energy harvesting, but it’s actually the low cost and ultra-low powered wireless (battery free, or “battery for life”) that is triggering no less than a revolution – with applications limited only by the imagination. The impacts of the efficiencies are extremely far-reaching. Here are a couple of examples that are already happening:

The Wireless “Valet” Knows Where to Park

Imagine parking meters smart enough to sense if there is a car in its space, so people can drive right to an open spot. The savings are numerous: less fuel, less time, and less infrastructure required by people who know exactly where they are driving. How do you get all of these meters to communicate with each other? That’s Venture’s (affordable) part of the solution. Then leave it to the cell phone companies to communicate with the consumer.

Wireless Lights the Way

Imagine the efficiencies of street lights that know what they need to provide lighting for, so as you are walking thru a parking garage at 2am, motion-sensing lights follow you, lighting your way without the 24/7 light pollution that we’ve become accustomed to. And the lights turn off when you leave. Additionally, imagine the savings of knowing when a light is about to fail and changing just what’s needed when it’s needed. Venture’s RFOS wireless solution is underpinning just such systems, as you can read below.

But what about your product? What would you do if adding wireless was free?

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Imagine needing to add new features to a product years after its last round of design changes. At some firms, the management has changed over and/or a new team is in place. In instances like this, Venture plays the role of company technology guru, and can pick up where they left off, and update new players on the client side as needed.

Engineers as Project Managers – a Key Difference

According to Chase Sebor, one of Venture’s founders, “Our approach is to have our employees be the project managers. The differentiator is that they are systems engineers. We fully document the process, and that knowledge base is available long-term to the customer. They are there down the road more commonly than the client’s staff will be. It’s not unusual for us to play a supporting role 3-5 years down the road.”

For reasons of changing staff or for multiple product derivatives, customers come back for resends of original product documentation.  According to Chase, “I think one of them is up to 8 times now.”

Clients Choose their Preferred Tools 

Venture works in common engineering tools such as SolidWorks and MSProject – but they morph the end result to the file format the customer needs. Sebor adds, “Our expertise is not on the tool alone, it’s on the engineering discipline. It’s in everyone’s best interest to do this. If your staff can’t own the work we do for you, we’re never coming in again. My equity is the relationship, we don’t own the product, the client does. When we make the client successful we all win.” 

For example, Venture designed an ozone measurement device decades ago. They helped the client hire so they could continue to support that design on their own. Years later Venture leveraged the original design to extend the client’s market by designing an ozone generator. The relationship has spanned over 20 years.

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