Thank you for a great Sigfox evening meeting!

11 October 2019

Last week we were invited to an evening meeting, along with IoT Denmark, about the cost of launching a Sigfox product and technical considerations regarding battery life optimization in IoT devices. The 35 participants made the evening enjoyable and even more educational with their insightful questions and comments on both the presentations and the tour in EKTOS’ test laboratory.

The meeting was the first in a series of evening meetings organized by EKTOS and IoT Denmark to mark our collaboration – we hope you will join us for the next one!

Competitive IoT solutions with Sigfox

The participants were startled when Lars Andersen, COO of IoT Denmark said that the data packages sent with Sigfox are 12 bytes. An SMS-text message is 140 bytes, so what can 12 bytes be used for? A great deal! Sigfox is used internationally in IoT solutions where the range and battery life need to be long, where the coverage can be critically low, and where simple sensor data is sufficient. Lars presented a case where the company Sensohive uses Sigfox to communicate their data from sensors that measure humidity and temperature in concrete. This helps to ensure the quality of the concrete casting and optimize the time when further work can be done after casting.

Sigfox is used internationally in IoT solutions where the range and battery life needs to be long, where the coverage can be critically low and where simple sensor data is sufficient.

Optimal design of battery-powered applications

The participants got startled once more when Alexander Liubimov, Development Manager at EKTOS, presented his slides that were covered with formulas and graphs. Alexander talked about the challenges of designing battery-powered applications. He emphasized that one parameter that is often left out is “shelf storage time”. Both batteries and products with batteries are often stored and transported under only partially known conditions (e.g. temperature and humidity) – conditions that can drain the capacity of the battery. A rule of thumb that tries to take the unknown factors into account, is factor 0.7.

The way Sigfox handles messages makes a much longer battery lifetime, than what you see on other networks, possible.

Join us at the next evening meeting on December 3rd!

The next evening meeting will be held on December 3rd at A.C. Meyers Vænge 15, 2450 Copenhagen SV. The theme of the next meeting is “Sigfox Connect – what’s new at Sigfox and in the market?” Sigfox Connect is an international conference by Sigfox, held on November 20th and 21st in Singapore. At the next evening meeting, IoT Denmark will present the highlights of the conference on developments at Sigfox and the latest movements within the world of IoT.

Contact Hjørdis Clemmensen at hjc@ektos.net if you are interested in participating or getting more information about the event.

If you are interested in receiving the presentations from the evening meeting on October 1st contact Hjørdis Clemmensen at hjc@ektos.net.