Vision
The Company’s Vision
At Oscilx Labs, we aspire to be the foremost innovator in embedded software and wireless connectivity solutions. We aim to lay the technological foundation for the upcoming IoT revolution, particularly in smart agriculture and industrial IoT. Our mission is to bridge the divide between consumer and industrial IoT by developing resilient wireless mesh connectivity technologies that are not only cost-effective but also capable of thriving in the most demanding settings. In line with this, our R&D focuses heavily on creating robust systems that utilize minimum resources and are affordable for the end-user while reducing time to market for products.
The company will enable these goals by creating, maintaining and distributing embedded and telecommunication software suites along with certified hardware modules for easy integration and faster product iteration for our customers.
The future of IoT and our significance
Introduction
The Internet of Things (IoT) has rapidly evolved over the last two decades, primarily driven by the consumer electronics market. The first IoT boom from 2010-2015 focused on creating responsive, affordable, and reasonably power-efficient devices. Technologies and standards developed to cater to these needs work well for wearables and small-scale connected infrastructure like smart homes.
Challenges in Industrial IoT (IIoT) and Smart Agriculture
The rise of Industrial IoT (IIoT) and smart agriculture presents new challenges. Effective operation in harsh environments such as warehouses, factory floors, and farmlands demands more advanced technologies. These settings often lack sufficient power outlets to deploy the desired number of connected devices. Building the necessary infrastructure or frequently servicing battery-operated devices is costly, making traditional wireless protocols less appealing. This creates a clear divide between the needs of consumer markets and industrial/agricultural applications.
Shifting Requirements: Consumer vs. Industrial Markets
In consumer applications like fitness trackers or smart lighting systems, responsiveness is crucial. Customers expect real-time heart rate monitoring and immediate activation of smart lights upon command. Power efficiency is less critical here, as users can be expected to recharge their devices regularly.
Contrast this to an industrial setting where power efficiency and reliability precede responsiveness. Take predictive maintenance applications, for example. Technicians analyze data collected over several days to years to spot abnormalities and schedule maintenance downtimes or preemptive failures. Since this is a statistical method, a few late data points do not significantly affect the results. However, the downtime of monitoring equipment due to battery discharge can incur significant service costs.
Smart Agriculture: A Special Case
While industrial IoT is a decades-old concept stemming from machine-to-machine (M2M) automation protocols, smart agriculture is a relatively new concept. Exposure to elements makes agriculture more challenging than manufacturing for field devices. Other than the operational conditions, agriculture also faces more financial challenges than industry, as industries can easily justify the setup costs since the RoI on predictive maintenance and automation is generally higher. The lower returns also mean that agricultural systems have to adhere to being cost-effective, the alternative being getting phased out of the market. This adds another very important metric to our bucket, cost.
How to address these differences
It is evident that earlier solutions cannot be repurposed for new problems with good results. As can be learned from efforts in the past, extending older specifications is a tedious and slow task that many times leaves behind a legacy burden, leading to suboptimal resource utilization and hard-to-manage systems, both of which increase costs for the end-user, directly or indirectly. We need to reimagine and rethink how devices talk in the upcoming era of communication. New algorithms and theories need to be crafted through research and experimentation, all while learning from past efforts. At Oscilx we are doing exactly that, building our solutions from scratch and recognizing that what worked in the past may not work now or in the future.
Why care now?
A question that comes up naturally is after decades of research and development why have we only recently started caring about the applications of IoT in agriculture and manufacturing?
As fabrication technologies and our understanding of material sciences improve, cheaper microcontrollers and SOCs along with more accurate sensors are entering the mainstream market. Coupled with the improving power efficiency of modern silicon chips and advances in energy harvesting techniques these hardware systems are becoming more affordable and easy to operate to the point where we can now reliably put them in harsh industrial and agricultural environments.
Closing Remarks
The solution to cracking the industrial and agricultural monitoring market is clear, a robust, affordable, and efficient technology. Oscilx Labs has taken up this challenge with a strong focus on research and development to cater to this new era of telecommunication. We have already created and demonstrated a resilient wireless mesh connectivity protocol that checks all the boxes. As the market needs evolve, we will be ever willing to create newer solutions to tackle them.