Cellular Mesh Telemetry Gateway
Dynamic Devices has been working in on a concept product called the Kettle Companion for the past couple of years. The Kettle Companion is an assisted living product, that helps those who live apart to stay connected, by illuminating when a loved one activates their kettle at home.
This is signaled through a monitoring plug and communicated via Wi-Fi to a paired Kettle Companion in another user’s home. Additionally, if there is a change in pattern of use, for instance, an elderly parent has not had their habitual morning cup of tea by the usual time, the paired Kettle Companion will illuminate red. A text message alert can also be sent to the owner of this appliance, prompting them to check on their loved one.
For more details see our explainer video.
We use a modified OpenSource smart home automation software stack called Tasmota. We feel this is a rich, mature smart home framework supporting secure MQTT based communications and is best-in-class.
Tasmota requires use of an Espressif ESP8266 or ESP32 series microcontroller.
Historically we have been able to source rebranded white box Chinese manufactured smart plugs made by Tuya and rebranded 2NICE, Avatar and many other brands. Tuya has now moved away from using ESP parts in favour of Realtek parts which we do not support.
In addition Tuya are reluctant to allow the replacement of their own firmware, which sends data through their own servers in China, with firmware which is not under their control. In the past it was possible to use their bootloader to replace their firmware with Tasmota but this is no longer possible with their newer firmware.
We also have questions about the reliability and maintainability of these Chinese made plugs (e.g. internal fuse is not replaceable and CE certifications).
All of the above lead us to wish to manufacture our own smart power sensing plug in the UK.
Feedback from the marketplace is that it is complicated to connect a device to a WiFI network, and it is less than ideal particularly for older people. A much better solution is to have a cellular capable device which can simply be plugged into a power socket in a home, business or other location, and which will then immediately connect to the Internet.
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We are using a 5G capable cellular modem with global support for 5G NB-IoT and CAT-M1 LTE M1 with fallback to 2G. This means we can deploy in most areas.
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We are using an internal microchip eSIM. This can be remote provisioned which means that there doesn't need to be a hole in the enclosure to insert and remove SIMs, and we don't need to manage populations of physical SIMs across devices.
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we are working with a major global cellular IoT data platform to provide devices with a lifetime amount of pre-provisioned data which means that issues around contract management for data usage are minimised. This platform allows us to aggregate data usage across devices and to determine "triggers" when usage hits unexpected levels in order to deal with issues before they become a problem.
We intend to support two variants of the Espressif ESP32 series microcontroller
- ESP32-S3 supporting low power, 2.4GHz WiFi and Bluetooth 5 (LE)
- ESP32-C6 supporting low power, IEEE 802.15.4, WiFi 6 and Bluetooth 5 (LE)
This enables our cellular telemetry gateway to support a local population of IoT sensors over Bluetooth, WiFi and the 802.15.4 radio standard in a star topology and/or meshed mode.
We intend to support three software stacks initially
- Modified OpenSource Tasmota stack with cellular support
- ESP32-SDK standard for 3rd Party Development
- Matter Protocol Stack
"Matter is built around a shared belief that smart home devices should be secure, reliable, and seamless to use. By building upon Internet Protocol (IP), Matter will enable communication across smart home devices, mobile app, and cloud services, and define a specific set of IP-based networking technologies for device certification."
See here for further details.
Support for the Matter protocol will enable us to deploy our cellular mesh telemetry gateway into locations where it can then be connected to a wide-range of third party sensors, thus providing the key gateway component to a rich smart home / smart city sensor environment.
We see an opportunity here to test numbers of Cellular Mesh Telemetry Gateway (CMTG) devices in a "Living Lab" environment to generate sensor telemetry data from Matter compatible sensors, and with the internal plug power sensing and power control capability.
[TBD]