5 ms·

I work for a company doing unsexy IoT and I've been dreaming about writing this article for months now. We're a tiny company in New Jersey whose been around in

by vdnkh 11y ago

I work for a company doing unsexy IoT and I've been dreaming about writing this article for months now. We're a tiny company in New Jersey whose been around in some form or another for the last 25 years, supplying remote telemetry units (RTUs) to the industrial assets industry. Helium, oxygen, nitrogen, whatever, on boats, trucks, and static sites. We also provide a monitoring platform which is where I come in. We're a very uncool Apple - vertically integrated, we design, build, manufacture, ship, and program all of our RTUs in-house. IoT has been around for a long long time now - a lot of our work comes from clients who can't maintain their old systems anymore. The entire hype wave of IoT has more or less passed right over us. Nobody has heard our name, save for the gas industry itself. But that industry is about to (not literally) explode. Helium is an extremely lucrative industry and is growing by the minute, and there's really nobody in this space but us. Remote monitoring - IoT - has never been more critical to helium than it has now. Without going into too much detail, knowing the pressure levels of your tank 24/7 can save you a lot of money. So where do I come in? Our platform is written in C#, with the front-end done in Silverlight. I'm the dude getting us off it with some really hip JS work in React. Before that I wrote a lot of microservices to handle various aspects of our system. We were in a pretty bad state when I got there so I spent a lot of time improving our development team. We didn't have PRs for a long time. For a first job out of college, it's not bad. I get to do a lot of cool work, and on my current project I've made every technical decision. But sometimes I wish that we could attract better talent. Oh well, I'm (hopefully) leaving soon.

pjmlp 11y ago
C#? Quite interesting. Anything that you can share about it? The language geek in me loves the use of C#, Java and similar safe stacks in the IoT domain. :)
- vdnkh 11y ago
  We don't program the boards in C#, just the services/Silverlight. The communication methods between the boards is well abstracted - most of our devices are reached via phone number. They have a SIM card with a carrier and services essentially make a phone call to get the data. There's a lot to do with communication protocols (i.e. bytes 0-8 are the configuration, 9-12 readings, etc.) but .NET has nice support for binary constructs. Some RTUs are difficult to work with because they have conversations with our server, and the lifetime of that call must be maintained while a million other things are going on. I wasn't here when the C# decision was made, but it's worked out really well for us so far, Silverlight notwithstanding. Microservices work out really well for us too because there's a lot of code written for specific RTUs which will not (and should not) be shared, and having them explicitly separated keeps everything tidy. Microservices communicate via a centralized publisher using WCF, which uses MSMQ as the underlying transport method. Our #1 priority is to never loose data so these technologies are a pretty safe bet. Like I mentioned before, C# has good support for low-level stuff, but we don't do as much low-level as you think. Our greatest challenge is handling several distinct protocols with as much as the same code path as possible, and C# has really great generics support which makes our lives easy. We don't require the performance a C++ platform would bring. To elaborate a bit more, our basic control flow goes something like: Poll unit -> get data -> push data -> translate data -> assign data to business objects -> operate on data -> present data Each step usually involves a save to the database of critical info at that stage.
  - pjmlp 11y ago
    Thanks for sharing. I am currently aware of stuff using .NET CF, the old WinCE/Pocket PC stack or just doing straight IO control from the PC side to "dumb" firmware that just follows the given commands.
rjdagost 11y ago
Sounds like you found a good niche. Your work is solving real problems and you can make real money from your product, instead of just creating another VC subsidized ad platform that gets breathless hype in TechCrunch. I'd consider sitting tight for now, there is a sea change going on in the tech world and money is getting tighter. In the not too distant future you might find it easier to attract better talent.
cormacrelf 11y ago
Dude! Same here! I'm moving a C#/Silverlight behemoth into React. I'm the only guy working on it, but my boss basically wants me to build something he can work on (not a JS guy!) so he doesn't have to employ me as much. I have 2 weeks left before I go back to college in another state for the semester. And it's hard to remote because we have a poorly architected and somehow buggy SVN repo. git-svn can't load SVN history from it, so I don't get to use that. Still using VS2010 for the C# to target Silverlight 4, using my own free .edu ReSharper license, just factored out an entire Service from behind a C# Web Api by exposing solution-wide data classes. Best bit? I don't have any concrete spec to build to. All I have is that it should look 'a bit like this'. RIP me.
Fej 11y ago
What company? Curious, I also live in Jersey.
dorkulous 11y ago
I think you hit the nail on the head here. You are delivering within a vertical, which means you have a good chance at being successful. IoT, like BigData before it, is suffering from an overload of people building technology for the sake of technology. I have done a lot of hands-on work in the Remote Service side of IoT, implementing solutions for GE, the TSA, etc. At no point did I ever encounter a customer who longingly cried out "Woe is me, is there a horizontal technology anywhere that kinda solves a piece of my problem?!". I fear that as we follow down the hype curve in IoT over the next 24 months, the roadsides will be littered with interesting and functional platforms that failed to solve a business problem. Companies like the one described above will continue to make money and solve problems without any of the press that comes along with each new IoT platform.

by vdnkh 11y ago

pjmlp 11y ago

C#? Quite interesting. Anything that you can share about it? The language geek in me loves the use of C#, Java and similar safe stacks in the IoT domain. :)

vdnkh 11y ago
We don't program the boards in C#, just the services/Silverlight. The communication methods between the boards is well abstracted - most of our devices are reached via phone number. They have a SIM card with a carrier and services essentially make a phone call to get the data. There's a lot to do with communication protocols (i.e. bytes 0-8 are the configuration, 9-12 readings, etc.) but .NET has nice support for binary constructs. Some RTUs are difficult to work with because they have conversations with our server, and the lifetime of that call must be maintained while a million other things are going on. I wasn't here when the C# decision was made, but it's worked out really well for us so far, Silverlight notwithstanding. Microservices work out really well for us too because there's a lot of code written for specific RTUs which will not (and should not) be shared, and having them explicitly separated keeps everything tidy. Microservices communicate via a centralized publisher using WCF, which uses MSMQ as the underlying transport method. Our #1 priority is to never loose data so these technologies are a pretty safe bet. Like I mentioned before, C# has good support for low-level stuff, but we don't do as much low-level as you think. Our greatest challenge is handling several distinct protocols with as much as the same code path as possible, and C# has really great generics support which makes our lives easy. We don't require the performance a C++ platform would bring. To elaborate a bit more, our basic control flow goes something like: Poll unit -> get data -> push data -> translate data -> assign data to business objects -> operate on data -> present data Each step usually involves a save to the database of critical info at that stage.
- pjmlp 11y ago
  Thanks for sharing. I am currently aware of stuff using .NET CF, the old WinCE/Pocket PC stack or just doing straight IO control from the PC side to "dumb" firmware that just follows the given commands.

rjdagost 11y ago

Sounds like you found a good niche. Your work is solving real problems and you can make real money from your product, instead of just creating another VC subsidized ad platform that gets breathless hype in TechCrunch. I'd consider sitting tight for now, there is a sea change going on in the tech world and money is getting tighter. In the not too distant future you might find it easier to attract better talent.

cormacrelf 11y ago

Dude! Same here! I'm moving a C#/Silverlight behemoth into React. I'm the only guy working on it, but my boss basically wants me to build something he can work on (not a JS guy!) so he doesn't have to employ me as much. I have 2 weeks left before I go back to college in another state for the semester. And it's hard to remote because we have a poorly architected and somehow buggy SVN repo. git-svn can't load SVN history from it, so I don't get to use that. Still using VS2010 for the C# to target Silverlight 4, using my own free .edu ReSharper license, just factored out an entire Service from behind a C# Web Api by exposing solution-wide data classes. Best bit? I don't have any concrete spec to build to. All I have is that it should look 'a bit like this'. RIP me.

Fej 11y ago

What company? Curious, I also live in Jersey.

dorkulous 11y ago

I think you hit the nail on the head here. You are delivering within a vertical, which means you have a good chance at being successful. IoT, like BigData before it, is suffering from an overload of people building technology for the sake of technology. I have done a lot of hands-on work in the Remote Service side of IoT, implementing solutions for GE, the TSA, etc. At no point did I ever encounter a customer who longingly cried out "Woe is me, is there a horizontal technology anywhere that kinda solves a piece of my problem?!". I fear that as we follow down the hype curve in IoT over the next 24 months, the roadsides will be littered with interesting and functional platforms that failed to solve a business problem. Companies like the one described above will continue to make money and solve problems without any of the press that comes along with each new IoT platform.