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Ha! me and several engineers from Lockheed built just such a thin in 2007 -- but we couldnt get funding for it (we built the RFID tracking system for the milita

Ha! me and several engineers from Lockheed built just such a thin in 2007 -- but we couldnt get funding for it (we built the RFID tracking system for the military) but we were too early for the market at the time and people werent educated about tracking so we go rejected all over....(it was for fleet operations - we built the tracking systems for all weapons shipments and containers for the military at the time.

jpribyl 4y ago
This sounds epic! How did you handle powering the devices at night / rainy days? A battery presumably.. but seems like that would seriously up the maintenance cost. You would have to replace the batteries fairly regularly and I have a feeling that without funding anything I cowboy rig would be super flaky. 2007 means that the network would probably have been an issue as well. Though, I’m less worried about that these days.
- samstave 4y ago
  The network problem was an issue in 2007 - and so we were working with cell companies to get sim cards and a deal - but that was really difficult because cell plans were still super expensive and this was a novel startup. There are two types of RFID [active|passive] active required a battery which was rather small but the pings were so low power that the battery lasts a really long time. We pivoted and built a tracking system for the cannabis industry - but cannabis growers didnt want to pay for anything they werent legally mandated to do so - we built a system called GreenScale which could track all employees in your growfields, bins etc... but again we are a bunch of engineers (my partner designs and builds the crazy sensors for TDK currently but designed the sensors for Google's RF hand sensors) However, currently, we have a medical tracking system we have built for elderly care which integrates with Alexa and will tell you where your elderly care person is, if they accessed the restroom, if they fell... etc - but its based on a custom Ras PI basically and it uses RF as opposed to video etc with highly sensitive pressure sensors and other metrics to determine human action in a room.... When I was Director of OPs for Cognitive networks we buil spying bullshit on every single Vizio (and a couple other brands) TVs and could get a screenshot from any single TV connected to the internet... We were always 5 years too early with our designs... and then all sorts of companies got founded upon things we were already doing 5 years prior... but people didnt undersrtand wtf we were trying to do and we are nerdy engineers and not salesmen so had a shitty time trying to get people to see our visions... One of my partners now in eng manager at netflix instead.

jpribyl 4y ago

This sounds epic! How did you handle powering the devices at night / rainy days? A battery presumably.. but seems like that would seriously up the maintenance cost. You would have to replace the batteries fairly regularly and I have a feeling that without funding anything I cowboy rig would be super flaky. 2007 means that the network would probably have been an issue as well. Though, I’m less worried about that these days.

samstave 4y ago
The network problem was an issue in 2007 - and so we were working with cell companies to get sim cards and a deal - but that was really difficult because cell plans were still super expensive and this was a novel startup. There are two types of RFID [active|passive] active required a battery which was rather small but the pings were so low power that the battery lasts a really long time. We pivoted and built a tracking system for the cannabis industry - but cannabis growers didnt want to pay for anything they werent legally mandated to do so - we built a system called GreenScale which could track all employees in your growfields, bins etc... but again we are a bunch of engineers (my partner designs and builds the crazy sensors for TDK currently but designed the sensors for Google's RF hand sensors) However, currently, we have a medical tracking system we have built for elderly care which integrates with Alexa and will tell you where your elderly care person is, if they accessed the restroom, if they fell... etc - but its based on a custom Ras PI basically and it uses RF as opposed to video etc with highly sensitive pressure sensors and other metrics to determine human action in a room.... When I was Director of OPs for Cognitive networks we buil spying bullshit on every single Vizio (and a couple other brands) TVs and could get a screenshot from any single TV connected to the internet... We were always 5 years too early with our designs... and then all sorts of companies got founded upon things we were already doing 5 years prior... but people didnt undersrtand wtf we were trying to do and we are nerdy engineers and not salesmen so had a shitty time trying to get people to see our visions... One of my partners now in eng manager at netflix instead.