Dear Sigfox enthusiasts,

First of all, we want to thank everyone for the positive feedback and numerous suggestions to the Sigfox Sales Checklist and we incorporated all of them into the latest release.

We also added the 7 main pitfalls of IoT sales. Enjoy.

This newsletter will be about the FIRMWARE. The part that is underestimated, but totally critical in the Sigfox case.

When people ask what IoT is, I love to give them the parable with a human body.
The internet as we know it with all the social networks, AI, big data and visualization is the head of the body. With very limited knowledge of the physical world.

Temperature, orientation, pressure, smell, hearing you name it.
Sigfox is the neural lines transferring the information from the senses to the head.
What is important that our senses don’t send information all the time as they would overwhelm both the lines and the brain. They need to be self intelligent to transfer the information only when it is relevant. When there is some trigger. Where some threshold is reached.
And the same with IoT and Sigfox.

The devices need to have intelligence in order to last long on batteries and not to overwhelm the communication lines and the brain itself.

That is precisely what we try to do at Simple Hardware. In order to make the hardware simple, we developed an elaborate system that enables us to configure precisely the behavior of the SimpleHW devices to fit it snugly to the use case while maintaining the advantage of the mass-produced low-cost devices.
We are happy to announce the completely revolutionary SimpleAPI 6 converting the 12/8 bytes limitation of Sigfox to its advantage. Having limited resources forces you to use smart solutions. You can exploit it using your own IoT platform and is fully supported by our demo platform at www.iofrog.com

And yes we believe that the major differentiation of the Sigfox HW will be on the firmware side. In firmware we trust.

Despite the firmware, we received a tremendous amount of feedback and orders for SimplePack Plus 3.0 and SimpleLeak and you ask where they are. Our aim is to bring the internet style fast development cycle to hardware. And similar to the car industry, electronics manufacturers and suppliers live in a very antiquated world. 

Yes, definitely,  manufacturing revolutionary products is a hell. We just need to go fast through it and not to stop :). We have 7 weeks slip in the expected production as we were too optimistic. Apologies for not always communicating precisely and timely and we promise to do our best not to disappoint you. We don’t want you to spend time with half baked products. 

For the latest delivery dates please see the roadmap.

People also ask why our products are not even cheaper and what kind of commission they can get on them.

We try to limit the incredible riskiness of HW production by choosing and using only the highest quality manufacturers of PCBs and highest quality parts like inductors, transistors, and coils. SimplePack Plus 3.0 Full consists of 111 parts. And all of them must be reliable for 10 years of its lifetime. We also do thorough quality testing and assurance for each individual product by automatized tester testing all the components.

The design is small to the least possible from a radio performance point of view. That forces us to us the smallest factor electronic parts and makes production more demanding and expensive. The devices are waterproof with IP68 rating.