The Solution’s the Thing
The Green Edge recently visited Barter for Things in Eastleigh, Hants to hear about some real-world applications of the Internet of Things and to talk about the skills needed to create them.
For many of us who lived through the Dotcom bubble and the series of false starts on artificial intelligence over the years, the Internet of Things (IoT) has a familiar ring to it. While some people – often those directly benefiting – can see real applications in areas like remote monitoring for people living with heart failure, there’s often the feeling that IoT is just another bubble. Certainly, it’s been hyped by the markets and the big boys for quick profit, and it’s loved by the techies and the academics for its intellectual challenge. And now it’s being trotted out in speeches by politicians as a key enabler for net zero because…well, it just is, isn’t it?
Ongoing IoT security concerns, reinforced by high profile incidents like the massive Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack on 21st October 2016 that took down sites like Amazon, PayPal and Netflix, don’t help. According to Alex Barter, “IoT continues to falter and it continues to splutter. There's an existing market failure, this is the third or fourth one that I've experienced. And it affects us as much as we want to let it affect us, but to be honest it doesn't really make much difference to us as a business.”
The thingmongers
‘Us’ is Alex Barter’s company, Barter for Things, shortened (of course) to B4T. They describe themselves as thingmongers, and like other types of mongers in years gone by, they’re on the high street – in this case, a town centre retail unit in Eastleigh, Hampshire that had stood empty for some time before the B4T team moved in. Alex tells us that reusing and repurposing assets is strong in the ethos of the company, and he goes on to describe B4T’s three pillars of “the three C’s’: cashflow, customer problem and community”.
We start with community. Left twiddling his thumbs after IoT’s previous market failure, Alex set out in 2016 to focus locally and build a crucible of IoT skills in the Solent area. Google meetups was a key tool and the result was the Solent IoT meetup – now merged with IoT North and incorporating machine learning – which now has over 500 members. Access to local talent, including three top-class local universities (Southampton, Solent and Portsmouith) was critical and became the crucible for Alex’s highly-skilled team. Alex comments, “I got bright people and I got access to them before anybody else. It's been important to get really good skills into the business and I wouldn't have got them without going out and selling the concept of IoT and making the local connections. In terms of skills, staying local is a good strategy from the business perspective.” A post-Covid strategy before Covid was ever a thing.
Alex’s team is small – there are 8 of them altogether, not including the advisory board – but growing. B4T’s next hire will be a Delivery Manager, an essential role in rolling out the customer solutions the company provides. We move on to talk about some of these solutions.
B4T operates in two main sectors: water utilities and maritime, both of which are high profile in the green economy. In water, smart metering is the key focus and here it’s critical that solutions are both efficient and cost-effective. Alex describes: “In the water sector there’s a vacuum of data, especially in smart metering. We've got a different approach to creating smart meter data, which is to reuse existing assets. We don't rip out meters and replace them. At the moment water meters are read by either somebody going out and having a look every six months or by phoning somebody up. Our equipment gives hourly information back, it's better but it's got to cost the same as the old methods.” In the UK, in a privatised market crossed with a regulated industry, margins are tight and cost parity with existing solutions, even if those existing solutions might be archaic, is vital.
The jellyfish
B4T’s main product is a widget called the Jellyfish. It has a body, a tail and sting, and it’s configured to gather and transmit data according to the customer solution. For smart water metering, it’s leakage and consumption data. For horticulture it’s real-time temperature, relative humidity and water pressure data giving information and alerts on crop health and stress. For predictive maintenance solutions the data collection may need to be combined with machine learning to build physical insights from abstract data. In every case, low power operation is key, allowing widgets to be left in place without needing attention for long periods of time, perhaps up to 10 years on a single A cell battery. Data packets are very small. Alex explains: “We built a business capability around a particular type of wireless connectivity, which was the lowest power with the longest range but has the smallest data. So we went for tiny, tiny data, something that we transmit a couple of times a day and only send a few bytes.” B4C’s ongoing development of the Jellyfish is looking to bring more on-board processing to the device itself, so that high-cost cloud processing of transmitted data can be reduced further still.
Moving on to talk about B4T’s customer solutions for the maritime sector, Alex describes a solution the firm built for Portsmouth International Port (PIP) which, in Green Edge’s opinion, nicely illustrates guideline 2 given in the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) Internet of Things Guidelines for Sustainability. As ever, WEF tends to deal in the abstract and obfuscate the subject, but translated, the guideline simply says, ‘understand the whole of the customer’s problem and build an integrated solution for it’. Alex describes the problem at PIP: to monitor air quality at the port and track against ship movements, with a project budget provided via grant for capital spend only and with no operational expenditure to follow. Bidding under competitive tender, most bids focused on competing on the costs of the sensors alone, but with expensive add-ons for items like ship tracking via third-party services with ongoing subscriptions. B4T, on the other hand, recognised the CapEx-only nature of the project and found a solution that could be paid for with the capital chunk up front and with no cash outflow later. This fitted the nature of the project budget and B4T won the project. The solution is now being implemented at PIP and is included in this Green Edge post.
The thing about skills
The Green Edge is keen to find out more about the skills needed by B4T to build end-to-end IoT solutions for its customers. Alex moves to the whiteboard and sketches a whole raft of skills, from high-end electronic hardware and software skills, to the ‘man work’ involved in putting widgets up on poles out in the field. A small amount of work, such as the PCB build, is outsourced to a local specialist, and the Jellyfish casings are manufactured in China (we’ll forgive them that, since cost-to-customer is such a critical factor), but all the rest is done in-house. It’s an impressive skills list for such a small team and Alex has already told us about the high qualification levels (typically masters) of the team members. But how might this change in future, particularly with opportunities to bring technicians into the team?
Without hesitation, Alex draws red boxes around two skill areas: “deploying the radio network, and the process of getting the widgets and the sensors built, turned around and out the door. These bits do take a little bit more grunt and are a bit more repetitive, but still there are problems to be solved. I'd still expect to challenge a technician to solve the connectivity of, say, these two things here. Got a device there? Got a receiver there? Does it work? Yes or no? If it works, yes, tell me how it works. Make sure that you know it's working properly. If it doesn't work, how do you make it work? And they're still very challenging things to be done.
“If I could grab some good technicians I’d get a couple of them right now”.
B4T Skills
Source: BMI from Alex Barter’s whiteboard sketch. Red boxes indicate activities suited to technician-level skills.
[As an aside: using the IfATE occupational maps, Green Edge did a little investigation post-visit to find apprenticeships that could map to the two technician areas that Alex described. The Digital map appears to cover radio networks pretty well, with both a Level 3 (A level) Radio Technician and a Level 4 (HNC) Network Engineer standard. The widget manufacture is a little more difficult to pin down, although some of the Level 3 Engineering Technician options within the oddly-named Quality Improvement and Project Control Technician group in the Engineering and Manufacturing map may teach the appropriate skills. While the government’s website for finding training providers indicates plenty of providers for the Engineering Technicians and Network Engineers, none are yet listed for Radio Technicians (L3), which was only approved in December 2020.]
Alex continues to be involved in engagement between himself, his company and the local community. He says: “There are all sorts of schemes that are unknowns. There's the Kickstart scheme which I'd like to get involved in. To get some kids to come in that might not have fitted into the education system that well, or further education didn't quite work out for them. Opportunities for younger people to get really focused on doing something. I'd like to get some youth in to do that”.
Alex concludes by telling us about some of the firm’s ongoing projects, which involve his team travelling to locations as far apart as The Scilly Isles and Aberdeen to install B4T’s real-world IoT solutions. The Green Edge wishes Alex and the team continued success in its endeavours.
Our thanks to Alex Barter for his time in talking to us for this Green Edge article. Opinions given on skills are entirely The Green Edge’s and may not coincide with Alex’s own opinions.
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