Ronald Bynoe used to run a family restaurant in Portland, Oregon. Every hour, he would check the temperature of each place the kitchen stored food -- including walk-in refrigerators, reach-in refrigerators, and soup kettles -- and record it in a paper notebook.
He was sure there had to be a better way of handling this ridiculously tedious task, and he started doing some digging -- but turned up nothing. "I never found anything that was economical and user friendly for the restaurant industry," he says. "So I decided to build something myself."
It was 10 years before he had the opportunity to run with this idea, but in 2011 Bynoe, his wife Judith, and their business partner, Loren Lang, founded Hexagonal Research and created Observos, a box that can monitor the temperature, humidity, and barometric pressure of a space and shuttle this information across the net. The boxes are ruggedized for outdoor use and can connect to the web via Wi-Fi.
You can check and monitor the information it collects through a simple web-based console, and Observos can text or e-mail you if the temperature of a place drops below a certain level, or if the air becomes too humid. They call it the Internet of Places.
Bynoe had taken some programming classes in college and was quite tech savvy, and Lang had an engineering background, but it was the open source hardware movement -- particularly the open source, programmable circuit board known as the Arduino -- that made Observos possible. "We started with the Arduino because there was such a low barrier to entry to get started," Bynoe says.
"Arduino provided us an extraordinary platform for testing against, an invaluable repository of preexisting libraries and other code that would have taken an incredible amount of time to write, and a lot of community support," he says. "It has decreased our time to market, and significantly reduced our startup costs, allowing us to more rapidly develop new prototypes."
After building the first prototype using an Arduino board, Bynoe and Lang originally designed their own circuit board. Now they're on their third version of the unit, which combines a custom board they designed themselves with the Arduino-like programmable board Pinoccio.
The company's first pilot customer was, fittingly, a restaurant. But they've discovered a bigger market: agriculture.
Bynoe says the company has been working with a local nursery with over 600 acres of greenhouses. There are existing automated systems for monitoring and managing greenhouse temperature, but Bynoe says they're extremely expensive and difficult to deploy. Observos units are much cheaper and are dead simple to setup.
The biggest challenge is getting the humidity sensors precise enough for agriculture. He says even some of the high-end systems don't get it right. Hexagonal is working on beefing up Observos with some new sensors, including oxygen and CO2. And support for the dead-simple integration service IFTTT is also in the works.
Observos is a great example of how open source hardware like the Arduino is enabling a new crop of startups. "We're seeing a lot hardware makers making the leap to companies and businesses across the entire spectrum of types of hardware (closed, partially open source)," says Limor Fried, an engineer and founder of open source electronics company Adafruit. "With more funding opportunities like Kickstarter or places to sell, like Tindie, it's never been a better time to be a maker business gone-pro."
Hexagonal did give Kickstarter a try following a successful trip to California as part of the tech blog Engadget's Insert Coin contest. But ultimately, the Kickstarter campaign failed.
Bynoe says it failed partly because they didn't do a good job marketing the campaign, and partly because they tried to market to too broad an audience. Hexagonal was targeting both the hobbyist market and the commercial market. That made the product seem too high-end for hobbyists, and not professional enough for professionals. "We ended up confusing both demographics and turned off both sets," he says.
Hexagonal is now focused on the commercial market, not the hobbyist game, and it has raised a small round of funding and hopes to close a second round soon. Bynoe says that the company doesn't need the Kickstarter funds, but may still do a hobbyist-targeted campaign for the boards themselves, not the full Observos product.
Fried thinks that hobbyists and the open source nature of Observos will still be important advantages for Hexagonal. "Marketing a product is a huge challenge, but when you're open source, your information -- files, source, tutorials -- is your advertising, and community of makers are contributing, interacting and sharing," she says.
Bynoe hasn't forgotten the importance of the open source community. "Although perhaps not standing on the shoulders of giants, open source hardware and software allows us to stand on the shoulders of our peers, which I believe confers an even greater advantage," Bynoe says.
