Writing, when there's something worth saying.
Technical field notes, values pieces, and the occasional post-mortem. No SEO filler. No "5 trends in IoT for 2026."
Articles
The first 30 days of a deployment
Signing the PO is the start, not the finish. The first month decides whether a deployment becomes infrastructure the site forgets it has, or a support ticket that never closes. Here's the arc — a composite of the ones that went well.
Read moreDesigning for the dead zone
We've written about picking a good cellular link. This is the other half of the problem — what the system does when there's no link at all, for a minute, an hour, or a whole shift. Off-highway, that isn't an edge case. It's Tuesday.
Read moreWhat a BLE tag's battery actually lasts
The datasheet says five years. The tag on the excavator went dark in fourteen months. Neither number is a lie — they're answers to different questions. Here's what actually drains a coin cell in the field, and why tags die all at once instead of slowly.
Read moreRental hours and the return-day argument
The rental house's invoice says the machine ran 180 hours. Your operator swears it was closer to 140. Both of you are reading a meter — only one of you was watching it the whole time. Here's how telemetry settles it without starting a second fight.
Read moreA day in Fleet
The new Fleet App ships soon. Instead of a feature list, here's what a Tuesday looks like for an ops lead with it open — from the 7am inbox paragraph to the 5pm audit log.
Read moreWhy off-highway equipment is its own IoT problem
A connected forklift is a known problem. A haul truck on a mine bench, an excavator on a remote easement, or a tractor halfway across a section — those are different problems wearing the same name.
Read moreSolar and battery sizing for remote sites: the math nobody does
Two panels and a deep-cycle battery is not a power system. It's a power system that works in May. Here's how we actually size off-grid IoT installs so they survive February.
Read moreSite surveys: the things you measure that aren't on the spec sheet
A spec sheet tells you what the hardware can do. A site survey tells you whether it will. Two hours on a roof saves a six-week return-trip story.
Read moreAI in IoT: what actually runs in production
Every IoT vendor has an AI story. Here's where machine learning genuinely earns its place in a real pipeline — and where it quietly gets replaced by a for loop.
Read moreCMH and the warranty conversation
When a $40,000 engine fails at 1,840 hours and the warranty runs to 2,000, what counts as proof? The boring bookkeeping that decides whether the claim gets paid.
Read moreCMH from telemetry vs CMH from the clipboard
The dashboard says 4,820 hours. The operator's logbook says 5,180. The gap is real, it's persistent, and it's costing someone money. Here's how to think about it.
Read moreWhat "running" actually means
Every yard tracks "machine hours" and every yard means something slightly different by it. The definition you pick changes the number by 20% or more, and decides whether your service intervals work.
Read moreCellular backhaul, the unglamorous part of IoT
Everyone wants to talk about sensors and dashboards. The thing that decides whether your deployment works is the cellular link, and almost nobody designs it carefully enough.
Read moreWhy we don't name customers on our marketing site
There are two stories in every B2B deployment — the one the vendor wants told, and the one the customer actually lived. We default to neither.
Read moreLoRaWAN in the wild: notes from a few real deployments
Datasheets talk about 10-mile range and decade-long battery life. Fish farms, remote sites, and metal-heavy yards tell a different story. What we actually see in the field.
Read moreWhen predictive maintenance isn't magic
The industry loves to talk about AI + IoT for equipment management. Most of what actually ships in production is thresholds, trendlines, and someone willing to look at the dashboard.
Read moreMQTT at scale, field lessons
What we've actually learned running an MQTT pipeline in production — the mistakes we made, the instrumentation that saved us, and the parts of the protocol nobody warns you about.
Read moreData pipelines without drama
Every IoT company eventually writes one. Every one of them is secretly held together by queues, dead-letter exchanges, and the hope that nothing fails at 3am. Here's what ours looks like, plainly.
Read moreWhat BLE tracking in a heavy-equipment yard actually looks like
A field note from a gateway install. Rust, forklifts, unexpected RF geometry, and what a 12km datasheet range means in a building made of steel.
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