Echolo Journal

Writing from the Echolo team — technical notes, field reports, and the occasional post-mortem.

The first 30 days of a deployment

Read more 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.

Published on: Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Designing for the dead zone

Read more 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.

Published on: Thu, 11 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

What a BLE tag's battery actually lasts

Read more 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.

Published on: Tue, 09 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Rental hours and the return-day argument

Read more 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.

Published on: Thu, 04 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

A day in Fleet

Read more 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.

Published on: Fri, 15 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Why off-highway equipment is its own IoT problem

Read more 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.

Published on: Tue, 12 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Solar and battery sizing for remote sites: the math nobody does

Read more 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.

Published on: Thu, 07 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Site surveys: the things you measure that aren't on the spec sheet

Read more 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.

Published on: Tue, 05 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

AI in IoT: what actually runs in production

Read more 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.

Published on: Thu, 30 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

CMH and the warranty conversation

Read more 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.

Published on: Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

CMH from telemetry vs CMH from the clipboard

Read more 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.

Published on: Fri, 17 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

What "running" actually means

Read more 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.

Published on: Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Cellular backhaul, the unglamorous part of IoT

Read more 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.

Published on: Fri, 03 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Why we don't name customers on our marketing site

Read more 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.

Published on: Sat, 28 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

LoRaWAN in the wild: notes from a few real deployments

Read more 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.

Published on: Wed, 11 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

When predictive maintenance isn't magic

Read more 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.

Published on: Fri, 27 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

MQTT at scale, field lessons

Read more 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.

Published on: Sat, 14 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Data pipelines without drama

Read more 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.

Published on: Thu, 22 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

What BLE tracking in a heavy-equipment yard actually looks like

Read more 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.

Published on: Tue, 09 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT