The IoT landscape today often appears as a patchwork of insecure, slow, and ineffective devices. Traditional IoT approaches have struggled to deliver on their promises in many cases, with 74% of all IoT products failing to make it to market, and of those that do, 97% struggle with security, while ecosystem fragmentation has hindered true scalability and sustainability. 

At Blues, we’re not just committed to IoT, we’re working to evolve it into something transformative: Embedded Intelligence. 

IoT’s Security Challenge 

The fundamental challenge with traditional IoT lies in the approach: devices connected directly to the internet without proper security protection or comprehensive management. Each new device becomes another potential entry point for bad actors, creating a massive attack surface that grows exponentially with each deployment. 

The results speak for themselves. Major IoT security breaches have compromised everything from consumer devices to critical infrastructure. Many IoT devices can’t receive security updates, creating persistent vulnerabilities in our homes, businesses, and infrastructure. But these challenges are solvable with the right approach. 

What we need now are machines that combine their senses with secure agents that can think and act intelligently, both on their own and in concert with other machines. We see a bright future where connected technology evolves to meet these challenges head-on. 

Introducing Embedded Intelligence 

What exactly is Embedded Intelligence? It’s a combination of hardware, software, and services that create an intelligent machine. A machine that uses data to meet goals. A machine that utilizes sensors and incorporate embedded intelligent agents to unlock unprecedented value and responsiveness. Unlike traditional IoT approaches, which often simply connect devices to the internet, Embedded Intelligence creates machines that can think, act, and adapt autonomously while maintaining secure connections to their environment and the cloud. 

Embedded Intelligence represents a philosophical shift as much as a technological one. Instead of viewing connectivity as the end goal, we see it as just one component of a complete system. Our approach places the embedded agent at the center, creating a secure, adaptable foundation for every connected device. This agent doesn’t just facilitate connections, it manages them, protects the device from threats, and ensures optimal performance regardless of conditions. 

The Two Pillars of Blues’ Embedded Intelligence 

Our solution is made up of two parts that work together to bridge device and cloud, creating a comprehensive ecosystem that addresses the fundamental security challenges of traditional IoT approaches: 

The Embedded Intelligent Agent 

We call it Notecard, and it’s not just a connectivity module, it fundamentally transforms how devices connect, communicate, and operate in the field. Notecard provides: 

• Intelligent radio management: With automatic fallback across every major Radio Access Technology. This means your device can dynamically switch between cellular, WiFi, satellite, and LoRa based on availability, signal strength, and cost considerations. With Notecard, there are no single points of failure for connectivity, your devices stay connected regardless of changing conditions. 

• Inference-based energy optimization: The agent automatically adjusts sensing, computation, and data uplink patterns as needed, balancing performance and power consumption. It can even predict future energy availability and adjust operations proactively, extending device lifespan in unpredictable environments. 

• Unbrickable firmware management: Allowing remote reset, wipe, and “dynamic brain transplant.” This revolutionary approach enables code upgrades or downgrades without risk, provides remote diagnostic capabilities, and ensures long-term sustainability. Even if a firmware update fails catastrophically, your device can recover automatically; eliminating the “bricked ” or rogue scenarios that challenge traditional IoT deployments. 

Notecard is designed as an outboard coprocessor, physically and logically separate from your device’s main application processor. This architecture creates an air gap that fundamentally changes the security model. Even if your application code is compromised, the Notecard remains secure, maintaining control over communication channels and protecting critical systems. 

The Embedded Network Hub 

Your Embedded Network Hub is the command center for your entire fleet of embedded devices. For us, this is Blues Notehub, and it’s not just a cloud service. Unlike generic IoT platforms that try to be everything to everyone, Notehub is purpose-built for managing embedded intelligent agents at scale. It delivers: 

• Intelligent Fleet Configuration & Management: Notehub offers manual, programmatic, and intelligent automatic fleet assignments, providing both direct and polymorphic inheritance for instant, scale-free reconfiguration. This means you can update thousands of devices simultaneously with just a few clicks, or create sophisticated device groupings that adapt automatically based on device characteristics, location, or behavior patterns. 

• Intelligent Storage & Analytics: Event streams intelligently fan out into different storage systems for interactive access, analytics, and warehousing. With support for time-series, geospatial, visualization, and enterprise application integration, you can extract meaningful insights from your device data without building complex data pipelines or analytics systems. 

• Service and Manufacturing-Centricity: Notehub’s API-centric approach focuses on smooth integration with your product procurement, manufacturing, testing, and provisioning practices. It seamlessly connects with your existing enterprise systems, enabling data and event flow from large fleets of deployed devices without disrupting established workflows. 

Notehub isn’t just about managing devices; it’s about making device data actionable and valuable across your organization. It bridges the gap between operational technology and information technology, creating a unified view of your embedded devices and the data they generate. 

Embedded Intelligence: The Power of Integration 

When combined, the Embedded Intelligent Agent and the Embedded Network Hub create a secure, adaptive system that doesn’t just connect a machine, it manages it. Always on, always listening, always secure. This integration enables capabilities that are simply impossible with traditional IoT approaches: 

• Secure Auto-Provisioning & Health Monitoring: Starting with hardware embedded in Notecard, through to auto-provisioning in Notehub, you maintain complete visibility and control over device attributes and behaviors. The system automatically detects unusual patterns that might indicate security concerns, allowing you to quarantine suspicious devices before they can impact your broader network. 

• Air-gapped Security and Protection: Blues implements a ‘dual gap’ prevention system against internet-based intrusion. The first gap is a non-networked ‘request tunnel’ between your application processor and Notecard. The second gap ensures all cellular and satellite traffic between Notecard and Notehub travels on a secure off-internet private VLAN. With encryption at both the transport level and end-to-end encryption for sensitive data, attackers simply can’t reach your devices or data. 

• Intelligent Device Geolocation: Blues enables indoor and outdoor devices to be located using the fusion and triangulation of cell towers, WiFi access points, and LoRa gateways, as well as satellite GPS. The system intelligently adapts based on available signals and automatically detects device movement and orientation, providing reliable location data even in challenging environments without draining battery life. 

These integrated capabilities represent a powerful evolution of IoT, transforming the piecemeal approach where security, connectivity, and intelligence are often bolted on as afterthoughts. With Blues, these critical functions become the foundation of every device and deployment. 

Reimagining IoT for a Secure Future 

With Embedded Intelligence, we’re elevating IoT from simple “connectivity” to a true agent embedded within every machine. A secure, outboard coprocessor entirely separate from the machine’s senses. This isn’t replacing IoT; it’s fulfilling its original promise with embedded intelligence that can think, act, and protect itself. 

Think of the agent as the machine’s trusted advisor, always there, always ready, and always secure. The outboard agent architecture fundamentally changes the security posture of your devices, creating a separation of concerns that protects critical systems even if application code is compromised. 

This approach also creates unprecedented flexibility and future-proofing. As connectivity standards evolve and security requirements change, Notecard can adapt through secure firmware updates without requiring redesigns of your core product. You can even switch radio access technologies in the field, moving from cellular to satellite or WiFi as needed without hardware modifications. 

Let’s Build a Connected Future Together 

Here’s the thing: if your device doesn’t have an intelligent, outboard agent, you’re missing a crucial security component. Every device needs a brain, not just a connection. We believe the future of IoT is bright—filled with devices that can sense, think, communicate, and adapt autonomously while maintaining secure connections to their environment and the cloud. 

Join us as we build a world of truly intelligent, secure machines, machines that fulfill the original promise of IoT and deliver value beyond anything possible with traditional approaches. The future of connected devices is here, and it’s more secure and intelligent than ever.  

Additional Resources 

• Try Notecard for yourself, get started with a development kit  
• Fuel your AI applications with optimized data streams 
• Discover MinSpin, our in house design service to kickstart your product development 

The post IoT’s Security Crisis and Path to Embedded Intelligence appeared first on Blues.

The good news is that, when it comes to wireless connectivity, Wi-Fi and cellular aren’t your only options. And depending on range and the needs of your application, approaches like BLE, Thread/Matter, and LoRa exist to help lower the cost of connectivity for IoT devices.

After we launched the Notecard in January of 2021, we saw a lot of interest from customers who were impressed with our approach to simple, developer-friendly cellular IoT and wanted to explore how our products and approach to low-code IoT development could meet their needs. And as we explored use cases and the challenges our customers were facing, we saw an opportunity to extend our product offerings into places were a Notecard on every sensor wasn’t an option. Over the last year, we’ve been working to expand the reach of Blues products from cellular, to Wi-FI, and today, to LoRa.

Introducing Sparrow

Today, I am proud to announce the general availability of Sparrow. Sparrow is a developer toolkit that accelerates construction of low-cost, LoRa-based device cluster applications. Our developer kit, which is available now, contains everything you need to build a POC of a solution, including:

• A Notecarrier A and Wi-Fi Notecard.
• 2 Sparrow Reference Sensors with onboard motion (PIR), temp, and humidity (BME280) in a ready-to-deploy enclosure.
• 3 Sparrow Essentials boards to create the gateway and two for adding your own sensors.
• Batteries and cables for power and programming devices.

As an extension to the Blues ecosystem, Sparrow works with any Notecard. We provide a Wi-Fi Notecard to get you started, but a cellular Notecard works great too. You create a Sparrow Gateway by connecting a Sparrow Essentials board to a Notecarrier using a Qwiic cable, and the pre-loaded firmware knows how to function as a gateway when it powers on and detects a Notecard.

The two reference sensors will help you deploy your first Sparrow app in minutes, simply plug in the included batteries, pair each with the Gateway, and the sensors will start sending temperature, humidity, and motion data to the Notecard and Notehub.io.

As with our other products, we have a complete quickstart and guides available at dev.blues.io to help get you going with Sparrow.

A complete toolkit, including firmware and software

And since Sparrow is meant to be a complete developer toolkit, we decided we wanted to go beyond the hardware and provide everything developers might need to explore the product. That includes reference firmware, and software for a web-based dashboard application.

On the hardware side, we’ve open-sourced the firmware that comes included on every Sparrow device, and have created an extensive set of guides at dev.blues.io to help you get started building Sparrow apps that read from your own sensors.

And on the software side, we’re also releasing an open-source reference web app that provides a customizable dashboard for viewing Sparrow data, and configuring your sensors. We’ve published a hosted version with some of our own sensors so you can see the app in action, and a complete set of instructions for creating and deploying your own instance of the app, and routing Sparrow data from Notehub.io to your preferred cloud store.

At Blues, we believe that LoRa is a great option for use cases where customers are looking to add connectivity to low-cost devices. And with Sparrow, it’s never been easier to add developer-friendly LoRa connectivity to Notecard-based applications.

We hope you’ll take Sparrow for a spin, let us know what you think, and share what you build with it!

The post Introducing Sparrow: A development kit for building LoRa-based applications appeared first on Blues.

On December 7th, Blues Wireless will celebrate one year since we launched the Notecard and Notehub.io to the public. And what a year it’s been: we’ve seen thousands of Notecards come online, and over 20 million events sent to Notehub.io from nearly all 135 countries supported by our products. We also added the Airnote air quality monitor, and Swan MCU to our lineup of products as we continue to deliver on our vision to simplify cellular and help our customers accelerate their IoT applications.

And while we have big plans for 2022 that we can’t wait to share with you, I wanted to take a moment to drop and early surprise that I know many of our customers will appreciate. Today, I am happy to announce the first Long Term Support (LTS) release of our Notecard Firmware, and our framework for Developer and LTS releases, moving forward.

What’s an LTS Release?

If you’ve been a Notecard customer for a while now, you are likely aware that we’ve been doing quarterly developer firmware updates since early 2021. These releases, as the name suggests, are meant for testing new Notecard features and functionality during the early Prototype and Pilot phases of your project. We strive to be a developer-driven company, so it’s not uncommon for us to expand the feature-set of the Notecard based on feedback and requests from customers building real applications.

For our scaling customers, however, we’ve intended from day one to provide a stable, unchanging version of the Notecard firmware. These applications are often feature complete and ready for the field, and do not need new features, or the risk associated with incorporating updated firmware into their application. LTS releases address this problem by supplying stable and consistent behavior that customers can bet on for field deployments.

LTS releases are feature-frozen, meaning that they do not receive new features, API changes, or any functionality that modifies the documented behavior of the device. They do, however, benefit from an extended support window in which Blues will address critical OTA vulnerabilities for a period of 10 years from the date of initial release, meaning you can rest easy knowing that your mission-critical devices are covered. For more information about the scope of LTS support, reach out to the Blues sales team at support@blues.com.

How do I spot an LTS Release?

We’ve chosen to adopt a firmware version numbering scheme inspired by the LTS practices employed for NodeJS. Namely, we’re adopting an even and odd major version numbering scheme to delineate between our LTS and Developer releases.

LTS releases will always start with an even number, and we will increase the minor or patch version numbers in the event fixes from a newer release need to be back-ported to an earlier LTS. For example, 2.1.1, which is the version we are releasing to the public today, is our first LTS version. If, in the support period, we identify a need to back-port a critical vulnerability, we would release a new LTS version on this line with a new minor or patch number, for example 2.2.1.

Likewise, Developer releases will always start with an odd number, and we will increase the minor or patch version numbers as we cut updated Developer firmware releases throughout the year. For example, the next developer firmware release, which is planned for January of 2022, will be version 3.1.1.

To put these version numbers and what they mean into more context, here’s our planned release schedule for 2022, starting with a January developer release, and ending in November with the next LTS release.

• Jan 2022 – Developer Release 3.1.1
  • LTS Update 2.2.1 (If Necessary)
• April 2022 – Developer Release 3.2.1
  • LTS Update 2.3.1 (If Necessary)
• July 2022 – Developer Release 3.3.1
  • LTS Update 2.4.1 (If Necessary)
• October 2022 – Developer Release 3.4.1
  • LTS Release Candidate for 4.1.1
• November 2022 – LTS Release 4.1.1

How do I update my firmware to an LTS release?

The process of updating your Notecards to an LTS release is the same as what’s supported for Developer firmware releases today. You can use Notehub.io to perform OTA firmware updates to one or more devices or do an offline update via a USB connection to a computer. Both approaches are documented in more detail at dev.blues.io.

It’s been an exciting, busy year for all of us here at Blues, but we’re grateful that so many customers have joined us in our mission of simplifying cellular IoT over the last year. And now, with an LTS policy and support in place, we can’t wait to see what you deploy next year.

The post Announcing Long Term Support Releases for Notecard Firmware appeared first on Blues.

Deploy with the Notecard, Qwiickly

Designed by SparkFun founder and super-engineer Nathan Seidle, the SparkX Qwiic Cellular board is a slick, small-footprint Notecarrier that’s ready for your next cellular IoT project. We’re long-time fans of SparkFun here at Blues Wireless, and had the pleasure of sharing the Notecard and our vision for wireless IoT connectivity with Nathan and the team last year. We’ve been exploring ways to work together ever since, and I’m delighted that Nathan and the team decided to build their own Notecarrier. This matte-black PCB includes:

• A Qwiic connector for I2C communication between the Notecard and a host MCU.
• A spare Qwiic connector for daisy-chaining other I2C devices.
• SMA connectors for cellular and GPS antennas.
• A rear-side footprint ready for a removable external SIM holder.
• Headers for accessing Notecard pins.
• JST connector for a LiPo battery.
• A reset button.
• VIN and charge indicator LEDs.

Get Started with Qwiic Cellular

To help you get started faster with the Notecard and SparkX Qwiic Cellular, we’ve added hookup instructions to the Notecard Quickstart and a new sensor tutorial that uses the SparkFun Artemis Thing Plus and an Environmental Combo Breakout board. It’s a complete SparkFun sensor tutorial!

In fact, when you head over to SparkFun to grab your SparkX Qwiic Cellular board, why not grab a ThingPlus and Environmental Combo while you’re at it? And if you grab a SparkX Qwiic Cellular, be sure to let us know on Twitter or over on the Forums, and we can’t wait to see what you build (and deploy) with it!

The post Introducing the Qwiic Cellular Notecarrier from SparkFun appeared first on Blues.

I do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success. – Nikola Tesla

I attended my first Bay Area Maker Faire in 2018. I’d been to the Austin Maker Faire several times in previous years, but this was my first experience attending the flagship event. Convened first in 2006 to a crowd of 20,000, by 2018, the event had grown to over 150,000 attendees and 1,200 makers exhibiting their creations. But what caught my eye most as I wandered through the San Mateo convention center were the sprawling booths erected by the likes of Google, Microsoft, Bose, and Ford. 12 years in, the humble maker movement looked to be thriving.
It would have been hard to imagine that Maker Faire and its parent Maker Media Inc. would cease to exist just one year later.

For years, companies large and small have looked upon the maker movement as the tip of the IoT spear. These communities were packed with hardware-curious software developers and, among younger members, the next generation of engineers and entrepreneurs. Companies like Arduino and Raspberry Pi exploded in this era, and several developer-focused hardware and IoT startups entered the space. The business model was simple: serve makers and developers in a way that would either create a self-sustaining business in itself or provide developers a path to building large-scale products with their tools when the time was right.

But by the end of the last decade, Maker Media was one among many focused maker businesses that failed or were forced to reorganize their operations. Early 3D printing company MakerBot struggled in the 2010s, performed several rounds of layoffs, and ultimately left the maker business behind. And TechShop, a maker space chain with 10 locations throughout the US, shuttered in 2017.

The Enterprise Pivot

By 2019, it was easy to write off the maker movement as dead. Many did, including a number of the companies that just a few years before had sprawling booths at Maker Faires worldwide. As these companies surveyed the space, they decided that the opportunity in the IoT lay not with makers but in “the enterprise.”

And so they pivoted. The enterprise is where the real work of the IoT is and will be done, they thought. The enterprise is the place where scale will be found. These companies pivoted to serve an audience that was, in their minds, wholly different. They adjusted their roadmaps, changed their pricing structure, and walled off their products. And along the way, they left the IoT developer behind.

This pivot was a mistake. Not because the enterprise is an incorrect target for many IoT businesses. It is a mistake because, even within the enterprise, it’s still the developer who matters most. It’s still the developer that drives the ultimate success or failure of any product within an organization.

Enterprise Developers Are Developers, Too

When companies pivoted away from the maker movement, many lumped makers and developers into the same bucket. The thinking was that a developer tinkering with a home automation project on nights and weekends wasn’t representative of the kinds of customers they were after. And while it’s true that the maker movement in and of itself doesn’t map directly to large-scale enterprise IoT deployments, to pivot completely to the “enterprise” fails to consider that enterprise developers are developers too!

I know this for a fact because I’ve met many of these developers, and I’ve been one of these developers at times in my career. Just like any developer, developers in the enterprise care about building a great product. They care about security, scale, and ease of use. About working with tools they enjoy and which help them get the job done.

Enterprise Developers Are Makers

The enterprise developer is often also a maker. They care enough about their craft, and software is a craft, to tinker on nights and weekends with interesting tools and services.

In the end, if they like your product and have success with it, they’ll find a way to use it for their work. I’ve seen countless examples in the IoT space of companies doing large-scale IoT deployments with hardware, tools, and services that started with a single developer. Not an executive mandate, but a single developer who brought a tool she loved into “the enterprise” to solve a big problem. And I’ve seen just as many examples of IoT projects that failed because developers were handed a tool that wasn’t built for them and never made it beyond a pilot.

If you’re selling your IoT product to “the enterprise” and the developer isn’t at least a major factor in how you design, build and sell your product, who are you selling to? The fact is, companies that cast aside makers and developers to chase “enterprises” are chasing an ideal of the “enterprise software” world that no longer exists.

In 2021, the maker movement is alive and well in schools, homes, and enterprises. And the companies that are enabling the next wave of the IoT still have a developer mindset at their core. Companies like the Raspberry Pi Foundation and Arduino still serve the maker and developer with the product every day, even as they add professional-grade tools to their portfolio. Companies like Twilio and Edge Impulse deliver exceptional developer experiences from the start. Companies like Ubidots and Datacake don’t hide their value behind a paywall.

Any one of us can follow in the footsteps of these companies. All it takes is a recognition that IoT developers, and all manner of embedded, firmware, and cloud developers still matter.

At Blues Wireless, we hope to be among those listed above. Learn more about us, and how Blues Wireless is making developer-friendly cellular IoT with the Notecard and Notecarrier.

The post Why IoT Developers (Still) Matter appeared first on Blues.

It’s a topic that deserves more than a blog post, so I am excited to share that, on April 21st at 1PM EDT, Rob Lauer and I will be presenting on “The Strings of Cellular IoT” as a part of the RIoT Lunch & Learn series.

In this free event, Rob and I will discuss five of the most common challenges IoT developers face and how Blues Wireless is delivering developer-friendly cellular IoT solutions with no strings attached. Click here to register and we hope to see you there!

The post RIoT Lunch & Learn: The Strings of Cellular IoT appeared first on Blues.

If you’re interested in a full hardware teardown and overview of the Airnote, check out the post and overview video I published on Hackster.

In celebration of IoT Day on April 9th, and Earth Day on April 22nd, we’re giving a handful of Airnotes away, and we want you to have one!

From April 8th to April 20th, we’re running a contest called Show us your air, Get an Airnote.

Here are the rules: Film a 30 second video that shows us where you’d place an Airnote, and why you want to measure the air quality where you are. Then, post that video to a sharing service like YouTube or Vimeo and send us the link by April 20th. We’ll send free Airnotes to the creators of the 5 best videos and announce the winners on Earth Day, April 22nd.

So what are you waiting for? Get that camera ready, share your best creation, and let’s raise the bar for air quality awareness together.

For complete contest rules and conditions, visit https://blues.com/contests/airnote-contest (contest no longer running).

The post Show Us Your Air, Get an Airnote appeared first on Blues.

With a twinkle in my eye, I smile.

Then, I place the item on the shelf, right between the other vessels of endless opportunity I got last week.

Maybe it’s just me, but I have a history of acquiring more dev boards and devices than I have time or opportunity to actually use. And a lot of times, the thing that keeps me from putting that new shiny toy on my desk and firing it up, instead of on my shelf, is that I just don’t know where to start.

I got the product. What now? What’s next?

When we set out to build the Blues Wireless developer portal, these are the exact questions we wanted to answer for every developer who purchases one of our Notecards, Notecarriers, and development kits. Every one of our products includes a URL on the packaging that points to our Notecard quickstart guide. What’s more, the developer portal includes an in-browser terminal that you can use to connect right to your Notecard over USB. In minutes, you get a hands-on experience with the Notecard API and Notehub.io without ever leaving the browser.

When you’re done, we have a complete tutorial that walks you through connecting the Notecard to your favorite MCU or SBC, and includes language-specific instructions for Arduino, C, Python, CircuitPython, and MicroPython developers.

And when you’ve gotten your sensor data into Notehub, we have a complete tutorial that shows you how to use Notehub Routes to send data to your favorite cloud service.

Then, after you’ve gotten a taste of building an end-to-end solution with the Notecard, you’ll want to explore our API walkthrough, reference, and SDK docs.

To get a preview of what the Notecard getting started experience looks like, check out the video below. If you have a Notecard on hand, get it connected at start.wireless.dev.

And to get your own vessel of endless opportunity, I mean, Notecard, visit shop.blues.io.

The post Getting Started with the Notecard appeared first on Blues.

Most people overestimate what they can achieve in a year and underestimate what they can achieve in ten years. – Bill Gates

Before it was the largest nuclear disaster since Chernobyl, it was a tsunami. Waves reached heights over 40 meters, traveled at 700 km/h and moved 10 kilometers inland before receding. Before it was a tsunami, it was a 9.0 magnitude earthquake, the largest ever recorded in Japan, and the fourth-most powerful since modern record-keeping started in 1900.

That tsunami, which occurred exactly ten years ago today, resulted in over 20,000 deaths and displaced hundreds of thousands of families, some for years. It also led to Level 7 meltdowns of three reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant complex. Residents within 20 kilometers of the plants were quickly evacuated and the world watched, waited, and worried if another Chernobyl disaster was in the making.

Safecast & The Decade of Global Collaboration

But unlike Chernobyl, the effects of which were hidden from the global scientific community for years, the news of the disaster spread rapidly. Once informed, a confederation of citizen scientists responded to the crisis and its resulting challenges over email, chat, discussion threads, and video calls.

Even if one were to set aside the political realities of the Cold War, the infrastructure for democratized global communication did not exist when the Chernobyl disaster occurred in 1986. Likewise, had Fukushima occurred just a decade earlier the community response would have been much slower. Global broadband was only just beginning its upward climb in 2001, and there would be no video collaboration tools to speak of until 2003.

But Fukushima happened on March 11, 2011, and in the ten years between 2001 and 2011, humanity built a broadband, cloud-backed, global communications infrastructure that made real-time dissemination of news and remote collaboration possible. In just a decade, we possessed the ability to be informed about, and respond to, a crisis in moments. We put ourselves on the Internet, and it was the existence of this infrastructure that allowed the original Safecast team to form: first to connect, check-in, and help, and then to solve a new set of problems just beginning to emerge from the disaster.

The IoT & The Decade of Global Insight

The biggest problem that citizens on the ground and the global scientific community faced in the early days of Fukushima was access to information. The government and local utilities had a view of the situation on the ground, but did not share it. The rest of the world could only guess at the extent of the damage or the safety of the surrounding area.

In a decade, we’d connected ourselves to each other over the internet, but the world and environment around us was still a mystery. And it was this world that Safecast was formed to change, first by deploying geiger counters and radiation detection devices, then by expanding to air quality monitoring. And over the last decade, Safecast has deployed 5,000 radiation and air quality monitoring devices in 102 countries, collecting over 66,000 measurements each day.

That’s 5,000 spots on the globe with a better sense of their air quality than 10 years ago. 5,000 locations where citizens know if the air outside is safe, and where data about their environment is as accessible as a friend over a video call.

Over that same decade, the cost of sensors, silicon, PCBs, and radios continued to drop, and a growing landscape of maker- and developer-friendly tools ushered in a Cambrian explosion of connected devices as the hype of the IoT gave way to reality. And it was in response to the still extant challenges in this space that led Ray Ozzie to start Blues Wireless and build the Notecard.

Introducing the Airnote

After 10 years, 5,000 devices and millions of data points collected, organizations like Safecast do not consider their job complete. If anything, just as the democratization of broadband and the cloud laid the groundwork for the IoT, the last decade has been a beta test of the value humanity can extract by adding devices to our environment. A test that has been wildly successful, as environmental data from open datasets is being used to inform scientific research, shape policy, and help every day citizens understand their world.

And so, the partnership that began among Safecast volunteers globally, including Ray Ozzie, has evolved into a partnership between Safecast and Blues Wireless. Over the past two years, as we’ve been working to bring developer-friendly, no-fees cellular IoT to market with the Notecard, we’ve continued to work alongside the Safecast team to help them get ready for their next 5,000 devices, and beyond.

Today, we are excited to announce the launch of Airnote, a zero-configuration air quality monitoring device. Powered by the Notecard, Notehub.io and the Safecast network, the Airnote is designed to allow anyone who wants insight into their local air quality, or who is interested in contributing to a growing, global picture of air quality, to purchase and deploy a device in minutes.

We built the Airnote with consumers in mind. It’s a high-precision device in an affordable package. It counts air particulate matter wherever it is deployed and uses the Notehub.io cloud service to route air quality data to the Safecast global dataset. It includes a high-quality solar panel that’s tuned to keep the device charged and can be mounted to an exterior window in a home, building, or community center.

Alongside Safecast, our goal with the Airnote is to make air quality measurement devices that work for everyone. Our hope is that, over the next decade, we can help connect humanity to the environment around us in the same way that we connected to each other in the last one.

Just imagine what we could do by 2031.

To learn more about the Airnote, visit the product page. To purchase your own device, visit the Blues Wireless shop. To learn more about Safecast, join us for a live-streamed driving tour of Fukushima and the surrounding communities on March 13, 2021. The tour will pay tribute to the 10th anniversary of the Fukushima disaster and Safecast’s founding. The day-long event starts on Saturday, March 13 at 9 am JST (Friday, March 12 at 7 pm EST) and will be broadcast live via YouTube.

The post What We Can Do in a Decade appeared first on Blues.