The Internet of Things and the Electronics Kodiak Builds
By 2017, connected devices had spread into cars, energy storage, security, sports and even pet care. Kodiak’s own work spanned each of those areas.
The Internet of Things, or IoT, comes up across the technology industry many times a day, and attention has turned to what comes next, including a sharper focus on security for connected devices across the market.
Wired wrote that connected machines and objects in factories could bring a fourth industrial revolution, and that experts predicted more than half of new businesses would run on the IoT by 2020. The forecast it pointed to, from Gartner, said that by 2020 more than half of major new business processes and systems would incorporate some element of the IoT.
Kodiak Assembly Solutions builds electronics in Austin for companies bringing IoT products to market, with strict processes, in-house testing and its quality certification behind each one.
Internet of Things Projects at Kodiak
Kodiak had built, or was building, the electronics for each of the products below.
NXP’s BlueBox was a large step for IoT in cars. NXP showed BlueBox publicly in May 2016 as a computing platform to help automakers build and test autonomous vehicles, Fortune reported. The project began before Freescale and NXP merged, and Kodiak built the boards behind it.
Battery-based energy storage systems sound futuristic, but they are in use now. They store excess energy, most often collected from a renewable source such as wind, solar or hydro, so it can be used later rather than wasted.
Iris biometric authentication was a film staple for years and is now in real use. Face recognition software is now commonplace, and iris scanning to confirm identity is following it. One iris authentication system was among Kodiak’s projects, alongside the fingerprint scanners it has also built.
Kodiak’s basketball project, a hoop that gathers data on every shot, grew from the observation that NBA shooting had barely improved in decades. League players made 45.2% of their field goals and 75.7% of their free throws in the 2015-16 season, against 45.8% and 75.1% in 1975-76, according to Basketball-Reference. The hoop uses scanning technology to record each shot’s range, court position and result, and identifies the zones where a player makes the most shots, giving players a way to raise their shooting percentage.
Fitness wearables have reached pets, and an activity monitor for dogs is another product on Kodiak’s list. It shows how much a dog moves during the day while its owner is away, and it can prompt more walks and trips to the park. Monitoring a pet’s heart rate could also prove useful.