|
From the President
"Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there."
Will Rogers
 Greetings,
This year’s annual DASH7 Alliance member meeting in San Juan, Puerto Rico was a phenomenal experience and I want to thank Paul Ritchie, Julie Jenks, Barb Howard, and Carla Borelli for putting it all together. We not only managed to draw several dozen people from around the world, but we also managed to have a great bit of fun while engaging in two days of intense discussions around DASH7. This was my first visit to Puerto Rico and I walked away a huge fan of the island, the cuisine, and the people. More importantly, I walked away just floored with the sophistication and depth of industry experience our members and advisors brought to the discussions. Great work.
The biggest news of the event came from Rob Frier and Ted Osinski from MET Labs, who have stepped up to run DASH7 test and certification efforts beginning in just a few weeks. MET is a global outfit with literally decades of experience and we’re psyched to have them aboard. New initiatives around air cargo, building automation and smart energy, and IPv6 were just a few of the topics presented by our Outreach Working Group, the team focused on educating the marketplace about DASH7 and gathering business requirements for the technical  working group. If you haven’t begun following the alliance on Twitter, you can check out our tweets via @dash7alliance and you can “follow” me via @patdash7. You can also join our new LinkedIn group and of course, our blog.
The Alliance’s Technical Working group presented a range of enhancements to the standard that will become public in coming weeks and months. Specific details about the upcoming enhancements to the standard are available exclusively to members at the Members Only section on DASH7.org.
Best,
Pat Burns
President
We are pleased to announce the following new DASH7 Alliance members:
Collectively this brings our international roster to now include Argentina, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, India, Korea, Japan, Switzerland, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the USA.
OpenTag, the open source DASH7 firmware library launched in 2009, continues to plow ahead. There are two OpenTag efforts underway at the moment: one for the Texas Instruments CC430, and one for the ST Microelectronics STM32. OpenTag is able to utilize several of the CC430’s SoC features, including:
- The built-in wake-on radio timer (WOR) replaces the RTC
- The CRC16 values are now computed in HW
- The 16 byte ADC12 buffer is used as a high-performance random number generator.
- All communication is intra-chip. No GPIO is required.
- The carrier-sense+preamble-detect cycle used to perform UHF wakeup is now entirely done in HW.
OpenTag code is available free of charge at http://opentag.sourceforge.net/. For more info email developers@dash7.org.
Our next member meeting is tentatively scheduled for April 13th, 2010 in Orlando, Florida and many of our members will be attending RFID Journal Live there later that week. If you plan to be there, please let me know and we’ll also put you on the list of our invite-only cocktail event tentatively scheduled for 5 pm on the 14th. For a complete list of upcoming DASH7 events, please click here.
- March DASH7 Webinar - TBA
- April 5, 2010. Union City, California. First DASH7 Plugfest. Members only.
- April 13. DASH7 Members-only Meeting. Orlando Convention Center.
- April 15 DASH7 Cocktail Reception at RFID Journal Live. Details TBA.
- May 26-27. Munich, Germany. Wireless Sensor Networks & RTLS Summit
and Energy Harvesting & Storage Europe 2010
- June 14-15. Munich, Germany. Odette25 Conference. ( Automotive)
Every month we will feature a new DASH7 member that is doing something innovative with DASH7 that we think you’ll find interesting. This month, we’re featuring Arira Design in Sunnyvale, CA and a Q&A with their CEO, Craig Paulsen.
D7Connect: Arira is known for its design work and product development expertise on custom digital platforms, how does DASH7 fit into your business model?
CP: First of all, we see an expanding marketplace for DASH7 products. The types of products are both technically interesting and generally “fun” products to develop. What engineer wouldn’t want to work on these types of products? To answer the question though, today’s product developers realize that it doesn’t make sense to re-invent the wheel. Rather, the industry trend is to get solutions from designers with direct and specific experience in similar technologies and on similar product types. Arira has extensive experience in the design and development of mobile computing and customized digital electronics devices. The addition of DASH7 to Arira’s existing product development portfolio provides a compelling reason for new DASH7 product developers to work with the Arira team. We believe this experience will give us a number of different development opportunities moving forward.
D7Connect: What sorts of DASH7 innovations should we expect from Arira?
CP: Arira’s first venture into DASH7 was a Hardware Development Kit (HDK). The HDK was developed for the purpose of providing new DASH7 developers a platform with many of the sensor and high bandwidth communication interfaces we expect to see in common DASH7 products. Future plans include integration of DASH7 into our mobile computing product which includes an industry standard operating system and graphical user interface. We hope to release details in Q2 of this year.
D7Connect: What silicon platforms does Arira support?
CP: Generally speaking Arira is silicon agnostic, meaning we’re happy to develop with our client’s preferred solution. However, Arira’s specific experience on a number of different platforms can be leveraged for faster time to market solutions. We’re happy to discuss these chipsets with any interested parties.
D7Connect: How can the DASH7 Alliance help Arira?
CP: Arira is dedicated to developing DASH7 products. However, as a small company our marketing budget is minimal. We rely on the DASH7 Alliance to help evangelize our business offerings and expose us to DASH7 product development companies who may be interested in our development offerings. Additionally, members of the DASH7 Alliance are able to provide specific technical expertise in areas that we are unable to staff as a smaller company. We rely on this type of expertise to ensure our clients receive the highest quality end product while meeting their Time-to-Market and cost targets.
D7Connect: What is your favorite brand of tequila?
CP: Probably Heredura Anjeo, but anything that is wet and isn’t Jose Cuervo is fine…
The Testing and Certification Workgroup has approved the interoperability testing approach and the overall Certification Program Roadmap. The next significant milestone on the Roadmap is to organize the first DASH7 PlugFest. It will be held on April 6-8, in Union City, California, at MET Labs. Stay tuned for further announcements or send an email to info@dash7.org for more info.
We are now up and running with the members-only workspace, available via dash7.org here. The latest DASH7 technical drafts, test and certification discussions, and standards discussions are here, as well as presentations from our annual meeting. It’s a good collaborative workspace that we all will use to keep track of discussions and document changes. The amount of activity within the alliance continues to swell so it’s ... swell that we finally got this live.
|
|
|
|
|
|
RFind is please to introduce its newest tag, the T400, to the DASH7 community. This tag fully supports the ISO 18000-7 standard with the added functionality of a full real-time locating system (RTLS) using RFind’s patented Tag-to-Tag communications technology. The T400 supports the efforts of DASH7 and is forecasted to be fully compatible with any DASH7 reader with respect to the ISO 18000-7 command set and is currently fully compatible with Savi’s 18000-7 reader for both the ISO 18000-7 command set and the RTLS functionality. This tag has been designed specifically to meet the needs of heavy manufacturing and logistics.
Find Out More
|
|
Be More Popular at Cocktail Parties
If you know anyone who would benefit from receiving our FREE DASH7 Alliance newsletter, please take a moment to let them know about us now (perhaps forward them this email), or sign up so they can get their own copy by entering their email address at DASH7.org. Your support is always appreciated! |
|
 Any day now we will be announcing a two part webinar co-hosted by Identec Solutions and MET Labs. Stay tuned for the details!
|
|
 The most recent addition to our social media portfolio is the new DASH7 group on LinkedIn – you can reach it by clicking here.
|
|
If you are launching a new product, announcing a deployment, or welcoming a new person to your team, we want to hear it - and we may even include it in an upcoming issue of DASH7 Connect.
Contact Us
|
|
|
|
|
