The State of the Engineering Market with Mike Wilkinson

Hello and welcome to engineering experience with Paragon Innovations. I'm your host today, Tyler Kern. Thank you so much for joining me. The market for IoT devices has really taken off in recent years and joining me today to talk about the market forces that are driving this forward, as well as the technology itself is Mike Wilkinson. He's the CEO of paragon innovations. Mike. Thanks so much for joining me Oh, thank you. Good beer. Absolutely. It's really good to talk to you. So tell me a little bit more about paragon innovations. Just give us an overview of what you do as a company how long you've been around in some of the work that you're doing. Okay. Paragon's been around thirty years and we are a product engineering basically companies that have ideas come to us with their idea and we turn those into fully functional products and and get them manufactured. Those products are electronic in nature. Our engineering team is comprised of a bunch of electronic mechanical and software slash firmware engineers to take those next to market. Our customers are anything from industries like medical and industrial and some consumer. And then everything has some kind of IoT component to it or a wireless component today, and we're very good at that in getting IoT added to products. Interesting. So you use the term IoT there and that's what we're here to talk about today. A little bit of a state of the union of IoT. So where where's the industry going? Where has it been? But just for people that maybe haven't heard that term before, kind of give us a broad overview of what IoT is and maybe how it interacts with our lives. Okay. So IoT is internet of things to relatively new term. Before that, we used to call it MTM, which is machine to machine. Communication and we had some other terms before that. But basically, it's when a computer that we don't really think of as a computer talks to another computer wirelessly primarily. And and so like a dog collar that tracking your your pet in your car today, you've got computers in your car that can be monitored remotely. The list goes on and on, your wireless ring doorbell. I mean, it just goes on and on, but those are all wireless devices that we call IoT. So, how have we seen technology advance in recent years to make IoT maybe a little bit more accessible or have some very applications that maybe it couldn't have before. What what advancements have we seen lately? So some big advancements have been the more and more cellular capability especially a new technology called CAT m one and MB IoT, which allows is the first time in the cellular world where a cellular cellular radio, if you will, or modem, was designed with the idea of just machine to machine, not not video, not Netflix, not your your handheld iPhone and whatnot, but for true embedded IoT devices. And that's given us a very low cost way to add cellular and to devices. And then also with the prevalence of cell phones, and that everybody has, it gives them a vehicle to communicate with those IoT devices. And so I think those two things have really promoted IoT more more than anything. So you mentioned earlier that there are applications in medical field. I know that there are applications storage containers and things like that when it comes to theft protection. Kind of walking you through some of the larger use cases that you've seen for IoT and maybe some things that people weren't wouldn't be expecting this technology to be involved with. Okay. So good examples in medical are you've got plenty of equipment in a hospital environment that, you know, need to be recalibrated or come out of adjustment or new data downloaded to it, and that could all be done with wireless in the hospital environment, locating devices at hospitals is also confusing big expensive equipment get rolled around everywhere, and they're kind of forgotten or or lost. Are hard to find. And so this is a way to go locate those devices. Outside the hospital is like shipping containers. There are millions in millions and millions of containers shipped every day and trying to keep track of those or make sure they're not broken into, you know, like an alarm system or breach detection system is something we develop, and that also is is based on wireless technology or IoT. You can constantly track and manage your containers. So this gives you the ability, as you mentioned, to track. So you would have something like a a dashboard or something like that tell you where all of the sensors are -- Correct. -- they kind of give you that information in real time? Correct. If there's anything, you know, wrong with today would be that we've got too much information in a dashboard. It's just overwhelming that data you can see, you know, your if you even look at your home, you've got your ring doorbell and and you set up cameras everywhere, you could be you could spend your whole life just looking at camera output from outside and inside and who opened the doors and the house, and when the garage door went up, when the garage door went down. But that'll all I mean, that'll all work itself out where people will just concentrate on the dash board pieces that they're really interested in. So you have a lot of experience working with these devices and in this area and your time in the industry what do you feel like you have learned from that experience that maybe other people don't have? What, you know, what do you feel like sets you apart in terms of your knowledge at Paragon? So I think the main thing is that most people when they think of cellular or other wireless, you know, WiFi Bluetooth, they they tend to think about their tablet or their phone or things like that, and they've got a kind of mindset of everything goes to the tablet and I have a direct connection. When we of these is or we think a lot of data like a lot of video or broadband. Most of the things that we're talking about in IoT are really low amount of data. They're not gigabytes or megabytes of data to being transferred. It's it's it's the garage door opener that did is it open or is it closed? Is there Is my alarm on or not? I mean, very simple data that we're tracking, even things outside your sprinkler controller, that's, you know, my sprinkler controllers wireless. It doesn't take a lot of data to turn it on or turn it off. So what I've learned is that really low data rates and really thinking about that low cost and low energy. You can do a lot of things with wireless data. You couldn't do just a few years ago. So what excites you then about the future? With that being the you know, knowing what you know, what excites you about the future and what products can be developed and, you know, how do you see life changing as a result of this? I see more things being being wireless. I I said probably twenty years ago that someday, my plant my office will determine itself when it needs to be watered and fed and then send in an email or text or something to my secretary who will then go water the plant or maybe it's automatically connected to a watering system and in the office and it waters itself. We need to get that in my house. Because Plant die. Yeah. We kill every plant. That's what happens in our office. So that's why I wanted it twenty years ago. And so we're at the point now where that's possible. And so excited about moving forward. There's some danger with moving forward in that we're all excited about tracking and tracking our our kids and our stuff and find my phone on your iPhone app but all this tracking, all this data data overload, but we're also becoming a more watched people. I mean, we can't there's no anonymity anymore really in skippling things. So I'm a little bit nervous that in the future, but I'm excited about more automation and everything we do and and the IoT world just gives us an opportunity to make that happen. So when you hear about IoT, you hear a lot of buzz about smart cities, you know. Oh, smart lighting, smart streets, smart cars, everything being smart From your perspective, what's realistic? What should people be taking away from that buzz and say, okay, maybe these are the things I should have as expectations rather than we have an entire city that's completely, you know. What what's realistic from your perspective? Good question. And smart cities is a big buzz word today. We And here in Dallas, we have our own smart cities conference every year, which is which is good to go to because there's a lot of people come come from all over the country speak. But the the cool thing about smart cities is, you know, there is gonna be this automation and when you drive up to a stoplight, gonna it's gonna be better and smarter than it is right now and you wait and look both ways and no cars that you don't have a green light. You know, even the city lights having all the lights on, how much electricity is being used to have the the boardwalk lights on when? In reality, they could be off if there's no cars in the in the area. So there's a lot of things that could be automated. Some of the fears though are auto you know, automated vehicles or those traffic lights, did they get too smart and then they they turn two people come in green at each other to have an ax debt or automated cars that have a problem. And all we need is another software update, you know. And I'm I'm fearful of that. I'm worried about the complete automation of those things But in general, I mean, having your sprinkler system throughout entire city all automated together. So you, you know, for for short on water, that part of the year, which in various parts of the country and states, then you can do a better job of managing that than you would right now with these controllers that turn on at six AM and water for an hour and go back to sleep. Yeah. Yeah. So off the top I mentioned just that the market has been kind of growing like crazy for this for this industry. What is behind a lot of that growth? Is it simply just people hearing about it excited? Is it the accessibility like we talked about a little bit earlier? What's driving so much growth in the IoT industry? I think it's accessibility and call cost. So it wasn't but a few years ago, that if you wanted to make a let's say a dog collar in and track your dog that the device and I know because we we developed the first one about twenty years ago, got seven patents on it. But if you wouldn't make one a few years ago, you would have a hard time getting the carriers, AT and T's, Verizon's, etcetera, to sell you a SIM card so that you could activate it on their network because in mindset, everything was a was a phone. Right. You know, not why would you have your dog have a sim card? Why wouldn't I? Yeah. It makes sense to them. And then also the cost of the radio because they were all set to download video and all these cool things. And so you're looking at depend on volume of thirty dollar radio. Well, now we're talking about sub five dollars for a radio that it won't send video, but it will do everything we want a case like a dog collar. That's really incredible. Well, it sounds like an exciting time to be working in the world of IoT, and so I'm excited to see what the future holds. And thank you so much for joining me to talk about where things are and where things are headed, Mike. Well, thank you. Absolutely. And everybody, thank you for tuning in to this episode of engineering experience with paragon Innovations. We'll be back soon with more episodes But until then for Mike Wilkinson, I'm Tyler Kern. We'll talk again soon.